Peter Blake Gallery presents a solo exhibition of recent works by multidisciplinary artist, Lita Albuquerque.
Lita Albuquerque is an internatonally renowned artist and writer. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Tunisia and Paris, she first gained national attention for her ephermeral pigment installations created for desert sites.
Highlighted in the exhibition at Peter Blake Gallery this summer are Albuquerque’s Auric Field paintings, which investigate space, color, and materiality.
Executed on layers of black and white pigment backgrounds, the paintings’ top layers of colorful pigment begin to vibrate and form a tonal language. Light is at once absorbed, reflected, and refracted — perhaps metaphors for light as consciousness.
And if one considers light as equivalent to consciousness, then these paintings highlight our collective awareness so that perception is made possible. It is no surprise that Albuquerque’s choice of pigment takes us from lake waters to volcanoes, from the roots of plants to the roots of the earth’s core, materials that are at once below and above the earth’s surface.
Albuquerque has recently experienced an increased emergence on the international exhibition circuit, including major installations for Desert X AlUla and Copenhagen Contemporary, and most notably a solo exhibition, Liquid Light, on view as part of the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022.
Albuquerque’s body of work interweaves photography, film, performance, painting, and sculpture into a vibrant synthesis of personal and cosmic mythologies through her central tenet: “light carries information.”
An integral part of Peter Blake’s vision for Blakehaus, a pandemic-inspired transformation for the gallerist, is a blurring of the lines between art, architecture, and design. Blake’s collection of modern design ranges from the 1930s until the early ’70s, from Bauhaus to the end of modernism, and is global in scope—Brazil, Italy, France, and Denmark. He exhibits the art and design together in the Laguna Beach gallery. Blake and his wife, the sculptor Stephanie Bachiero, also live in the space.
An evocative example of Blakehaus was on display in Palm Springs earlier this year: a pop-up takeover of the midcentury masterpiece William F. Cody house. The installation featured collectible design in every room, along with work by Light and Space Movement artists Blake has championed at his Laguna Beach gallery for 30 years. It was “an homage to Desert X and what’s happened in contemporary art in the desert over the last few years,” Blake told art critic Steven Biller in Palm Springs Life magazine.
Peter Blake Gallery | 435 Ocean Avenue, Laguna Beach | 949.584.1224 | peterblakegallery.com
