Lita Albuquerque
Turbulence
Frieze Projects: Inside Out
Curated by Art Production Fund
Frieze Los Angeles
February 20 - February 23, 2025
Lita Albuquerque, a pioneer of the Land Art and Light & Space movements of the 1960s and 1970s presents Turbulence. Drawing on themes explored throughout her 50-year career, Albuquerque will place a boulder coated in ultramarine blue pigment atop a bed of decomposed granite. Through this work, Albuquerque underscores the fleeting nature of our connection to the environment while anchoring viewers in the present. The use of blue bridges earth and cosmos, transforming light into matter through poetic, transient gestures.
About the Artist
Lita Albuquerque (b. 1946, Santa Monica, CA, raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, France) has created an expansive body of work since the early 1970s, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, colour, the body, motion and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal.
She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. Albuquerque has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis: Antarctica, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the 2019 Laguna Art Museum Wendt Artist of the Year Award, and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award.
Recent major exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Earth Skin, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Lita Albuquerque: The Washington Monument Project: The Red Pyramid, presented by Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Offscreen, Paris; Lita Albuquerque: Malibu Line, Los Angeles Nomadic Division; Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920 - 2020, California Institute of Technology, Getty PST, Pasadena, CA; Lita Albuquerque: Early Works at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels; Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Lightpresented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022; Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Desert X AlUla 2020, Saudi Arabia; the 2018 Art Safiental Biennial, Switzerland; Desert X 2017; 20/20: Accelerando at USC Fisher Museum of Art; The Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others. A dedicated educator, Albuquerque has held many teaching appointments during her tenure, and was on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design for 35 years.