While the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas has just put women in Land Art back in the spotlight 1The La Patinoire Royale Bach gallery in Brussels invited Lita Albuquerque to recreate in its large nave her early ephemeral installations, which question, through primary forms and pure pigments evoking primordial elements, our identity and our relationship to the cosmos.
“No road, no path, / No land marks / Show the way there. / You must go by the stars.” [ “No road, no path, / No landmark / Shows the way there. / You must go by the stars.” ], wrote the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) in one of his poems inspired by the Desert Fathers . An aphorism that the American artist Lita Albuquerque seems to have adopted as her own.
Beyond her fascination with the desert, this figure of the Light and Space movement—born in Southern California in the 1960s—has always gazed at the starry sky. This is how the map of the constellations came about, which she reproduced with 99 blue circles drawn using three tons of powdered pigment on the sands of the Giza plateau, at the foot of the Great Pyramids, during the sixth Cairo Biennale in 1996. Inspired by Plato's writings affirming the alignment of the pyramids with the stars, this ephemeral work, entitled Sol Star, earned her the Biennale prize. As evidenced by the preliminary sketches exhibited at the La Patinoire Royale Bach gallery, the gilding of the pyramidions, which remained a project, was intended to give this installation an extraordinary cosmological dimension.
From the Earth's Spine to the Stellar Axis
In 2006, on an Antarctic ice plateau, the artist, accompanied by researchers and experts, placed 99 blue spheres corresponding to the 99 stars in the Antarctic sky to draw a terrestrial constellation. And while in 1980, Lita Albuquerque traced, in the form of a red spiral, the Earth's Spine in the Mojave Desert – a foundational work specially recomposed by the artist at La Patinoire Royale – in 2018, she placed on the summit of a Swiss mountain the cast of a naked woman's body covered in ultramarine blue pigment, lying down to listen to the Earth.
For Lita Albuquerque, “deserts are places of listening and connecting to the rich history of celestial traditions.” It was in this way, amidst an arrangement of circles of blue powder pigments reflecting the alignment of the stars on January 31, 2020, that the artist placed the monumental sculpture of a blue woman in a meditative pose atop a rock in the AlUla desert in Saudi Arabia.
Primordial shapes and primary colors
While the ultramarine blue used in her most spectacular large-scale installations evokes the sky, the cadmium yellow, with which it is often associated , evokes the sun, and red summons the energy of the earth. These pure pigments are arranged in circles, spirals, or points, or sprinkled onto stones, to reveal their intrinsic power. For, according to Lita Albuquerque, who does not reject a certain affinity with animism, stones are alive and contain a light that the pigments merely reveal… Volatile pigments that the artist likes to release to the desert wind or to her own breath, as evidenced by her 100 yellow, fuchsia, or blue breaths created in 1989, or her Wind Paintings (2012 ).
1 – “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” from September 23, 2023 to January 7, 2024
2- Macarius the Younger, collected Poems , New York, 1977
3 – Stellar Axis: Antarctica
4 – Transparent Earth
5 – NAJMA (She Placed One Thousand Suns Over the Transparent Overlays of Space)
6 – Notably in Materia Prima, another early work reconstructed at La Patinoire Royale, and in Man and the Mountain made in the Mojave desert in 1979.
7 – 100 Breaths Yellow Green, Fuchsia… (lithographic monoprint) and Wind Paintings (pigment on canvas)
Born in 1946 in Santa Monica, California, Lita Albuquerque grew up in Tunisia and Paris until the age of eleven, when her family settled in the United States. She graduated from the University of Los Angeles where she still lives and works today.
“Early works – Lita Albuquerque”
The Royal Bach Ice Rink
15, rue Veydt, Brussels (Belgium)
Until March 30, 2024
