Small Seas at University of La Verne

Liat Yossifor

small seas

April 11-May 11, 2023

Harris Art Gallery, 1950 3rd Street , La Verne, CA 91750

Over the past few years Yossifor has faithfully created oil on paper pieces as a part of her daily studio practice. These pieces are modest in scale and allude to layered stories or expansive explorations, and individual pieces can be thought of as diary entries, letters or drawings. While her impressive large-scale paintings are about movement and abstraction, the selection of works in “small seas” are cerebral and their figurative elements seem to emerge from liminal peripheries or subconscious states.

A sophisticated colorist, Yossifor begins by actively mixing bright warm tones and vibrant cool hues into each other. Guided by intuitive mark making and gestural finesse the opposing chromatic tension creates rich neutrals and compelling grays. It’s this weaving together of color, surface, and marks that invites the viewer on a journey that stimulates awareness, retraces sentimental memories and sparks new ideas.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Doppel House Press will publish “Letters Apart,” a book of paintings by Liat Yossifor and poems by Ed Schad.

Over the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in Los Angeles, a poet/curator and a painter correspond in their own mediums, developing a conversation across space and time during the lockdown.

Part monograph, part poetry collection, Letters Apart presents unusual events of language and a progression of imagery that conjure personal memories, early Expressionism, and the capacity for lightness and darkness, fear and flights of fancy to coexist.