Lila Katzen
Favorite Graces, 1988
Stainless steel
Museum Purchase
Lila Katzen’s Favorite Graces is a shimmering ribbon of polished steel. Katzen began her career as an abstract painter, but always thought of form as something intact and living beyond the boundaries of the frame. She has said, “I have always…related to an image that was not controlled by the outer edges of the canvas…. [Painting] is to me again a kind of life force, and the forms themselves, while they are hard and crisp and emblematic and so on, to me they are magical and flowing…and go beyond any kind of calculated images…. The forms are alive and have personality….”
Favorite Graces reflects Katzen’s understanding of shape as magical and flowing. The sculpture looks like fluid brushstrokes rendered three dimensionally. It is perhaps the balanced ebb and swell of the form that gives the sculpture its name; if an inanimate object can be graceful, this work surely is.