ABOUT

Liz Markus (b. 1967, Buffalo, NY) is an American artist based in Los Angeles whose painting practice explores perception, memory, and the subconscious through fluid
color, repetition, and recurring cultural motifs. She paints to see where the painting
will take her, approaching subject matter as a vessel for the act of painting rather than as a fixed object or image. Markus often works on multiple, interrelated or non-related series simultaneously, allowing chance, intuition, and accumulation to shape the work over time. She believes the totality of her practice is something greater than its individual parts, and that works from different series are ideally experienced together.

Markus primarily uses bold, colorful washes of acrylic paint on unprimed canvas, working wet-into-wet and relinquishing a degree of control as pigment bleeds, spreads, and collides while drying. Because the paint continues to move as it sets, she cannot fully predict how a painting will ultimately look. This element of chance produces hazy, atmospheric images that hover between abstraction and figuration, images that feel both immediate and unstable. Her process is intuitive and physical, guided by what she describes as a non-verbal dialogue with the painting itself. She trusts the subconscious as the primary driver of strong painting and often allows discomfort, uncertainty, and risk to guide her decisions.

Her subjects recur and reappear across decades and include socialites, hippies, pop-cultural figures, dinosaurs, cavemen, cheeseburgers, landscapes, interiors, and iconic objects drawn from American history and everyday life. These images are not treated as portraits or symbols in a literal sense, but as flexible containers for psychological projection, cultural memory, humor, desire, and contradiction. Markus is drawn to icons that already carry social meaning, but she strips them down, abstracts them, and lets color and atmosphere destabilize their fixed identities. Through repetition, each subject becomes a shifting field rather than a stable image.

Markus’s work is deeply informed by her experience growing up Gen X and by the rawness of punk and grunge music and culture, as well as by her formative years spent immersed in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. There she absorbed the work of Abstract Expressionists, Color Field painters, and Pop artists, including the stained canvases of Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, the color structures of Gene Davis, and the loose figuration of artists such as Grace Hartigan. These influences continue to surface in her emphasis on color, scale, immediacy, iconic reduction, and the tension between freedom and structure. Her practice operates at the intersection of these traditions, filtered through contemporary American imagery and a personal, experiential approach to painting.

Repetition and return are central to Markus’s work. She revisits motifs across long stretches of time, allowing each series to absorb what came before it. As she sees it, orientation is never fixed, and meaning shifts with context, duration, and scale. Humor and joy coexist with darkness and psychological weight, reflecting her interest in the tension between repression and liberation. Her paintings often radiate lightness and color while carrying an undercurrent of intensity or emotional density. This coexistence is not resolved but held in suspension, allowing viewers to project their own experiences onto the work.

Markus earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1989 and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1997. She has mounted solo exhibitions internationally at Stems (Paris), Shrine (New York), Loyal (Stockholm), County (Palm Beach), Maruani Mercier (Brussels), The Pit (Los Angeles), Unit (London), Nathalie Karg (New York), White Columns (New York). Recent group shows include Hexton Gallery (Aspen, Co), Tripoli (Wainscott, NY), Asia Art Center (Taipei). Group museum exhibitions include A New Subjectivity at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, the Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas, The Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University, and Domestic Seen at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.