Mokha Laget: New Perspectives

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Mokha Laget: New Perspectives. These recent iterations of the artist’s shaped canvases inject arcs and arches into their brilliantly colored geometries, a departure from the pure angularity which has characterized much of her previous work. Each painting presents a unique perceptual puzzle alongside a medley of potential solutions in the same moment of observation. They are active and alive, in full sensory dialogue with the perceiver, igniting a flurry of implications and contradictions within the eye and mind.

The considered interplay of color relationships and painted and physical geometric forms imply ambiguous light sources and incompatible perspectives which subvert the expected behavior of volume and space. Strange architectures and suggestions of movement advance and retreat, materialize and then dissolve, as the mind works to resolve the competing stimuli – a conversation between seeing and comprehending that never quite arrives at a straightforward conclusion.

The addition of circular forms creates new possibilities, suggesting the warping of light, rocking motions, and deformations of structure that can only be accomplished by a non-angular shape. The matte surface of the paintings is bound tightly to the underlying canvas, displaying and integrating the natural tooth of the cotton substrate. Light is readily absorbed into this soft texture, intensifying the works’ rich colors and amplifying their spatial relationships by reducing reflective interference. Laget’s paintings are spring-loaded with potential energy, residing within the fleeting spaces between looking and recognition, understanding and uncertainty.

Mokha Laget studied Fine Art at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. There she studied under several prominent members of the Washington Color School and worked as a professional artist and studio assistant to WCS painter Gene Davis. She has exhibited widely, nationally and internationally, for the past 35 years. In 2019, she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. A 2022 retrospective exhibition at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. surveyed the preceding 10 years of her career. Works by Mokha Laget are included in the collections of the Ulrich Museum, the Sheldon Museum, the George Washington University Museum, the University of Texas, the Department of State Art in Embassies Collection, and the National Institutes of Health as well as private and corporate collections around the world. She lives and works in the mountains of New Mexico.