Liat Yossifor: the gray feather a thrush lost

Discourse is alive outside of comfort zones. A new place can bring about new ideas, and working and showing abroad have always shifted my thinking, but especially now during a time when the world is shaken. My Berlin Fellowship with VATMH and 68projects is a set up to test new ideas in a new context, away from what I know, from my routines.

I will be working on a body of work entitled 'the gray feather a thrush lost' (a line from 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World' by Adam Zagajewski), which is about beauty and loss. My work is both painting and reflections on history, and I get there not necessarily through concepts, but by being present and dealing with current events through a daily practice of painting.”

- Liat Yossifor

68projects is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based Israeli artist Liat Yossifor in Berlin. The exhibition will coincide with the artist's Berlin Fellowship at the renowned Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V.

The poem by Adam Zagajewski, from which the title of the show was selected, consists of lines about normalcy and beauty that are interrupted by descriptions of brutality. Yossifor's new paintings negotiate rough paint handling with lyrical line work as well as natural movements and their deviations. She achieves this by drawing and scoring into thick textural masses of paint. Dark grays dominate this newest series, which also showcases a thickness never seen before within her practice. The thicker the structure, the deeper the markings left within. The gray for Yossifor is not meant as an aesthetic choice, but rather as an outcome of complementary colors cancelling one another through the intensive process of gestural painting. For us, whatever color and gesture are lost through this process are what we, in turn, can gain by allowing ourselves to consider our own markings in life and moments of erasure.