{"id":7894,"date":"2018-06-26T19:27:13","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T23:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/?p=7894"},"modified":"2018-07-03T08:20:05","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T12:20:05","slug":"liat-yossifor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/liat-yossifor\/","title":{"rendered":"Liat Yossifor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Liat Yossifor, standing in front of her painting during the exhibition The Stand, at Paramo Gallery in Meixco<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Liat Yossifor<\/a> was born and raised in Israel and moved to the United States in 1989. Her early monochrome portraits of women, posed as soldiers, with the features of the sitter appearing as though etched into immersive fields of pigment, resist easy identification. These early paintings explore the effects of cultural displacement and the contradictions of identity. Her series of landscape paintings consists of abstracted battle scenes composed of multiple figures, where bodies merge with\u00a0cinematic landscapes. Yossifor\u2019s subsequent work is divided into two distinct series of abstract monochrome paintings, each adopting aspects of her previous bodies of work. Her monochrome series of gray paintings and black paintings are further delimited by differences in duration, pigment, material, and process.<\/p>\n

Yossifor received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine in 2002. She was a resident at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany, as a guest of the Deutsche Borse Residency Program in 2010. Select solo exhibitions include \u201cPre-Verbal Painting<\/a>,\u201d Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; \u201cThe Tender Among Us,\u201d Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; \u201cTime Turning Paint,\u201d Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA. Select group shows include include \u201cModulaciones,\u201d Museo de Arte de Sinaloa in Culiac\u00e1n, Sinaloa, and\u00a0Museo de Arte de Zapopan,\u00a0Mexico; \u201cNew Works,\u201d the Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; \u201cStolen Gestures,\u201d Kunsthaus Nurnberg, Nuremberg, Germany; \u201cSubject,\u201d Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT. Her work is in the collection of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Los Angeles, CA; Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (LACMA), CA; The Marguilles Collection, Miami, FL; and Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN.\u00a0Her book, Movements: Liat Yossifor, was published in 2016 by DoppelHouse Press.<\/p>\n

This interview was conducted in writing, not audio, please read the Q and A below.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Brainard Carey: What is happening in the studio right now?<\/p>\n

Liat Yossifor: My work is changing right now. Part of my process in recent years has been to bury line work with thick paint.\u00a0 Recently, I have been covering less, and pushing the line work up to the surface. The line work is now more pictographic, even illustrative in parts of the painting. If I was excavating before, I am now letting some gestures hang right on top of\u00a0the\u00a0surface, and creating an extra layer of information. In some ways, I want the painting to be more direct and it is starting to look like sgraffito,\u00a0which was always part of the work, but is now more dominant and used all-over.<\/p>\n

I had a show in March of this year, and the logical question that follows a show is what is next, but, for me, it is not always a genuine question to the daily studio life where I am developing a language over time and not per show. But, this time, was a little different.\u00a0I knew what I wanted to follow this show and how, at least a general sense of things to come. I am also looking at the palate of some sculptural surfaces and attempting\u00a0to translate\u00a0those into paint. For\u00a0example,\u00a0I am working now on a red clay monochrome. There is the issue of mimicking the color, which is not easy… because I want it to look and feel like wet clay.<\/p>\n

BC: How do you think about making work in this socio\/political global place we\u2019re in?<\/p>\n

LY: I am not from here (born and raised in Israel) so I have always been on alert; this agitated state and global connectivity is part of my psychology always when I make work.\u00a0My own work recently shifted from light grey to black paintings, and because color is content, this changed the essence of the paintings.\u00a0But, I would like to answer this question about painting at large (I am not sure this is your\u00a0question\u00a0to me, but I have been thinking about what it means to paint now, in the larger sense, during these cultural wars). Painting is reactive and immediate, I would argue that making work right now is like absorbing cultural trauma and telling the viewer fairly quickly about it. The socio political\u00a0upheaval\u00a0right now is told in real time, there is no distance, and less time to reflect. This is different than post\u00a0September 11\u00a0for example;\u00a0the consensus\u00a0then was\u00a0that people\u00a0needed\u00a0more time to reflect.<\/p>\n

I think there are many ways in which making work now\u00a0will be understood later because not all the shifts are\u00a0obvious or even clear to\u00a0the artists (or curators). But,\u00a0I would say that the approach is more extreme and more didactic now. In the field at large, some painting remains isolated (and this is not a qualitative statement; painting can choose to be untouched and do something\u00a0entirely\u00a0different on its own) but there is a return to the figure and identity, and to a subject matter. I was describing to a\u00a0friend recently\u00a0how there was a conversation about portraiture in the early\u00a02000s\u00a0that attempted to remove all psychology and identity from a portrait. This would be laughable now…<\/p>\n

I am not sure though about this\u00a0approach working itself out as a trend. I think some of the new work being made now is so busy communicating that it suffers from not paying attention to the condition of painting. Some of the work is not aware of\u00a0the\u00a090’s?\u00a0 In the best case scenario, the socio political landscape would be met by a subject and a painting that are successful as one. There are a lot of art historical examples that make painting\u00a0particularly able to carry the climate of the world in it. I remember reading how\u00a0The Death of Marat<\/i>\u00a0was painted in such urgency that the economy of space (all that beautiful un-worked space around Marat) was a result of having to get the painting out to the world while it mattered.<\/p>\n

BC: Is there anything you wanted to say, that I didn\u2019t ask about your upcoming work or an exhibit you want to guide the reader to?<\/p>\n

LY: If I could guide the reader it would be to my recent exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in NY in March 2018<\/a>.\u00a0I already talked about the shift to a dark\u00a0palate, and this\u00a0exhibition\u00a0consisted of four large new black-on-black works in the front room and four greys in\u00a0the second room (to be seen in natural light). The black paint\u00a0was an impulse, and then a complication…while working,\u00a0the shiny black surface resists pictorial intentions. This\u00a0prompted\u00a0me to name them “Walls” and think of them as\u00a0physical\u00a0objects and\u00a0focus\u00a0on their presence as things, not rely on their inner space. I kept thinking about a\u00a0Gauguin\u00a0quote “Reject black, and this mixture of white and black that they call grey. Nothing is black, nothing is grey\u2026\u201d and so I went along, I turned to sculpture and etching. I had to manipulate the paint to operate like another material that can stay in place while I etch. I am not a\u00a0sculptor, but I tell myself stories about sculpture when I paint (I imagine\u00a0sculpture, and I often tell my friends about my next sculpture, but instead I make a painting…). Having\u00a0sculptural intentions that are trapped in the two\u00a0dimensions of a painting is different than moving\u00a0around mediums. It is more like having a\u00a0dissatisfaction\u00a0with a state of being and\u00a0expressing this without\u00a0switching to another being. Looking at relief work is always on the verge of frustrating to me, because it is as if the subjects want to become independent from the block of stone but cannot. This\u00a0circles back to what I mentioned\u00a0earlier about what\u00a0I am doing now in the studio, which is to push this\u00a0conversation about the pictorial and the physical further.\u00a0What I am working on now will be shown next at Patron Gallery in Chicago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

BC: What are you reading now?<\/p>\n

LY: I recently enjoyed a wartime biography by Sarah\u00a0Kaminsky\u00a0entitled\u00a0Adolfo\u00a0Kaminsky:\u00a0A\u00a0Forger’s Life<\/i>. This is the story of a man who started forging identity papers for the\u00a0Resistance\u00a0in France during the Nazi occupation at a young age (he then continued to work for different resistance groups for most of his life). It may be interesting for artists to learn that he was an expert in dyeing cloth, which\u00a0is why\u00a0he knew how\u00a0to erase inks from\u00a0forged\u00a0documents. It is also\u00a0fascinating, and great story telling.<\/p>\n

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Wall I, 2017, 80 by 78 inches<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Exhibition view, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Liat Yossifor was born and raised in Israel and moved to the United States in 1989. Her early monochrome portraits of women, posed as soldiers, with the features of the sitter appearing as though etched into immersive fields of pigment, resist easy identification. These early paintings explore the effects of cultural displacement and the contradictions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[224,225],"class_list":{"0":"post-7894","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artists","8":"tag-isreal","9":"tag-united-states"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Wall-I-2017-80-by-78-inches.jpg?fit=1762%2C1800&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p47FRq-23k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7894"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7912,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7894\/revisions\/7912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/interviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}