Lia Yossifor’s latest show, “Communicating Vessels,” opens May 13th at Miles McEnery Gallery, 520 West 21st Street, New York, NY.

Yossifor’s website has been updated to include early socio-political portraits from 2005–2007; the landscape series The Tender Among Us from 2007, and the evolving series of grey paintings entitled Movements from 2012-–2016. The Tender Among Us was exhibited at the Pomona College Museum of Art in 2007 and accompanied by a catalog. DoppelHouse Press published Yossifor’s first artist monograph Movements, which includes essays by Karen Lang, Christopher Michno, Stella Rollig and Ed Schad and was designed by award-winning Vienna-based graphic artist Peter Duniecki.

The new site brings to light how Yossifor’s paintings evolved over time.

Yossifor was trained at UC Irvine, California, with professor who made their names during the culture war debates and the identity politics movement. Her work then was a series of sociopolitical portraits that were etched in great detail onto monochromatic fields. These portraits were buried in single color fields, in shades of red, white, and black and only came to life with a certain light and position of the viewer. Evolving into abstractions, Yossifor’s work has become portraits of events instead of portraits of people. The new abstractions are time-restricted, repeated, and body-aware; they speak to a cycle of trauma and belatedness. Their subject is entirely a state of mind, and is formed over time by thinking of these works in groupings of paintings and memories. In these abstractions, a delicate balance between cognition and action forms a pictorial space which coexists in tension with the painting as a record of an event. The abstractions are grounded in the artist’s movement and are generated by utilizing a process that resembles automatic drawing. Yossifor attacks, scores, and interacts with the paint to create textural lines and structures that echo drawings; these drawing features are subsequently buried in the ensuing layers of paint. The work is also done entirely in paint, but describes different material states, from stone relief and ceramics to body prints.