Liat Yossifor's paintings are composed of bold strokes, stabs, and smudges in alla prima monochromatic fields. Liat Yossifor interchangeably shifts between drawing, painting, and sculpting in thick paint. In her paintings, there is a sense offigural presence, anchors, and hints of recognition, but they appear only to disappear back into movement-based abstraction, which is the center of her work.
For her first printmaking project, Liat Yossifor, whose surfaces are made by incisions into paint, which often echo etchings, had addressed another part of her practice – her daily drawings of oil on paper. By working on a non-absorbent surface rather than paper, Liat Yossifor was able to float material and explore the stretch of time that did not fix until it was printed, giving space to the weightless, the poetics, and the immaterial.
The paper qualities were chosen to retain freshness and immediacy of the gesture, making us almost hear the pulse of those nearly silent works. The result shifts from purely optical towards physical; which relates to how the watercolour is solidified by the act of printing, at times, making a thin water-based gesture read as thick oil paint and such qualities that confuse the eye.
Artist's Statement:
Observing water as a painter is hardly unique, nor is it art; it's what people do. In the simplicity of this act, the pretense of knowing washes away. After trying various techniques upon my arrival to Copenhagen, a city by the sea, I decided to float watercolor on glass. This was not easy to control or see, not until the transparency was pressed onto paper to become concrete. Painting daily on glass was intuitive work that's done somewhat in the dark. With that are the surprises, such as when water marks end up looking more like charcoal once they are printed, and when overworked opaque layers nullify themselves and show up as missing areas. As soon as I saw there was a gap between the work on glass and the eventual print, I knew these issues of absorption and transformation to be the subjects of these works. If liquid turns into dry brushing, then what gesture will appear soft? These are questions of translation. Since the master printer is ultimately the one that turns one surface into another, this became the essence of our collaboration. With three sets of eyes, it was great to make a series of these daily seascapes together.
Liat Yossifor born 1974, Tel-Aviv, IL. lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, CA (USA) and an MFA from the University of California, CA (USA).
Liat Yossifor’s recent exhibitions include Pre-Verbal Painting,Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, MO (USA),
Life Against Itself, PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL (USA), The Colors Behind: Hands Kaiser and Liat Yossifor, The Wilhelm Morgner Museum, Soest (DE) and The Tender Among Us, Benton Museum, Claremont, CA (USA). Forthcoming in 2025, is an exhibition with Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney (AUS).
Liat Yossifor’s work is included in the collections of the Isabel and Agustin Coppel (CIAC), Mexico City (MX), The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL (USA), Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN (USA) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA (USA) among others.
