While the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas has just put the spotlight back on the women of Land Art 1, La Patinoire Royale Bach gallery in Brussels has invited Lita Albuquerque to recompose her first ephemeral installations in its great nave, using primary forms and pure pigments evoking primordial elements to question 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 land marks / Show the way there. / You must go by the stars." writes the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) in one of his poems inspired by the Desert Fathers 2. An apophthegm that American artist Lita Albuquerque seems to have made her own.
In addition to her fascination for the desert, this figure of the Light and Space movement - born in Southern California in the 1960s - has always looked to the star field. This gave rise to the constellation map she reproduced with 99 blue circles drawn with three tons of powdered pigments on the sands of the Giza plateau, at the foot of the Great Pyramids, at the Sixth Cairo Biennial in 1996. Inspired by Plato's writings affirming the alignment of the pyramids with the stars, this ephemeral work entitled Sol Star won him the Biennale prize. As evidenced by the preliminary sketches exhibited at La Patinoire Royale Bach gallery, the gilding of the pyramidions, which remained in the planning stage, was to give this installation an extraordinary cosmological dimension.
From the Earth Spine to theStellar Axis
In 2006, on an Antarctic ice plateau, the artist, accompanied by researchers and experts, placed 99 blue spheres corresponding to the 99 stars of the Antarctic sky, in order to draw a terrestrial constellation 3. And while in 1980, Lita Albuquerque traced, in the form of a red spiral, the Earth's Backbone in the Mojave Desert - a seminal work recomposed specially 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 4.
For Lita Albuquerque, "deserts are places for listening and connecting to the rich history of celestial traditions". Thus, amid an arrangement of circles of blue powder pigments reflecting the alignment of the stars on January 31, 2020, the artist placed a monumental sculpture of a blue woman in a meditative position 5 on top of a rock in the AlUla desert in Saudi Arabia.
Primordial forms and primary colors
While the ultramarine blue used in his most spectacular large-scale installations refers to the sky, the cadmium yellow often associated with it 6 refers to the sun, while red summons the energy of the earth. So many pure pigments spread out in circles, spirals or spikes, or sprinkled on stones, to reveal their intrinsic power. According to Lita Albuquerque, who does not reject a certain closeness to animism, stones are alive and contain a light that pigments merely reveal... Volatile pigments that the artist likes to deliver to the desert wind or her own breath, as evidenced by her 100 yellow, fuchsia or blue breaths created in 1989, or her Peintures de vent (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 - Notably in Materia Prima, another early work reconstituted at La Patinoire Royale, and in Man and the Mountain, produced 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 moved to the United States. She graduated from the University of Los Angeles, where she still lives and works today.
"Early works - Lita Albuquerque
The Bach Royal Ice Rink
15, rue Veydt, Brussels (Belgium)
Until March 30, 2024
