Press Release of Valerie Bach

In its iconic nave, the Patinoire Royale Bach presents, for the first time in Europe, a selection of historic works by the internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist Lita Albuquerque, one of the few women artists associated with the Light and Space movement and Land Art.

International Archives 1st half of 2024

Lita Albuquerque, Early Works

Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussells (Belgium)

03.02 - 30.03.2024

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Entitled Early Works, the exhibition invites visitors to discover a curated selection of sculptures, photographs and installations from ephemeral works produced in the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibited works, some monumental, reflect the artist's favourite materials: stone and pigment. Combining geometric forms and natural elements, they invite us to reflect deeply on our relationship with the environment, the duality between earth and sky, and the transience of light and space. They foreshadow her more recent creations, such as the film Liquid Light (2022), which was presented at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Spine of the Earth, a masterful installation at the heart of the exhibition, stretches across 150 metres of floor space. The installation at the Patinoire Royale Bach is a revival of Lita Albuquerque's most complex ephemeral work, in terms of both scale and geometric articulation, which was originally created in the Mojave Desert in California in the autumn of 1980.

Lita Albuquerque's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, including the Light and Space retrospective at Copenhagen Contemporary Denmark (2021) and the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA (2023). Her work is held by major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty Trust, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the LA Museum of Contemporary Art.

On 3 February, to coincide with the opening of her exhibition and for the benefit of the public, the artist will exceptionally perform the meditation she has been doing every day for the last forty years on the beach in Malibu, California.

Furthermore, since January 20 and until March 9, Marie-Luce Nadal's exhibition, Guerre Céleste, inaugurates the new Project Room at the Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach.

Lita Albuquerque, Spine of the Earth, 1980/2024, pigment, decomposed granite

Born in 1984, the Franco-Catalan artist dives in her winemaking background and her upbringing in Perpignan, to explore the intersection between myth, art, and science. Born into a line of winegrowers, her work reflects a blend of poetic and scientific perspectives on the dominion of the heavens, following in the footsteps of her grandfather's ancestral struggle against the elements.

Guerre Céleste presents a series of works that immerse the viewer into a personal cosmogony, made up of study drawings, a cloud trends calendar, homemade bombs and family notebooks. Among them, Arbalète Madeleine (Madeleine Corssbow) embodies the artist's quest to "make the clouds cry and go looking for their emotions". The exhibition presents three unique pieces that capture and tame three essences of the clouds to offer an experience where these condensed atmospheres can be perceived and 'adopted' in a new way.

Through his stories and performances, Nadal engages audiences in the immensity of the universe, revealing a profound connection between earthly and divine forces. Extracting essences from storms and conjuring clouds, his work revolves around the human obsession with controlling and dominating the natural world.

Marie-Luce Nadal, Tirage photo, faire pleurer les nuages, 2017, print on RC paper, 120 x 80 cm

Exhibition 03 February - 30 March 2024. La Patinoire Royale Bach, 15 rue Veydt - 1030 Bruxelles (Belgium). T. +32 2 533 03 90. Hours: Tuesda-Friday 11:00 - 19:00, Saturday 11:00 - 18:00.