Experience Austin Artist Laura Lit at Northern-Southern

Laura Lit’s new animal-sized painted wall reliefs of wood, resin, and clay suggest sentience. Twelve will hang in Northern-Southern. Each is a deliberate dreaming, a spirit made solid, a tether to within.

Lit summons the full range of her experience, as a painter and from her work in film makeup, special effects, and architectural restoration. She composes the forms by meditation, or before sleep. Only when it is honed does she commit the design to paper, usually in a single drawing. Lit works alone, without assistance or fabrication. She jigsaws wood skeletons, sculpts molds, fine brushes oils, pours dyed resins, until something on the wall lives.

FAR IN is on the forefront of what abstraction could become again, post Hilma af Klint: spiritual, deeply imagined, ur-real.

Laura Lit (b. Dallas, Texas, 1979) was educated first as a painter (BFA Rhode Island School of Design), then studied Special Effects Makeup for Film and Television at Vancouver Film School. In her twenties, she worked in film and in art and architectural restoration, self-educating in a breadth of techniques from carpentry to the most subtle brushwork. A material bravado and spiritual curiosity hallmarks her artwork. Lit is unafraid.

Her first Austin solo show was at Women and their Work in 2017: photorealistic oil portraits pierced with thread. For AFTER IMAGES at Northern-Southern 2018 Lit painted her first suite of abstractions: six gentle-edged ambiguous forms like life drawings of what we see with tightly shut eyes. In N-S’s 2019 portrait show LIKEsNESS, Lit began to work with sculpture: two meticulous miniature clay busts, painted to life down to the complexion. Each statuette suggested a version of Lit herself. In 2020, kept from her studio by the pandemic, Lit drew. Her serial drawing show FUZZY FORCES was named Top in Texas by Glasstire, Summer 2020.

Visiting Hours:

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

2-6pm