Throughout a four-plus decade career, the Malibu-based artist Lita Albuquerque has engaged in an ongoing, epic dialogue between earth and sky—from early desert installations like Spine of the Earth (1980), a “terrestrial painting” invoking the four directions on a dry lakebed in the Mojave; to Sol Star (1996), which mapped the constellations over the Pyramids of Giza with circles of the pure ultramarine blue pigment that would become her signature, the traditional North African color an homage to her own girlhood in Tunisia; to Stellar Axis (2006), an installation on the ice in Antarctica, her most ambitious project to date and the largest contemporary artwork ever created at the South Pole. However, last year’s An Elongated Now (2014), a performance piece on Laguna Beach featuring a procession of hundreds of white-clad participants being led across the sand, seems to have pointed to a shift in direction. With two shows currently on view in Los Angeles, Embodiment at Kohn Gallery through March 5 and 20/20: Accelerando at USC’s Fisher Museum until April 10, this profoundly cosmic artist is exploring the process of becoming embodied, through the mediums of paint and film. Over espresso at Kohn Gallery one recent afternoon, we talked … Continue reading Planet Queen: Lita Albuquerque On Art and The Cosmos