Lisa Anne Auerbach

Gavlak Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions of new work by the Los Angeles based artist Lisa Anne Auerbach, and New York based T.J. Wilcox. Lisa and T.J. share a long history dating back to the mid 90's, where both attended the MFA program at Art Center College of Art and Design in Pasadena, California. While the two artists work in different media, Wilcox in film and collage and Auerbach in photography, knitting and publications, there is a similar sensibility in their approach to art-making that clearly comes from the teachers under which both studied closely. Mike Kelley, Stephen Prina and Liz Larner are just a few of the instructors that greatly influenced them. A sweater presented here ("More Than Love Hours," 2012) by Auerbach was knitted for an exhibition put on by former students as an homage to Mike Kelley after his recent and untimely death, and is a poignant homage to these artists' shared history.

For her third solo exhibition with Gavlak Gallery, Lisa Anne Auerbach will include banners knit with sayings culled from visits to psychics, along with new abstract gouaches of sweater patterns. This body of work, which is similar to works to be featured at the upcoming 2014 Whitney Biennial opening in March of this year, continues Auerbach's exploration of the alternative distribution of ideas and language through knitting, publications, and photography. Lisa is well known for her knitted sweater and skirt sets and banners with political and personal slogans and declarations based on current events such as "Everything I touch turns to $old" and "Occupy yourself first". For Auerbach, the quality and "craft" of how something is made is as important and intrinsic as the imagery and subject matter.

The works included in her solo exhibition at Gavlak Gallery were taken from her meetings with various psychics, their clairvoyance and statements of the future recorded and then knitted into both large and smaller size banners with traditional sweater patterns. These new knitted banners which will also be included in the Whitney Biennial, are considered by Auerbach to be pixilated imagery similar to a printed photograph and the "printing" of the knitted banner is done using large knitting machines in her studio. More recently the artist has taken the idea of the pixels and translated them into hand painted, colorful, abstract gouaches on paper depicting traditional Norwegian sweater patterns, a study for an eventual sweater to be knitted with text or simply a "sampler" of color squares floating on another intense color.

Auerbach's work has been featured in recent exhibitions: "Chicken Strikken," at Malmö Konsthall, 2012; "United We Stand," Hammer Museum AIR: Artist in Residence, Los Angeles, CA 2012; "Take This Knitting Machine and Shove It," Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK 2009; "UMMA Projects: Lisa Anne Auerbach," University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor, MI 2009; "Nine Lives," Hammer Museum Biennial, Los Angeles, CA 2009; "Election Sweater Project," Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO 2008.