Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was advances key ideas that have preoccupied American artist Liz Larner (born 1960) for more than thirty years: the relationship between reality and illusion, stability and power, and object and viewer—dynamics that Larner positions as central to a contemporary understanding of sculpture. The book considers the ways in which the artist’s virtuosic forms—whether aggressive or delicate, technically exquisite or unruly and formless—have expanded the potential of sculpture to engender dynamics between the work, the embodied viewer, the surrounding environment, and the larger cultural context. Texts by Connie Butler, Mary Ceruti, and Ariana Reines explore the material features of Larner’s work (in mediums that range from bacterial cultures to steel chain, from surgical gauze to bronze, and from paper to porcelain, selected for their physical properties as well as for social and historical associations), as well as its feminist challenges to social and political constructions of space.
