Now and then

Lies Kraal

November 14 - december 18, 2021

CMay gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Dutch-born Los Angeles-based painter, Lies Kraal.

Kraal is a veteran of the LA art scene and has exhibited in the city for over 30 years including seven solo exhibitions at the renowned Kiyo Higashi Gallery, one of the rare reductive venues; and shows at POST Wilshire, Chac Mool, and more recently, at Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects.

Throughout her career Kraal has been known as a reductive painter focusing on the subtle qualities of life. (She has also done a series of site-specific installations called the “NAOTDAM Project”). Her paintings are concentrated on surface and color and their effects. Kraal paints over 100 layers on each painting, sanding between each coat, creating a velvety smooth surface that is so sensuous, it makes one want intensely to touch the painting’s surface. She often says: “I like people to feel my paintings without touching them”. There is emotion.

Now and Then focuses on the evolution of her paintings over the past 30+ years. The early work includes six paintings on unstretched linen that express her interest in patina and its history. These works are trompe-l’oeil representations of floors of renown LA galleries. Who would find beauty in old floors? The floors represented include Margo Leavin, ShoshanaWayne, Burnett Miller, Luhring Augustine, Richard Bennett and Ace. These paintings were made in the late 1980’s and will be exhibited for the first time.

The new works continue her trajectory of making paintings that are reductive but displaying a pursuit of the handmade. Kraal’s paintings are not unlike the actual galleries represented in her earlier work, created layer by layer, both reveal human interactions with the material forming a subtle yet beautiful quality that can only be made over time. 

Bringing these bodies of work together in one exhibition forms an intriguing concept and study of an artist’s career. It brings full circle Kraal’s pursuit of the sublime.

Since 1989 Lies Kraal has shown her work both nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Mexico City, Seoul, Germany and Santa Fe. She has been included in important group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Rome. In 2015 she was one of only six artists chosen to represent the vast Panza Collection in the first posthumous tribute to Dr. Panza in Rome. In 2003 she was an artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; in 2005 she was a COLA Fellowship recipient from the City of Los Angeles; in 2014 she was invited to the Parkfield Project, an artist retreat in California; in 2017 she was chosen for a residency at Kaus Austerlitz in Rotterdam; and in 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of only 7 fine artists in the USA and Canada.

Her work is included in the Panza Collection, Milano, Italy; the Jumex Colección, Mexico City; the Weisman Collection, Los Angeles, among others. Kraal will be included in a group exchange exhibition with artists from The Netherlands and Los Angeles next year in a collaboration with PRJCTLA and the Frank Taal Gallery in her birth city of Rotterdam.

Selected Works

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