Sculpture

For a number of years the direct inspiration for my work came from the industrial landscape, from machinery. The existent world provides me with a familiar reference, but my desire is to de-familiarize, to question reality, to insist on the difficulty of knowing. This series of sculptures alludes to the contradictions of liberation and technology, progress and chaos. The works suggest an unknown function, a purpose, but serve no evident use.

They also embrace pleasure, the absurd pleasure that springs from a visceral experience of the world, from an openness to the world within which the recognition of danger and death is inherent. Despite the weight of material, my work is an affirmation of freedom, a vision of a weightless gravity.

In 1995 I began a series of smaller works, drawing more directly on the personal, suggesting a more confining space and inviting the viewer to share in intimacy, in memory.

Again the work’s effect rests on contradiction: to seduce, to draw the viewer in, but also to repel. It asks the viewer to hold both positions simultaneously and in so doing to suspend the present moment.

In the most recent work, in the work I propose to continue, my intention is to marry these two directions, and allude to the mythical in life as a lived experience.

My use of materials has also expanded, moving away from steel and concrete, incorporating what are, for me, more unexpected materials, for example: fur, suede, lead, garphite or rubber. I am continuing to do large scale work and experimenting, for the first time, with small pieces in a series entitled For you after midnight.

Liliana Berezowsky was born in Krakow, Poland in 1944. After arriving in Canada as a small child, she completed a degree at the University of Toronto before moving to South America where she lived for six years. 

Two experiences there would influence her work significantly. One was surviving a commercial aeroplane crash as the only one of eleven remaining passengers without serious injury. The other was witnessing oil derricks piercing the earth in the jungle – a riveting contrast of the modern and the primitive with an intense sexual dimension.

Arriving in Montreal on her return to Canada, again displaced, again marginal, without French, without friend, the structures on the rooftops seen from the elevated expressways became her first companions.

She decided to dare to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an artist, completing both her Bachelor and Master Degrees in Fine Arts at Concordia University. 

Her work has always integrated the lived, composted experiences of her life although she has never adopted them into her sculpture directly or by a forced process. Often the emergent allusions provide her with an unexpected surprise. That Jenyk IV, for example, based on the port and the needle trade industries, contained within it references to the dissolution of her marriage, was completely unanticipated.

The Greek myths her father read to her at bedtime, her children, the men who have been part of her life, the contradictions and paradoxes of her lived experience, all have contributed to the expression of her art. 

Liliana has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada and in Berlin. Her work is part of many museum collections: the National Gallery of Canada, the Museums of Fine Art and Contemporary Art in Montreal, the Museums of Quebec, of Joliette, of Lachine among others in Canada. She has also produced a number of public works in Quebec.

Two art catalogues have been published on her work: the first by the Saidye Bronfman Art Center in 1989 and the other by CIAC in 1999. Her work is represented in a number of group catalogues. She also has a page in Anne Newland’s Canadian Art.

She has been teaching part-time at Concordia University since 1988.

Article by Jocelyn Connlly in Espace 96, 2011

Article de Veronica Redgrave in Vies des Arts 221, p.14