American artist Liza Lou discusses her recent shift in practice, moving from her famous large-scale bead installations to a new body of work that fuses oil painting with glass beads. After years of collaborative work in South Africa and focusing on monochrome tones, Lou has returned to a solitary studio practice in a windowless warehouse in the San Fernando Valley. This new phase is defined by a "headlong love affair with colour," inspired by the hallucinatory palette of the Mojave Desert and a transition from logical drawing to a more intuitive, freestyle process.
Lou’s evolution highlights a career-long investigation into the hierarchy of materials and the boundaries of the art historical canon. By treating her canvases as "windows" within a dark industrial space, she reclaims the act of painting through the lens of craft and materiality. Her current exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac demonstrates how she continues to challenge the distinction between fine art and labor-intensive craft, using ready-made factory colors to create relief against the "darkness" of the contemporary world.