Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In her creekside cabin in Malibu, Lita Albuquerque is waiting for the dawn. She comes here in the peace of early morning to make drawings and sometimes write, and after a set of energetic meditations that help connect her to the land and sun.\u00a0So far, so Californian. But, for the 79-year-old artist, the ritual has a deeper purpose. Since she came to prominence as part of the light & space and land art movements that arose in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles, the Earth\u2019s surface has been her canvas and material; her work a means of engaging with the cosmos and our place within it.\u201cThere\u2019s no way I would make this kind of art if I lived in New York or Paris or London,\u201d Albuquerque says. \u201cIt\u2019s very much about the kind of space we have here.\u201d She describes for me the birds outside the cabin, her view of the mountains. Behind her, the long leathery leaves of an oleander tree press close against the glass. \u201cI\u2019ve always made sure I live in nature.\u201dInterventions in nature, using rocks, soil or sand that she \u201cenlivened\u201d with pigment, made Albuquerque\u2019s name. \u201cMalibu Line\u201d (1978), for instance, was a vivid ultramarine trench that seemed to yoke together ocean, earth and sky. For \u201cRock and Pigment\u201d (1978), meanwhile, she placed coloured rocks on a dry lake bed in the Californian desert, in alignment with and matching the colours of the stars. (That stars have different colours \u2014 who knew! \u2014 is one of many cosmological nuggets with which Albuquerque matter-of-factly laces our conversation.)There\u2019s no way I would make this kind of art if I lived in New York or Paris or London. I\u2019ve always made sure I live in natureToday, those same elemental materials remain a hallmark of her work, which in the intervening half-century has travelled beyond the California wilderness to far-flung locales such as Antarctica. There, for her piece \u201cStellar Axis\u201d (2006), Albuquerque fixed 99 blue fibreglass spheres to an ice shelf in 110mph winds, mapping the constellations above the South Pole.Her newest work, however, will be installed very close to home: in the gardens of the Frieze LA fair as part of Inside Out, a presentation by Art Production Fund, a non-profit dedicated to commissioning public art projects. She conceived of the piece \u2014 a coloured boulder \u2014 many months ago but has recently renamed it \u201cTurbulence\u201d, in response to the wildfires.When we meet, she hasn\u2019t yet found quite the right boulder: \u201cI want the height of a person, to give it some kind of scale.\u201d She is drawn to simple forms, she says, \u201cbecause I make ephemeral art and what remains is the trace. Pure forms, pure colour, pure geometry, they stay in your mind. Like Malevich with his \u2018Black Square\u2019. It\u2019s really about perception.\u201d\u00a0Perception was everything to the light & space and land art movements, when artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Walter De Maria and James Turrell sought to create situations or installations that made the viewer acutely aware of sensory experience. Unlike her male contemporaries, however, for whom huge, everlasting, often baroque statements were king, Albuquerque\u2019s interventions have tended to be light-touch and impermanent. Most were unmade by rain, wind or plant growth long ago. In a cruel instance of life imitating art, in 2018, Albuquerque\u2019s long-term base in Malibu burnt to ash in the Woolsey wildfire, robbing her of the home in which she and husband Carey Peck (son of actor Gregory) had raised their three children as well as her studio and archive. She also lost precious heirlooms, including recordings of her Tunisian grandmother singing the ancient Andalusian music malouf, and manuscripts for her mother\u2019s plays, which were performed in 1930s Paris.The shock of it temporarily unmoored Albuquerque. \u201cWhere do I go from here? Either as a human, or as an artist. It was absolutely horrifying; it\u2019s never far from my consciousness.\u201d On the day that we speak, amid the wildfires, Malibu is expecting 80mph winds: \u201c[environmental catastrophe] is no longer a rarity, it\u2019s a reality\u201d. Lately, though, she has felt filled with a new energy \u2014 and it shows. In the past two years she has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, in Brussels and as part of the Getty\u2019s Pacific Standard Time project. She also remade \u201cMalibu Line\u201d on her property, where she and Peck are rebuilding their home \u2014 which was cathartic.\u00a0Albuquerque was born in LA in 1946, where her diamond dealer father owned a jewellery store in Beverly Hills. He met her mother F\u00e9rida (pen name Fred Harlen) aboard the ship she escaped Tunis in the 1940s on, and lived with her and his wife in a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois. When Albuquerque was five months old, the relationship broke down and her mother returned to Tunisia, where Albuquerque grew up in a convent boarding school overlooking the ruins of ancient Carthage and the Mediterranean. \u201cThere were these marble columns, I thought of them as sentinels, and the information and history the stone contained. That\u2019s always been a powerful image for me.\u201d\u00a0When she was 11, they returned to California, where she later studied art history at UCLA. Of far more influence, however, was meeting light & space artist Robert Irwin (\u201cI wasn\u2019t even one of his students, but he liked to come to the studios and talk. It was important to him to share his ideas, and that\u2019s what I ate, like plums\u201d) and seeing JMW Turner paintings at the Tate Gallery in London (\u201ca revelation in terms of expression and light\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009It was the first time that I started thinking abstractly\u201d).\u00a0In her twenties, she lived at The Property, a Malibu artists\u2019 colony populated by painters, musicians, poets, screenwriters and actors. She married her first husband there, the late photographer and flamenco guitarist Steve Kahn. \u201cIt was an amazing time of creativity and togetherness. The land had this sweet energy, and a trail so high that when you looked out at the ocean you could see the curvature of the Earth. That\u2019s when I started to think about perception.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0She and Kahn moved to a studio in Venice Beach, where light & space was taking shape: \u201cI was surrounded by the Venice boys, part of that incredible moment,\u201d she says. \u201cJim [Turrell] was making his Mendota Hotel series [1966] a block away, but I don\u2019t think any of us thought of it as a career then; it was just a lot of experimentation.\u201d\u00a0Last year, Albuquerque was one of 12 artists featured in the landmark exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, which shifted the focus of that notoriously male-dominated movement towards the women working successfully \u2014 if less ostentatiously \u2014 among them. Was it a very macho scene? \u201cAs women, we were both considered and not considered. But there weren\u2019t that many of us, and I think at that time I wasn\u2019t paying attention to whether we were being ignored. I mean, I knew we were, but the work was more important to me.\u201dSuch can-do grit might be said to have fuelled Albuquerque\u2019s entire career. When she hit on the idea for \u201cStellar Axis\u201d, for instance, no one had ever made an ephemeral artwork in Antarctica before. \u201cThere was no way of even going there,\u201d she tells me, \u201cbut eventually I found out the National Science Foundation gives grants, and then I met an astronomer who had been there for a year, and he gave me all kinds of tips.\u201d Flying in on a tiny military plane, \u201cI felt like I was with Nasa.\u201d She was 60 at the time.\u00a0Twenty years on, Albuquerque is in fine form. She swims in the ocean most days, is working on a film with her daughter Jasmine, a dancer, and contemplating a third \u201cMalibu Line\u201d in Tunisia. \u201cIt\u2019s always extraordinary to see where inquiry will take me,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s something I get from Robert Irwin: to think of the inquiry as a plough and what comes off it as the art. But the important thing is always the inquiry.\u201d\u00a0February 20-23, Santa Monica Airport, frieze.comFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In her creekside cabin in Malibu, Lita Albuquerque is waiting for the dawn. She comes here in the peace of early morning to make drawings and sometimes write, and after a set of energetic meditations that help connect her to the land and sun.\u00a0So<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":204930,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-204929","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204929"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204931,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204929\/revisions\/204931"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}