The Museum of Geometric and Madi art is proud to present the recent shaped canvases of Mokha Laget. The galleries will feature her unique clay pigment paintings and a series of lithographs the artist created in collaboration with Landfall Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This selection brings together over 25 diverse works offering visitors a rare opportunity to view the evolution of Laget’s work over the last 4 years.
Laget’s geometric abstractions evoke vast landscapes, urban environments and ambiguous interiors, the categorization of which lies beyond conventional interpretation. They engage the viewer to actively explore relations between the shaped canvas, its embedded planes and surrounding architecture. At once sensual in surface color and intellectually playful, her paintings invite the viewer to accept paradox and impossibility as an aesthetic premise.
NY art critic Eleanor Heartney states: “The paintings of Mokha Laget split the difference between… the underlying armature of the world and the shimmering surface that delights our perception… that embraces both order and change in a way that constantly throws the viewer off balance.”
Pulitzer prize winning author Steve Naifeh writes: “What is so astonishing and gratifying about (Laget’s) work is the way that color and shape, each as important as the other, interact to create each painting…her compositions… derive from the shapes of her canvases…(like) Frank Stella, Ken Noland, and other twentieth-century artists who turned away from the traditional quadrangle of most Western painting.”
Mokha Laget was born in Oran, Algeria. At the age of 5 she crossed the Sahara desert and has never stopped traveling since. Through her immersion in multiple cultures, from Japan to Brazil via her native France, Laget has absorbed and synthesized these influences. “My work has been heavily informed by art history and all things from Berber mosaics, contemporary architecture, mountains, African textiles, the desert …I look for what is indefinable and ambiguous, the embedded mystery.”
The artist has participated in numerous group and one-person exhibitions in the US and abroad. She received art training in France followed by a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and a graduate degree in linguistics from Georgetown University (CCI).
Laget has recently been awarded a major commission from the Arts in Embassies program.
She lives and works in an off grid studio in the mountains of New Mexico.
