Over the past few years Yossifor has faithfully created oil on paper pieces as a part of her daily studio practice. These pieces are modest in scale and allude to layered stories or expansive explorations, and individual pieces can be thought of as diary entries, letters or drawings. While her impressive large-scale paintings are about movement and abstraction, the selection of works in “small seas” are cerebral and their figurative elements seem to emerge from liminal peripheries or subconscious states.
A sophisticated colorist, Yossifor begins by actively mixing bright warm tones and vibrant cool hues into each other. Guided by intuitive mark making and gestural finesse the opposing chromatic tension creates rich neutrals and compelling grays. It’s this weaving together of color, surface, and marks that invites the viewer on a journey that stimulates awareness, retraces sentimental memories and sparks new ideas.
In conjunction with this exhibition, Doppel House Press will publish “Letters Apart,” a book of paintings by Liat Yossifor and poems by Ed Schad.
Over the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in Los Angeles, a poet/curator and a painter correspond in their own mediums, developing a conversation across space and time during the lockdown.
Part monograph, part poetry collection, Letters Apart presents unusual events of language and a progression of imagery that conjure personal memories, early Expressionism, and the capacity for lightness and darkness, fear and flights of fancy to coexist.
About the Artist
Liat Yossifor is a Los Angeles-based artist. She has been in numerous exhibitions, including (solos) The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; and Pitzer Art Galleries in Claremont, CA; PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL; Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York,NY; and Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany. Group exhibitions include those at Museo de Arte de Sinaloa, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico; Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico; Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA; University of La Verne, La Verne, CA; Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT; Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Germany; and the Margulies Collection.
Yossifor earned her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, 2002. She completed residencies at The Rauschenberg in Captiva Island in Florida in 2020, and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany in 2010 and was the recipient of Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House Berlin Fellowship, Germany, in 2022. Select public collections include: Creative Artist Agency (CAA), Los Angeles, CA; Isabel and Agustin 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 (LACMA); and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
Gallery
