New York
The sculptures in Liz Larner’s current exhibition “Maybe not” (on view through October 22, 2025) continue the more contained, and arguably austere, mode of art-making that she has undertaken since her turn toward ceramics in the late 1990s. Larner’s previous work often involved a significant array of forms and materials, including polyurethane, steel, bronze, found objects, and porcelain. The Larner of yore also engaged in haptic intermedia and new-media works, creating kinetic sculptures fitted with stanchions and engines, such as the highly publicized and much-lauded Corner Basher (1988), an electro-motor sculpture recalling Jean Tinguely’s Métamatics, in which electric motors and speed controls exacted cacophonous collisions between a steel ball on a chain and the gallery walls.
Larner’s new sculptures—delicate, form-oriented, and static—represent the antithesis of violent movement. Mounted on the wall, these constructions hew toward saddle-, plate-, and pill-shaped geological elements, partially riven and cragged but unified through a subtending structure. In a number of pieces, she has applied successive layers of glaze to transform the rough and lithic into ethereal, lustrous surfaces. Coalesce, the most effective of these glossed-surface works, features a cinnabar-colored segment that snakes like a tongue from a larger robin’s-egg-blue slab. In Durable Goods (2025), a pair of moss- and coral-flecked brown-butter fragments are pieced together with a crooked, tear-shaped form. Negative space divides the three elements from one another like an invisible vein pushing the slivered particles adrift. The inventive composite form is highlighted by dry sheens of pistachio, matte coffee-brown, and chartreuse-olive. These sculptures, in which Larner avoids a uniform palette, make for optically sensuous amalgamations, as adjacent tones are set into a tension that allows the viewers’ eyes to linger over and unify the collision of severed pieces. Here, palette assiduously licenses form.
In a few instances, the naturalist metaphor becomes too obvious. Ovovivi (2024), for example, with its homogenous pale olive-copper glaze and constraining ovate form, has an ornamental, petrified quality—one cannot escape the perceptual anchor of the leaf. Sculptures with a higher degree of ambiguity are more successful. In After inertia, Stygian areas of ore-like glaze are broken by a dirtied bubblegum-pink molten core. The segments, each a husk curled at its edges, are molded into agreement. Static though they are, the pieces suggest an incrementally cleaved breakage—as if torn by gravity from a once-unified boulder, each shard now sinking in a slow cascade.
Even the most asymmetrical of Larner’s works appear, when viewed head-on, to be weighted evenly enough that the forms create a sense of unity amid variety. At best, they hardly suggest the intervention of an artist’s hands. But such pleasing cohesion is not always the case when the sculptures are viewed from their sides, particularly where Larner uses visible hardware fasteners. These exposed aluminum or stainless-steel fittings prompt a disunion of materials and form, endowing the works with a built quality at odds with their apparently uncontrived and organic gloss.
The markedness of this dichotomy suggests that it is one of Larner’s thorough-going thematic concerns, part and parcel of her broader interest in the relationship between variegated, stone-like ceramic finishes and organic-appearing forms. This overlaps with the related issue of the pre-conditions for creating beautiful forms—a concern often thought to be antiquated but nevertheless operative in our responses to sculptural objects (and arguably artworks tout court). Perhaps Larner is able to better illuminate, by way of cold metal abutments that strike at the core of material and form-based juxtaposition, that which is visually sensuous and apposite for organic-seeming sculptural objects. Indeed, her most pleasing forms are those that appear to be collected from nature and hardly contrived.
Larner’s project goes to a core concern in the philosophy of art. Beginning with Immanuel Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), a work of art is not nature; “yet the purposiveness in its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature.” That is, the beautiful artwork does not suggest some intentionality for which it came into existence; no concept, or purpose, will fully explicate the work’s meaning. Friedrich Schiller, in Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner (1793), elaborated that it was the “idea of freedom” inherent in nature that, when evinced in artistic beauty, allowed for an “[a]utonomy in technique” and “freedom in artfulness.” Such representations license freedom as the ground of beauty, with the artist’s technique contributing to beauty “only insofar as its serves to stimulate the representation of freedom.” Schiller, translating Kant’s notion of “purposiveness without purpose” into the appearance of freedom, believed that something has the appearance of freedom when it is acting within its nature—i.e., that which is natural for it.
The milled metal hardware, where it is appended to Larner’s sculptures, invokes a kind of means-to-an-end use—something external to the artwork. This explains why such fittings do not, and cannot, further the sculptures’ geological form, exacting instead a visual and thematic interruption. One might make the case that we can only properly appreciate those works with pleasurable continuity unless we have seen that continuity broken. However, Larner’s forms presenting continuous natural beauty do not require such conceptual service. They are self-standing in their natural coherence and beauty.
