Liza Lou

Over the past 20 years, Liza Lou (born 1969) has achieved acclaim for her meticulous, large-scale sculptures and installations in her unique medium of beads. Lou refers to these works, with their beaded surfaces mounted on cotton-backed stretchers, as “paintings,” foregrounding their allusions to minimalist painting, from Georges Seurat to Agnes Martin. Durban Diaries is composed of reproductions of these recent works with Lou’s account of seven years of working and living in Durban, South Africa. Descriptions of her working processes are interspersed with stories about the men and women with whom she works, and throughout she recounts the joys and doubts, the triumphs and tribulations of living in her adopted country and working with Zulu artisans. Neither a discursive text nor an artist’s statement, Durban Diaries offers a stark and honest account of the day-to-day rhythm of life inside the studio and beyond.

Famed for the labor intensiveness of her works, Liza Lou here attains new levels of technical mastery and thematic complexity with a series developed over the past three years. The formal beauty of Lou's beaded pieces is often underscored by themes of injustice or violence.