Back Yard (fragment), 1996

From 30 th January to 15 th March 1993, the Espai 13 at the Joan Miro Foundation will be the venue for an installation by the United States artist Liza Lou, whose works describe our immediate surroundings (the kitchen or garden) and at the same time present a critical view of the American way of life.

Liza Lou was born in New York in 1969 and now lives in Los Angeles. Her works have been shown in different US museums but this is the first time she will be exhibiting The Back Yard, an installation that reproduces the typical garden of every American home, particularly those in California, and is made of millions of different coloured beads. Beneath a seemingly benevolent vision of The Back Yard (or The kitchen, her previous installation), Lou criticises the American way of life, consumerism and the superficial nature of today's society.

Back Yard, 1996

Liza Lou decided to start working with beads in 1991 after a trip to Italy. Impressed by the Renaissance masters who painted the Tuscan countryside with exquisite delicacy, she decided to reproduce her own landscape. In her first installation, The Kitchen, no single detail was left out; refrigerator, table, chairs, walls, clock, cutlery, a fried egg on a plate, etc. It was the result of four years of painstaking work.

Her next installation was The Back Yard , now to be shown in the Espai 13. It is a garden reproduced down to the very last detail, but this time Lou did not work alone but invited anyone to participate - senior citizens, groups of Boy Scouts, neighbours and others - and each provided a flower, a blade of grass, a tiny insect or a even camping table.

Liza Lou's installations certainly make an impact, and not only because of their dimensions. They refer to the work that goes unrecognized and to the meeting point between art and craft, and they also question the very authorship of the work of art. Lou works in a manner that is exactly the opposite of conceptual art, where the idea or concept is everything. Her art is precisely the opposite: the installation does not exist unless it is seen.