Lisa Williamson: Hover Land Lover: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles 

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Hover Land Lover, Lisa Williamson’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 7th through November 9th in Los Angeles. 

With an interest in forming a language through concise material abstraction, Lisa Williamson creates works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and often attune to the spaces in which they are exhibited. For Hover Land Lover, the artist presents a series of painted wall reliefs and sculptures that convey language as a series of formal compressions — of landscape, of architecture, and of figuration. At once systematic and intuitive, Williamson tunes and calibrates material space, in that of her individual works and in their relationship to one another within the gallery.  

Central to the exhibition is a series of machine-carved basswood relief sculptures that are mounted to aluminum and painted by hand in layers of semi-transparent shimmering metallics, contrasted by surfaces of densely saturated color. Shifting in scale from vast horizontal expanses to modest head or page size abstractions, each work punctuates space and impresses an energetic chromatic charge. Wrapping around the galleries, the artist relates the installation of these works to the structure of a sentence or to that of an imagined morse code. Installed with “room to breathe”, Williamson carefully considers the sculptures’ relationship to the walls and connection to the surrounding architecture, rhythmically creating a conversation between each form and the space they occupy.

In the metallic silver-blue relief, New Wave, the sculpture echoes a long and narrow wave, a line drawing, a curtain, or a vibration. In juxtaposition is the compact relief, Fields, a concentrated bolt of color in which three horizontal bars of vivid green float before a gold infused bronze-metallic ground. Inventing subtle color associations and complex painted surfaces through her incorporation of glass and metallic particles, Williamson’s sculptures catch light and perceptually shift as one moves around each work. Groover is a direct nod to this act of tuning as a pattern of black dials reminiscent of stereo knobs protrude from a glimmering cream block. Hovering in the galleries, Williamson’s reliefs each convey a particular optical frequency — autonomous forms that hold space — at once expressive in their physicality while also maintaining a certain level of interiority, opacity, or resistance. 

In a series of vertical sculptures, the artist draws from leveling or navigational tools such as plumb bobs, fishing bobbers, and pins. Human in scale, each upright form personifies balance and the demarcation of space. Situated in conversation with Williamson’s reliefs, these works disrupt the horizontality of the exhibition and instead “drop in”. Ray is a tall and tapered pin that is bifurcated by warm and cool tones, with alternating sections of opacity and luminosity. Drawing from a ray or beam of light, this work exemplifies the active nature of Williamson’s painted forms as glass particles reveal a non-static and light-responsive surface. In the diptych, A Bird and a Bud, Williamson inverts two identical forms and reorients her approach to color within each. Standing together, these animated sculptures conflate nature and figure, as an after-image of color casts against the wall to activate the surrounding space. Regarding precision as an expressive gesture and calibration as a mode of production, Williamson imbues her forms with character and locates a distinct formal resonance, softening the line between painting and sculpture, language and object. 

Born in 1977, Lisa Williamson lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with a MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (2008) and received her BFA from Arizona State University, Tempe (1999). 

Williamson’s work has been included in important group exhibitions including the 2010 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2010); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Variations: Conversations In and Around Abstract Painting, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2014); PROSPECT 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2017). In 2009 the artist completed a residency at CCA Andratx in Mallorca, Spain. Williamson was the recipient of the 2007 LA Studios, Inc. Sound Award as well as the University Teaching Fellowship at University of Southern California, Los Angeles. The artist also received the CAAP Grant in Chicago in 2001 and 2002.

In 2019, a permanent installation, Obstruction, Reflection, Transition was installed at the University of Illinois, Springfield and in 2024 a second iteration from the series was installed at the The Embassy of the United States in Tegucigalpa, Honduras as part of the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies program.  

Lisa Williamson’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and CCA Andratx, Mallorca.

Photo by Jeff McLane