'Do You Love Me Now?' by Liz Craft at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven

Liz Craft belongs to a generation of representational sculptresses and sculptors that in L.A. in the early 2000s developed an allusive, humorous, surreal, and feminist artistic language. Rooted in California’s pop and counterculture, her works often feature psychedelic aspects and cross the border to the eccentric, abject and provocative.

Craft uses a variety of materials for her pieces—from found objects, to paper mâché, to plaster and ceramic. She comes upon her themes in daily life, in her surroundings, memories, fantasies, and dreams, lending her works a high degree of directness which is, however, made complicated by interconnections and superimpositions, by grotesque and surreal twists. For by bringing together what is (usually) unrelated, layers upon layers of “meaning” arise and torpedo each other. Yet in visual terms, they indeed make “sense.” 

Consequently, Craft’s work’s cannot be fixed, they instead go beyond themselves in a spirally movement, vacillating between the banality of daily life and fantastical scenes. The real mutates into the unreal, waywardness arises from the mundane. They are at once familiar and absurd, characterized by what could be called a quick or direct sense of humor. 

It is this complexity that makes Craft’s pieces so interesting and distinguishes them from currently widespread, contemporary practices that make recourse to the surreal and magical. For in Craft’s work, the non-real is “reeled in,” so to speak, it is “grounded,” just as banality is transgressed by the fantastical. 

The artistic strategy of collage pervading Craft’s works is also the strategy on which the arrangements of her exhibitions are based. They are nonlinear and associative narrations in space emerging from the compilation and encounter of individual works, referring to the multidimensional quality of life, while simultaneously seeking to counteract established orders, norms and moralizations.

The exhibition of Liz Craft at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven is the artist‘s first solo presentation in Germany in 15 years.