Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was

For the past three decades, Los Angeles-based artist Liz Larner has explored the material and social possibilities of sculpture in innovative and surprising ways. Her use of materials ranges from the traditional—such as bronze, porcelain, glass, or stainless steel—to the unexpected: surgical gauze, leather, or eyelashes, each selected for its physical or chemical properties as well as for its social and historical associations. Taking direction from these materials, her works can be delicate or aggressive; meticulously crafted or unruly and formless.

Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was is Larner’s first solo institutional exhibition in New York City and her first survey exhibition since 2001. Presenting approximately 30 works produced between 1987 and 2021, the exhibition offers an opportunity to view Larner’s larger artistic project within today’s expanded discourses of posthumanism, embodiment, and gender. It includes Larner’s early experiments with decaying bacterial cultures and destructive machines, chains and cords that attach to and challenge institutional architecture, figures and parts of figures, and more recent wall- and floor-based ceramic sculptures. Together these works unsettle the social, perceptual, and physical positions of their viewers, bringing forward tensions that have occupied the artist’s work: power and instability; surface, form, and volume; illusion and reality; the micro and the macro; and the interconnectedness of our bodies to objects.

Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was is organized by SculptureCenter, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where it will be on view from April 30 to September 4, 2022. The exhibition is curated by Mary Ceruti, Executive Director, Walker Art Center. The New York presentation is curated by Kyle Dancewicz, Interim Director, SculptureCenter.

Programs
No M, No D, Only S & B: Around Liz Larner
Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 1pm EST on Zoom
Join SculptureCenter for an afternoon of online talks with artists Eric Wesley, Carmen Winant, Yu Ji, and Elaine Cameron-Weir, presented in conjunction with Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was, and led by exhibition curators Mary Ceruti and Kyle Dancewicz. Register here.

Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalog, published by Dancing Foxes Press. Texts by Connie Butler, Ariana Reines, and Catherine Liu. Conversation by Mary Ceruti. Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder. Preorder here.

Liz Larner
Liz Larner (born 1960 in Sacramento; lives and works in Los Angeles) has exhibited extensively since the late 1980s. Recently, she has presented solo exhibitions at Galerie Max Hetzler, London (2021); Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2021, 2019); Peter Lund, Oslo (2020); Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris (2017); Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2016); Aspen Art Museum (2016); Art Institute of Chicago (2015); and The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2015). In addition, her work has recently been included in group shows at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2021); Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, CA (2021); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2017); DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2016); Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2016); Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2013); and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2013).

Support
Generous support for Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was at SculptureCenter is provided by the Girlfriend Fund, The Deborah Buck Foundation, Sarah Miller Meigs, and the Henry Moore Foundation.

Support for the exhibition catalog is provided by Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris | London; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and the Girlfriend Fund.

Leadership support of SculptureCenter’s exhibitions and programs is provided by Carol Bove, Jill and Peter Kraus, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Lee Elliott and Robert K. Elliott, Eleanor Heyman Propp, Jacques Louis Vidal, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, and Robert Soros and Jamie Singer Soros.

SculptureCenter
For more information, visit sculpture-center.org.