One of the many reasons artists like Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, and other mid-20th-century pioneers of painterly abstraction were so innovative for their time is the use of the deliberate yet loose brushstroke. Pollock intuitively dribbled and splattered paint on surfaces spread across the floor of his studio, and Kline created bold, monochromatic paintings with just a few deceptively simple, gestural strokes of a large brush. It’s this visceral approach to visual rhythms and color that continues to awe us today. (A major retrospective highlighting both Krasner and Pollock’s work is slated for The Met later this year.)

For artist Liza Lou, the calculation of brushstrokes, color, and gesture opens the door to another media type altogether—beads. The artist is known for using the material, including a large-scale installation titled “Kitchen,” which took five years to create. In her recent work, she adds thousands of the diminutive baubles in myriad colors, shapes, and sizes to sweeps of oil paint on canvas. Tapping into the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, Lou parses the relationship between gesture, intention, organic forms, and the brushstroke as a subject unto itself.

Lou’s works appear this month in FAQ, a solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac. The title references questions that the artist returns to again and again in her practice. When does a painting become not a painting? Can a brushstroke be more than a brushstroke? “These works are about amplification—about making things more ideal,” Lou says. “There’s a poem by Fernando Pessoa where he writes about wanting flowers to be more flowers than flowers, and in this body of work I’m using my material as a way to make paint more paint than paint.”

Unlike a quick swipe of a brush, each bead is meticulously placed amid a field of others, creating a chromatic topography. Lou likens them to painting “straight-out-of-the-tube,” except that they can’t be mixed on the canvas. She relies on color relationships, textures, and precise placement to give the impression that, from a distance, the loose strokes and splatters have blended or merged. When viewed up close, we see distinct, saturated topographies that, in a rather macro sense, are delightfully sculptural with the soft ground of painted details underneath. “My process involves this improv where every stroke requires everything I have, my full attention,” Lou says. “Every mark becomes this kind of violin-crescendo-holy shit-experience.”

FAQ opens on April 10 and continues through May 23 in London. See more on Lou’s Instagram.

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There are thousands upon thousands of types of mold out there. Some you can eat—think the rind on a wheel of brie or a gray fungus known as “noble rot” that gives certain types of grapes an extra sweet flavor for dessert wines. But there are plenty we shouldn’t eat, and when that loaf of bread in the cupboard begins to turn blue-green, it’s definitely time to chuck it in the bin. For Kathleen Ryan, the myriad colors and textures of mold continue to inspire larger-than-life sculptures of fruit and other foods that, in a way, preserve decay.

Ryan’s oversized works are characterized by their textural finishes, often using salvaged metal and other materials in addition to an array of colored beads and semiprecious stones to achieve the effects of layered fungi and rot. Recent works such as “Bad Lemon (Slice of Paradise)” and “Screwdriver” nod to the realm of cocktails and, by extension, the notion of luxury and even vacations—concepts that somewhat sour within the context of an increasingly vulnerable economy.

Juxtaposing stones ranging from amethyst and azurite to turquoise and tourmaline with salvaged metal from vintage cars, Ryan’s sculptures evoke an array of associations. She has previously likened their over-the-top scale to the roadside attractions tourists might see along Interstate highways, such as giant doughnuts and other foods and animals.

Like a geode that doesn’t look like much from the outside, works like “Bad Lemon (Slice of Paradise)” have two very different personalities, where the metal exterior lets on little about what’s inside. Ryan taps into our appreciation of hidden beauty when opening up an ancient, crystallized stone while simultaneously suggesting the grotesqueness of opening a peach, for example, only to find it rotten inside.

Some of the works seen here were recently on view at Karma in New York, and you can find more on Ryan’s Instagram.

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