EARLY WORKS

Overview

In its iconic nave, the Patinoire Royale Bach presents, for the first time in Europe, a selection of historic works by the internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist Lita Albuquerque, one of the few women artists associated with the Light and Space movement and Land Art.

Entitled Early Works, the exhibition invites visitors to discover a curated selection of sculptures, photographs and installations from ephemeral works produced in the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibited works, some monumental, reflect the artist's favourite materials: stone and pigment. Combining geometric forms and natural elements, they invite us to reflect deeply on our relationship with the environment, the duality between earth and sky, and the transience of light and space. They foreshadow her more recent creations, such as the film Liquid Light (2022), which was presented at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Spine of the Earth, a masterful installation at the heart of the exhibition, stretches across 150 metres of floor space. The installation at the Patinoire Royale Bach is a revival of Lita Albuquerque's most complex ephemeral work, in terms of both scale and geometric articulation, which was originally created in the Mojave Desert in California in the autumn of 1980.

Lita Albuquerque's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, including the Light and Space retrospective at Copenhagen Contemporary Denmark (2021) and the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA (2023). Her work is held by major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty Trust, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the LA Museum of Contemporary Art.

Curated by Julien Frydman.