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 to follow. / You must follow the stars." ], wrote the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) in one of his poems inspired by the Desert Fathers 2An aphorism that the American artist Lita Albuquerque seems to have adopted as her own.
Besides her fascination with the desert, this figure of the Light and Space movement—born in Southern California in the 1960s—always gazed at the starry sky. This led to the creation of the constellation map 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 It earned him 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 Earth's backbone withStellar axis
In 2006, on an Antarctic ice shelf, the artist, accompanied by researchers and experts, placed 99 blue spheres, corresponding to the 99 stars in the Antarctic sky, to create a terrestrial constellation. 3And while in 1980, Lita Albuquerque traced, in the form of a red spiral, the Earth's backbone In the Mojave Desert – a seminal work specially recreated by the artist at La Patinoire Royale – in 2018, she placed a cast of a nude woman's body covered in ultramarine blue pigment, lying down to listen to the Earth, on the summit of a Swiss mountain. 4.
For Lita Albuquerque, “deserts are places of listening and connecting to the rich history of celestial traditions.” Thus, amidst an arrangement of circles of blue powder pigments reflecting the alignment of the stars on January 31, 2020, the artist placed the monumental sculpture of a blue woman in a meditative pose atop a rock in the AlUla desert of Saudi Arabia. 5.
Primordial shapes and primary colors
While the ultramarine blue used in his most spectacular large-scale installations evokes the sky, the cadmium yellow, which is often associated with it 6The color refers to the sun, while red evokes 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 doesn't 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 breaths of yellow, fuchsia, or blue made in 1989, or even its Wind paintings (2012) 7.
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 – Particularly in Materia Prima, another early work reconstructed at La Patinoire Royale, and in Man and the Mountain filmed 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
