“Barricade is a fence that floats in the space as a kind of Surrealist object. The idea that you’re never safe or protected.” Liza Lou, 2011

Musing on the idea of confinement, both in the forms and environments that she depicts and in her painstaking studio practice, Liza Lou’s Barricade is simultaneously threatening and jewel-like.
Encased entirely in 24 karat gold-plated beads, Barricade straddles the form of a gate or fence, yet formally it offers no security. Conceived in South Africa and produced by female bead workers at risk of violence from their husbands or boyfriends, Lou’s elegant yet powerful structure escapes the traditional confines of the artist’s studio by imbuing it’s form with a socio-political message.