"Beads have a lot of connotations before you even make anything with them – around beauty, preciousness, and even labour. They're made with a lot of care; they have their own value." —Liza Lou
Splitting her time between KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Los Angeles, Liza Lou’s oeuvre fuses elements of sculpture, painting and crafts. Known for her monumental sculptures and wall pieces encrusted with mosaics of individually applied beads, her work has long centred around exploring the meaning found in process and labour traditionally associated with crafts and performed by women. Thus, the viewer’s attention is drawn beyond subject matter, to the artist’s choice of media and production process, as she often collaborates with South African beadweavers. Delicately beautiful yet strikingly powerful, Lou painstakingly applies the miniscule shimmery beads onto the canvas as she deliberately blurs the line between crafts and fine art.
Liza Lou was the recipient of the 2013 Anonymous Was A Woman Award and the 2002 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world including at Lehmann Maupin (Seoul, 2019, New York, 2018, and Hong Kong, 2017) and White Cube (London, 2014). Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; François Pinault Foundation, Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
