Current Work

Lisa Fromartz literally makes art from the world. She takes its disparate forms and allows them to coalesce into complex, energetic collectives. In her sculptures and prints, the world speaks in its raucous vernacular of commercial materials, found objects, and printed images. Free-wheeling and improvisatory, these works reflect both abundance and chaos of contemporary life.

For her sculptures, Fromartz takes a dizzying array of the world’s stuff and plays with its possibilities of morphing, colliding, and mysteriously joining up to make something new. There is a nomadic spirit at work here--objects detached from social utility have struck out for a life on the road. With identities set adrift, toys and crutches, fans and spirals, have come together to form emerging, provisional communities. These objects seem to have temporarily alighted, to lightly touch, and experiment with their newfound intimacy.

This work has the look of the future that is now--shiny, playful and light. Fromartz applies the organizing principles of constructivism and collage. Colored plastic sheets, netting, and translucent vinyl all catch the ambient illumination, and then create a phantom sculpture of cast shadows. Transformation rules, and nothing remains the same. With a single cut, a plane corkscrews into three dimensions, while a ventilation hose becomes a curving conduit of space.

Fromartz’s large format digital prints share with her sculptures an essential attitude of openess and serendipity. In the prints, the movement of vision and matter through space remains the artist’s organizing principal. This movement is by turns explosive, springing and sinuous. For all the animation these energies provide, a kind of airy architectonic order prevails, a mathematical intelligence behind all that jazz. The prints originate as multi-media collages, composed of both photographic images and painted paper. Cut-out shapes, suggestive of both tropical plants and the geometry of flight, are locked in sensuous embrace with not-quite-recognizable images. The result is a lively visual choreography, a delirium of picture and pattern, bounding shapes and vivid color.

Lisa Fromartz’s work is celebratory in its exuberance and democratic in its inclusive and scrappy spirit. We witness the freedom with which her diverse forms comingle to create a new reality that is full of a contentious and joyful noise.