The Art Department congratulates Liat Yossifor, MFA 2002, on the exhibition of her most recent paintings

Wall I, 2017, Oil on linen, 80 x 78 inches, 203.2 x 198.1 cm

The Art Department congratulates Liat Yossifor, MFA 2002, on the exhibition of her most recent paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery, opening in New York on Saturday, March 17. The exhibition will run from March 17 - April 14. 

In 2011, Liat Yossifor definitively turned her painting practice toward abstraction, and has since been making works that adhere to a specific formal approach. Limiting herself to three days to complete a painting, the time pressure turns into a kind of psychological pressure. In this way, her work becomes a self-conscious performance. Yossifor chases an elusive composition around the canvas, though she does not seek to achieve a composition that is thoroughly “resolved.” Her struggle to locate something creates contradictory forces that simultaneously push and pull the viewer.

The resulting monochromatic paintings are equally pictorial and physical. Using an alla prima (“at first attempt”) technique, Yossifor works within the durational limitations and liveliness of the oil medium, while simultaneously using a set of self-imposed restrictions related to the action of painting. The artist generates the atmosphere of these works using performative gestures, and her paintings reference an embodied self, reflected in the thickly textured, punctuated surfaces. In seeking to reinvigorate and advance the language of action painting, she concentrates the “action” near the center of each work, while allowing it to become more diffuse around the edges.

Yossifor’s paintings are grounded in the artist’s movement and are generated utilizing a process that resembles automatic drawing. She attacks, scores, and interacts with the paint to produce textural lines and structures that echo drawings—these drawing features are subsequently buried in the ensuing layers of paint.