Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new work by Shirazeh Houshiary for the inaugural Frieze Los Angeles (Stand D16). Houshiary is recognised for her intensive, process-oriented practice, and the works featured will represent her most detailed and laborious to date. These paintings and sculptures use gesture, colour, and form to expose typically hidden natural phenomenon in order to alter viewers' perceptions of time, space, order, and chaos. Lehmann Maupin has represented Houshiary since its inception in 1996, when the artist was associated with British sculptors like Anish Kapoor and Richard Deacon. In the decades since, Houshiary has distinguished herself by her exploration of the intangible, which has evolved to include works across media such as painting and animation.
Houshiary's approach to painting often takes on a sculptural dimension; she works on canvas placed directly on the floor in order to achieve a fully multidirectional viewpoint. Her methodically produced line work is repeated as the artist moves around the canvas, imbuing each painting with a multidimensional illusory effect that undulates and vibrates across the surface. This drawn gesture is replicated in her sculptures, like Lunate (2018), in which she layers glass bricks in an organic yet strictly ordered shape reminiscent of a helix or vortex. Each layer of bricks precisely replicates the one previous, continuously rotating the form until it has reached the maximum degree before becoming structurally unstable. Her most recent sculptural series, including pieces such as The Oracle (2018), deftly emphasises the signature line work of her paintings, minimised to a few isolated gestures tangled in delicate balance. Taken together, these works capture the fluid energy and conceptual duality—micro and macro, interior and exterior, formation and disintegration—exemplified in Houshiary's work.
Though based in the language of abstraction, Houshiary's works rely upon formal elements established in Renaissance painting such as composition, rhythm, structure, and depiction of light. Her affinity for the aesthetically ancestral influence of past artists often plays out in homage, as in the strict colour palate she has selected in these works. This includes hues that Houshiary has never before used, such as a pistachio green attributed to paintings by Chaïm Soutine. Soutine, an early 20th-century artist who placed emphasis on texture, shape, and colour over explicitly representational figures, is an apt predecessor to Houshiary's own practice, which realises an intangible boundary between the physical and immaterial world.
Shirazeh Houshiary (b. 1955, Iran; lives and works in London) graduated from the Chelsea School of Art in London in 1979. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organised at Espace Muraille, Geneva, Switzerland (2016); Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2003); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2002); the British Museum, Islamic Gallery, London (1997); and Camden Arts Centre, London (1993). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include Regarding Spirituality, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (2018); Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL (2016); Reductive Minimalism: Women Artists in Dialogue, 1960-2012, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (2014); 50 Years of Collecting Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2012); Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Happiness, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2003); and Thinking Big: Concepts for Twenty-First-Century British Sculpture, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2002). Houshiary has participated in multiple biennials, including GLASSTRESS 2017, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); GLASSTRESS 2013, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); The 1st Kiev Biennale, Ukraine (2012); and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). Houshiary's work is in numerous international public and private collections, including the British Council Collection, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London
Opening Hours
The inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles will open with a two-day preview on Thursday, February 14 and Friday, February 15.
Thursday Preview, February 14 (invitation only)
Friday Preview & Private View, February 15: 2pm - 8pm
Saturday, February 16: 12pm - 7pm
Sunday, February 17: 12pm - 6pm
Getting to Frieze Los Angeles
Frieze Los Angeles will take place at Paramount Pictures Studios, a working movie studio lot. Taxi and Rideshare drop-off and pick-up points for the fair will be located at:
• 801 N Gower Street
• 900 N Van Ness Avenue
Please note, there will be no access at Paramount Pictures Studios' Melrose Gate for Frieze guests.