PIGMENTS ET PRÉSENCE: LITA ALBUQUERQUE

Lita Albuquerque, a pioneering feminist figure in the American Land Art and Light and Space movements, is known for introducing raw pigment powder into her large-scale interventions in the landscape. Through works in the deserts of California, Egypt and Antarctica, among others, she interrogates the architectural and alchemical connections between us, the natural world, and the cosmos. 

The intimate selection of drawings and paintings presented in Pigments et Présence bring the same materials and questions to a condensed scale, crystallizing their presence in a new set of never exhibited drawings, prints and large scale paintings that span the artist’s practice from the 1980s to today.

The drawings (all Untitled, 2024) show traces of the artist’s hands, as she presses pure pigment directly on paper. It is an echo to the contemplative, and precise methodology she employs in her land art works and sculptures, as were exhibited indoors for the first time in Europe in her 2024 exhibition Early Works in the gallery’s nave. 100 Breaths (1989) are a series of unique, large scale lithographic monoprints that capture the wispiness and the artist’s commitment to color — one of the key innovations women land artists brought to the earth art movement in the 1970s and 80s. At the time, Albuquerque dusted rocks in the desert with loose pigment (Rock and Pigment (1978)), and filled an indented line leading off to the horizon (Malibu Line (1978)) with blazing blue. This signature hue is brought back in the large scale paintings, made with gold resin. They seem to radiate from within, with a twinkling luminosity that shifts with the light. 

Through the purity and directness of her materiality, and the intrinsic meditative quality that underlies her practice, Albuquerque activates an alchemical relationship in the viewer, connecting the body, light, and the stars.