Liz Markus

Liz Markus’ Super Disco Disco Breakin’ is currently available to view at The Stables in Covent Garden. Open 11am – 6pm Monday – Friday.

The T-Rex works stem from an obsession with the well-known dinosaur Halloween costume, featured in hundreds of videos online where people are attempting to run in them while the giant T-Rex heads fall backwards. Markus finds these T-Rexes endearing: their attempt to appear aggressive contrasted with their utter failure to do so is inherently disarming. She was taken with the proportions and colours of the costumes – as well as the malleability of form – and the multitude of different poses that could be achieved in the costume.

As a descendant of Pop Art, Markus is unconsciously searching for an iconic image, something that is a good structure to hang a painting on. In other words, an image that can be repeated multiple times and hold all variants of color, emotion, and action. Similar to the way Willem De Kooning’s women are an architecture within which he expressed violence, humor, action, and obsession. Markus listens to the Beastie Boys or 90s Grunge music while painting, as it lends her the right attitude and energy she needs to paint aggressively with an unforgiving medium, staining raw canvas. Beastie Boys and Nirvana lyrics contain absurdities that capture the point of view of generation X, it is this quality that Markus is trying to imbue her cohort of T Rexes with.

She begins by sourcing the right image, before painting quickly takes over. This source image is just a rough guide, the painting could still take many forms. For Markus, the process whereby form begins to take a concrete shape, is the crux of the painterly pursuit.

Markus lives and works in Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at Maruani Mercier (Brussels, Belgium), Nathalie Karg (New York, NY), ZieherSmith (New York, NY), White Columns (New York, NY), Loyal Gallery (Stockholm), and other notable galleries.

Her work was recently included in the exhibition A New Subjectivity (2017) at the Reece Museum (Johnson City, Tennesse) and Domestic Seen (2016) at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS). Markus earned her BFA at School of Visual Arts (New York, NY) and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia, PA).