LIAT YOSSIFOR

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Liat Yossifor. Communicating Vessels will open 13 May at 520 West 21st Street and remain on view through 19 June 2021. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by the Paris-based scholar Susan L. Power.

Yossifor’s new series of large scale paintings establishes a dialogue of duality and opposition. The paintings deploy a striking visual vocabulary of combined mediums that include painting materials and surrealist automatic drawing techniques, with the textural qualities of sculptural reliefs. Acknowledging the wandering mind as a part of her process, the artist orchestrates these compositions through an exchange of structure and spontaneity. This interplay between oppositional forces is articulated by André Breton in his seminal 1932 text Communicating Vessels. The title is a metaphor for the permeability between the exterior and interior worlds.

Yossifor’s Communicating Vessels is anchored by two large scale paintings, Water and Solar. Their thickly textured black and golden surfaces both contrast and complement each other. Yossifor adds, “In this exhibition, it is about these lines of communication between ideas across a space and between opposites. One painting emits light and one absorbs it.” Yossifor’s myriad of marks, from cross-hatchings to ample looping lines, creates a rhythmic conversation between the paintings, the artist, and her audience.

“These exuberant expanses of paint reward sustained contemplation, inviting the viewer to experience the exchange and entanglement of complementary pairings—accretion and removal, motion and stillness, action and reflection, radiance and shadow, vigor and languor, agitation and serenity, give and take, back and forth,” states Power.

LIAT YOSSIFOR received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2002. She was an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg residency in Florida in 2020; and a guest of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany in 2010.

Select solo exhibitions include “Letters Apart,” PATRON, Chicago, IL; “No Second Chances in the Land of a Thousand Dances,” Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “A Body of Water,” PATRON, Chicago, IL; “The Stand,” Páramo Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico; “Pre-Verbal Painting,” The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; “Expanding on an expansive subject,” The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; “Double Life,” Anita Beckers Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany; “Time Turning Paint,” Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA, and “The Tender Among Us,” Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, CA.

Group exhibitions include “A Time of Monsters,” curated by Cesar Garcia-Alvarez, Fort Gansevoort Gallery, New York, NY; “Sculptural Surfaces: Liat Yossifor and Pia Fries,” curated by Ludwig Seyfarth, Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany; “100 Years and Counting,” Minnesota Museum of Art, Saint Paul, MN; “B.A.T. State III: Women Artists in Conversation with El Nopal Press,” Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA; “Modulaciones,” curated by Graciela Kasep, Museo de Arte de Sinaloa, Culiacán, Sinaloa, and at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico; “Stolen Gestures,” Kunsthaus Nurnberg, Germany; and “New Works,” The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL.

Select public collections include Creative Artists Agency Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection (CIAC), Mexico City, Mexico; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (LACMA); and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Liat Yossifor lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Download PDF

520 West 21st Street

13 May - 19 June 2021

Selected Works

Press Release