Margaret Lazzari: Heaven and Earth

Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present MARGARET LAZZARI: Heaven and Earth, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition by the Southern California-based painter. Heaven and Earth features the artist’s most recent series of large and medium scale landscape inspired abstractions exploring the emotional power of color. The exhibition opens with a reception on November 21 and continues through December 19th. In these new paintings, Lazzari is exploring the internal and external - the physical and the spiritual. There is an intensity and depth to these works: layer upon layer of deeply considered marks accumulating into compositions that transport. We feel a touch of water, a hint of leaves, storm clouds rising, seasons changing. The color relationships Lazzari develops are stories of their own. Color is deeply important to Lazzari and often her starting point for a painting. Using colors that at times can feel unsettling when taken on their own, Lazzari has an uncanny ability to unify disparate hues into richly nuanced compositions that draw the eye in and lead the viewer through layers and worlds. In Heaven and Earth, we find a balance between luminous ethereal light and fervent gestural darkness. The composition is divided vertically into the celestial and the terrestrial - a calm and measured space on the right with open softness in sepia and gentle blues and an intensely worked space on the right - light reflecting on stormy water, clouds gathering on the horizon. We feel landscape in Lazzari’s work - our eyes connect horizon lines and color and yet it is not literal. The work exists in a space where our minds connect to it on a deeper level: we are transported through our own memories of storms, a night sky, ripples of stones thrown into a pond. The composition in Indigo is cut by a horizon line. Above are softer marks: billows of nebulous mist punctuated by flickering lights. The lower third is comprised of intensely multi-colored strokes with those marks disappearing towards the corners: hovering in blue gray, suspending on stillness. Gemstones is an intense flash of motion - a phoenix rising from the ashes in red, orange, blue, pink. The colors dance and dash: glitters of saffron, celadon, cadmium illuminate the composition. The dark red burning intensely on the left side is a counterpoint to the meticulous mark-making on the right. Margaret Lazzari merges precepts of Abstract Expressionism and the intent of 19th century landscape painters to capture the sublime. Noted art critic Harold Rosenberg who helped define Abstract Expressionism described the canvas as an “arena in which to act” and to listen to Lazzari speak about each painting is to see that concept in action. But unlike AbEx painters and their focus on the intuitive, Lazzari is focused on the push and pull between chaos and order, representation and abstraction, and the balance of the free gesture with the cerebral. Margaret Lazzari is a painter, writer, and Professor Emerita of Art at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design. Lazzari has had numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, including her 2020 exhibition, Vastness, at George Billis Gallery LA and her 2015 solo exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum as Distinguished Woman Artist. Her works are included in several permanent collections, including Cathedral Collection of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles; Kaiser Hospitals, California; Huntsville Museum of Art, Alabama; Azusa Pacific University, California; Harrah’s Casino, New Jersey; the Fresno Art Museum; Clark University, Iowa; and St. Louis University Museum of Art. In 2018, she was named Honored Alumna of St. Louis University. Lazzari has written several innovative textbooks, both as sole author of Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist and also as co-author of Art and Design Fundamentals; Exploring Art: A Global, Thematic Approach, published by Cengage; and two drawing text/sketchbooks published by Oxford University Press. The third edition of the Practical Handbook will be published in 2021 by Thames and Hudson. Over her 33 years at USC, she taught in the MFA program and in undergraduate painting, drawing, design and general education areas. Lazzari established the design program, which greatly expanded offerings in the Roski school. She served in several administrative roles during her career, including Vice Dean of Faculty, Vice Dean of Art, and Chair of Painting and Drawing. Lazzari lives and works in Southern California.