The earliest example of Larner’s work presented here, Corridor Orange/Blue, 1991, consists of a bright orange wood and metal structure with protrusions that pierce a soft fabric body collaged from vintage sweaters in brilliant technicolor shades of orange—blue’s complimentary color—ranging from crimson to hazard yellow and marigold. Hanging from the ceiling beside it are several high-gloss metal panels in ascending shades of blue. At first glance entirely incongruous as a set and opposite in color, the pair awkwardly mimic each other’s shape. The colorful “corridor” as a primary experience also fragments and fractures onlookers as they walk through and around it.  While the space that separates them is the width of a standard hallway, the structures are psychically and emotionally a world apart.

Combining industrial materials with an assortment of fabrics, Larner organizes apparent opposites—soft and hard, handmade and hi-tech—in mental and physical proximity to arouse the viewer’s sense of the means by which color and form create and affect our everyday world. Curator Russell Ferguson writes, “There is a pushing and pulling back and forth between the impulse to order and the countervailing allure of surrender to looseness and disintegration. Despite her almost dazzling virtuosity, Larner always wants what she makes to lead out of form and into a broader context. ‘I still want to have an object,’ she has said, ‘but I don’t want a recognition of form—the external shape of the object—to be the primary element of my sculpture.’”

(Russell Ferguson, “Iron Virgin and Fleshy Virgin” in Two or Three or Something: Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner, published by Kunsthalle Graz, 2006)

Reflector Wizards, 1992, suspends in space a quartet of reflective, missing figures that we know only by what covers them. Composed of a metal armature sheathed in jagged fragments of mirrored glass, the vacant, spectral forms twinkle in and out of materiality as they reflect and fracture not only their surroundings, but one another as well. Penny Florence writes, “there is a mutating formal language operative in Larner’s overall oeuvre, one that mobilizes poetic language and mathematics in space to interrogate and re-make it, at the same time as it makes the viewers consider themselves in relation to it. The work of art is as surely the focus as it was in the sculptural tradition before postmodernism, but the work is no longer a separate or fixed object….Larner’s sculptural elements…mutually qualify and converse with each other—they set up a ‘polyogue’ rather than a dialogue, and the viewer participates.” This is particularly true of Reflector Wizards, in which the art encounter encompasses viewer and art object alike, which become intertwined as they move and shift. As they do, so too do their surroundings appear to shift and fragment into an echo chamber of spaces. 

(Penny Florence, “Outer Space, Embodied Sense Two Meditations and Then Some (Futures)” in Two or Three or Something: Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner, published by Kunsthalle Graz, 2006)

Larner, who is today considered an innovator in ceramics, had her first foray into the material with her smile series. Curator Jenelle Porter writes, “Given Larner’s investment in concretizing the ephemeral, immortalizing the atmospheric, and chronicling the unseen, the smile seems a fitting subject.” The works and their titles are inspired by descriptions of smiles Larner came across in novels including John Gregory Dunne’s The Red White and Blue, in which the author indexes such assorted smiles as an “icicle smile,” “a small, satisfied smile,” “a luminous, loony smile,” an “executioner’s smile,” and a “languid smile.” smile (abiding), 1996 – 2005, emerges out of a network of triangular facets which, crinkled and paper-like, culminate in two haphazard peaks of a crescent. The work possesses a makeshift quality that belies the fragility of its cast porcelain shell and the precision and technical ability required of the process. Porter continues, “Casting porcelain is exceedingly challenging—especially if one intends to make a sculpture that is supposed to look provisional, as if it had been folded into an origami abstraction and then held together by hot-glued seams.” The effect is one of freezing a fleeting moment of the artistic process. By capturing an ephemeral moment of its making, the work formally embodies its very subject, itself an ephemeral gesture: the smile.

(Jenelle Porter, “X Quantities” in Liz Larner, published on the occasion of her exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, 2016)

“X is a place to start; it marks the spot. X is mathematical, metaphorical, scientific, emblematic, and symbolic: it is a placeholder, a multiplier, a signature, a chromosome, a kiss. It is an intersection in space. It is the independent variable and the unknown quantity. …For Larner, X is as immaterial as it is concrete, a graphic character as much as a symbol of the unknown. X is a minimal, geometric form that she exploits for its flexible dimensionality, for the limitless and productive sculptural questions that the translation from two dimensions to three affords. …Much like a room, or a cube, an X is a form so familiar that it is accepted as a given, a specific thing in itself, and is voided of meaning by its ‘factness.’ Larner, in all her work, seeks to destabilize such givens, to ‘open a question that is closed down.’”

— Jenelle Porter, “X Quantities”

As its title suggests, the polished steel sculpture X, 2013, involves intersecting paths, in this case wide bands with beveled edges of polished stainless steel which bow upward to converge in a gentle crest, while their terminal ends curl under, arachnid-like. Larner arrived at the idiosyncratic form using digital modeling to wrap the shape around a three-dimensional object. The solid form it takes on is undone by the reflective surface that absorbs, and disappears into, its surroundings.

Since 2010 ceramic has played a central role in Larner’s investigations into the limits and possibilities of material form. xvi (Caesura), 2015, an example of her signature wall-mounted sculptures, features a fractured slab of rolled clay dripping with colored epoxy and combines her interest in abstraction and geology. In her essay, Jenelle Porter writes, “Although applied color is fundamental to this series, Larner points out that the works adopt none of the nomenclature of painting. There is no figure and ground relationship. The support is clay, not canvas. Furthermore, though the works hang on the wall, they in fact project relief-like from the wall at no insignificant distance, into the space of the room. The works appear to hover, defying their materiality, until one draws close and encounters their bulk and dimensionality.”

(Jenelle Porter, “X Quantities” in Liz Larner, published on the occasion of her exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, 2016)