Art Institute of Chicago Displays 'Innovative' Liz Larner Sculpture Project Today

Larner's project for the Art Institute, her first in Chicago in more than a decade, brings together two recent sculptures: the mirror-polished, low-slung stainless steel X of 2013, and the vividly painted, outstretching steel 6 of 2010-11. Each of these two distinctive X-forms is a graphic mark: "X marks the spot." Each work also remains literally and metaphorically open: "X" is a common mathematical variable, with an unknown or undefined value.

An important third element, unique to the Art Institute of Chicago project, creates a site-specific context for the public to experience and interact with the works. Larner will construct an expansive wooden platform of reclaimed ash lumber, measuring 33 feet by 54 feet and nine inches, to serve as a unifying base for the installation of X and 6. Visitors are invited to step onto the platform and break through what Larner describes as the traditional distancing from sculptural work as they circumnavigate the objects installed on the viewers' level.

Contemporary Co-curator Lekha Waitoller notes, "Larner is offering the audience a new experience on the Bluhm Family Terrace - the sculptures' curving lines and the vivid application of color on 6, paired with the warmth of the wood interrupts the cool rectangular, concrete forms of the museum's Modern Wing and encourages visitors to engage with the sculptures."

Since 1988, the Los Angeles-based Larner has been committed to exploring both the formal qualities and suggestive power of an object. She aims to animate the intellectual as well as emotional capacities of a viewer. Larner has made sculptures from materials as diverse as saltpeter, paper, crystals, rubber, and ceramic. While typically abstract, the resulting forms - composed of contours more often than solid planes - tend toward the organic. Larner is known as a colorist as well, having explored across her decades of art practice the historical tension between applied color and "local" or inherent color. Her work is substantial and experimental in equal measure, technically refined but also perceptually playful.