March 25, 2025, 1 p.m. University of Arts Linz, Domgasse 1, Seminar room DO.01.15
The Sculptural Conceptions / Ceramics invite you to a lecture by Liz Craft.
Liz Craft is part of a generation of figurative sculptors who, in early 2000s Los Angeles, developed a language rich in allusions—playful, surreal, and imbued with feminist undertones. Deeply rooted in California’s popular and contemporary culture, her works often incorporate psychedelic elements, pushing the boundaries of eccentricity, the abject, and the provocative.
Craft employs a wide range of materials, from found objects and papier-mâché to plaster and ceramics. Her motifs emerge from everyday life, her surroundings, memories, fantasies, and dreams. This results in a striking directness, which, at the same time, is complicated by layers of interwoven subjects and references, often twisted into the grotesque and the hyper-real. By assembling seemingly unrelated elements, meanings accumulate, contradict, and destabilize each other—yet, a strong visual coherence remains.
Craft’s works are in constant motion, spiraling beyond themselves. They oscillate between everyday banality and fantastic scenarios, where the real morphs into the unreal, and the absurd grows out of the ordinary. They are both familiar and strange, humorous in a way that feels immediate and sharp.
This complexity is what makes Craft’s work so compelling and sets it apart from the widespread use of surreal and magical references in contemporary artistic practices. In her work, the unreal is always grounded in the everyday—just as the banal is transcended through the fantastic.
The collage-like approach that runs through Craft’s sculptures also forms the basis of her exhibition arrangements. Her shows unfold as nonlinear, associative narratives, where the juxtaposition of individual works not only reflects the multidimensional nature of life but also seeks to subvert established structures, norms, and moral conventions.
Works by Liz Craft (*1970, Los Angeles) have been exhibited at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven (2022); Centre d’édition Contemporaine, Geneva (2022); Kunsthaus Pasquart Biel/Bienne, Geneva (2023); Kunstmuseum Appenzell, Geneva (2023); Truth & Consequences, Geneva (2018, 2015); Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt a. M. (2022, 2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2017); Liszt, Berlin (2017); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2017); Oracle, Berlin (2017); Real Fine Arts, New York (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Bodega, New York (2015); Jenny’s, Los Angeles (2015); Pro Choice, Paris (2014); Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2014); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2014); Friedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2013); Nottingham Contemporary (2013); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012).
Stefanie Kleefeld