Liza Lou FAQ

In her latest body of work, Liza Lou combines glass beads and oil paint on canvas, layering two distinct temporalities to create highly gestural, abstract paintings that examine the heroics of the painted gesture and mid-century abstraction. Lou uses her chosen material to denaturalise the spontaneity of the brushstroke, juxtaposing each painted drip and spatter with a process that demands painstaking precision and care. By translating fluid pigment into cell-like particles of colour, she forges a new experience of painting grounded in what she describes as the push and pull between ‘absolute control and total abandon.’ 

An explicitly conceptual line of investigation lies beneath Lou’s use of beads, her signature unit of art making for more than three decades. As the exhibition’s title suggests, FAQ unfolds as a series of fundamental questions that Lou has returned to over her career. When is a painting not a painting? What constitutes a paint body? Can a brushstroke be more than a brushstroke – and colour more colour than colour? ‘These works are about amplification, about making things more ideal,’ she says. ‘There’s a poem by Fernando Pessoa where he writes about wanting flowers to be more flowers than flowers, and in this body of work I’m using my material as a way to make paint more paint than paint.’

From her large-scale sculptures and installations of the 1990s – now held in major collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and National Gallery of Art, Washington,  D.C. – to the minimalist, community-based bead-woven works she created between 2005–20, an emphasis on concept and process has consistently defined Lou’s artistic language. Where her earlier works often foregrounded labour- and time-intensive modalities, in these paintings, she explores her chosen material as a vehicle of unmediated personal expression. 

For Lou, the brushstroke is more than a technical element of painting’s facture – it is a subject in its own right, loaded with fetishistic notions that through the artist's hand we might obtain access to the artist’s mind. She treats the stroke as something not only to be enacted, but quoted, reinterpreted and reformed, recalling her early Pop sensibility as well as Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstokes (1965–66), a series of enlarged, dripping brushstrokes made with layers of screenprinted Ben-Day dots. ‘Brushstrokes in a painting convey a sense of grand gesture,’ he once said, ‘but in my hands, the brushstroke becomes a depiction of a grand gesture.’ Where Lichtenstein made replicable that which Abstract Expressionism and its painters had upheld as the ultimate, inimitable gesture, Lou’s meticulously wrought facsimiles compete with the immediacy and fluency of paint itself, while simultaneously challenging art history’s long-standing valorisation of art forms associated with male subjectivity over those tied to women’s work and craft. 

The works in the exhibition are titled after figures of speech, reflecting the analogy Lou draws between language and visual art. For her, words and beads function similarly: we might string sentences together, follow narrative threads or watch plots unravel. Beads, like words, have a cumulative effect – laid down one by one, they develop structure, meaning and rhythm. The paintings reference linguistic devices including Enjambment, the unpunctuated flow of a sentence from one line to the next; Chiasmus, a sentence shaped by symmetry; Stanza, a group of lines forming the basic metrical unit of a poem; and Onomatopoeia, a word that phonetically resembles the thing it describes, such as splash, splat or fizz.

Accompanying the paintings is a selection of works on paper. Lou does not produce preparatory sketches for her canvases; drawing exists as an independent strand of her practice. Working with oil stick, another medium that can be applied directly to the surface and is resistant to blending, she builds each composition according to the same principle of adjacencies. Patches of pure colour accumulate side-by-side to form compact, mosaic-like abstractions, each richly textured scribble serving as a single unit within a larger scene or landscape.