Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Liat Yossifor. The exhibition will open 17 March and will remain on view through 14 April 2018. A public reception will be held for the artist on Saturday 17 March from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Christopher Michno and Glenn Harcourt.

In 2011, Liat Yossifor definitively turned her painting practice toward abstraction, and has since been making works that adhere to a specific formal approach. Limiting herself to three days to complete a painting, the time pressure turns into a kind of psychological pressure. In this way, her work becomes a self-conscious performance. Yossifor chases an elusive composition around the canvas, though she does not seek to achieve a composition that is thoroughly “resolved.” Her struggle to locate something creates contradictory forces that simultaneously push and pull the viewer.

The resulting monochromatic paintings are equally pictorial and physical. Using an alla prima (“at first attempt”) technique, Yossifor works within the durational limitations and liveliness of the oil medium, while simultaneously using a set of self-imposed restrictions related to the action of painting. The artist generates the atmosphere of these works using performative gestures, and her paintings reference an embodied self, reflected in the thickly textured, punctuated surfaces. In seeking to reinvigorate and advance the language of action painting, she concentrates the “action” near the center of each work, while allowing it to become more diffuse around the edges.

Yossifor’s paintings are grounded in the artist’s movement and are generated utilizing a process that resembles automatic drawing. She attacks, scores, and interacts with the paint to produce textural lines and structures that echo drawings—these drawing features are subsequently buried in the ensuing layers of paint.

Liat Yossifor (b. 1974, in Israel) received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine in 2002. She was a resident at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany, as a guest of the Deutsche Borse Residency Program in 2010.

Select solo exhibitions include: “A Body of Water,” PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL; “The Stand,” Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico; “Time Turning Paint,” Pitzer College Art Galleries, Broad Center, Claremont, CA; “Pre-Verbal Painting,” Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; “The Tender Among Us,” Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; “Movements,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY; “Double Life,” Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany; and “Expanding on an expansive subject,” the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA.

Group exhibitions include “Modulaciones,” Museo de Arte de Sinaloa in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico; “Grafforists,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; “New Works,” the Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; “Stolen Gestures,” Kunsthaus Nurnberg, Nuremberg, Germany; “Subject,” Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT; “From America,” Museum of Modern Fine Arts, Minsk, Belarus; “The Third Wight Biennial,” New Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, CA; and “The End,” Deep River, Los Angeles, CA.

Select public collections include Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Los Angeles, CA; Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Marguilles Collection, Miami, FL; and Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN.

Her book, Movements: Liat Yossifor, was published in 2016 by DoppelHouse Press.

Yossifor is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany; PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Páramo Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Yossifor lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.