At OFFSCREEN Lita Albuquerque presents “The Washington Monument Project: The Red Pyramid”, a unique triptych of photographs and a sculpture in copper and pigment, reanimating the artist’s ephemeral performance work in 1980 on the National Mall in Washington, DC. For the International Sculpture Conference the artist’s intervention transmuted the iconographic Washington Monument from a symbol of imperial strength to an ode to a different sort of power: cosmic, spiritual and timeless. A never exhibited vintage slideshow of images of the work and its process complements the presentation, along with documentation and drawings that give a deeper understanding of Albuquerque’s pioneering feminist impact on the history of Land Art.

To create the site-specific work, Albuquerque dug triangular trenches into the earth due West, North and East of the Washington Monument obelisk. She consulted the astrophysicist, Donald Goldsmith for his calculations to geolocate the precise times and locations for the intersections, so that her earth installation would be in perfect alignment with the shadow of the massive structure. She filled the trenches with natural pigment, in a technique she had already begun to use in her landworks in locations including the Mojave desert and the Malibu horizon line, which was recently reconstructed this year.

Lita Albuquerque is a major figure in the Land Art and Light & Space Movements. In 2024 she held a major exhibition at Gallery Patinoire Royale Bach that brought her Land Art indoors for the first time in Europe. She was born in 1946 in Santa Monica, California and spent her childhood in Tunisia, Paris and the US. Among her major recent exhibitions are the Light and Space retrospective at Copenhagen Contemporary Denmark (2021), Groundswell: Women of Land Art, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA (2023), and the Venice Biennale. She represented the United States in the 6th edition of the Cairo biennial, where she won the first prize. She has been awarded MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award along with three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among many other honors. Her works are held in numerous major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA.

Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach represents major contemporary artists including Lita Albuquerque, Alice Anderson, Joana Vasconcelos, and the Estates of Carlos Cruz-Diez and Marthe Wery. In a listed historic building in the Saint-Gilles district in Brussels, it presents monographic exhibitions in its 1000m2 main museum-like central Nave, alongside two other exhibition spaces: the Glass Roof and the Project Room dedicated to invited proposals and emerging artists. The gallery was founded in 2015 by Valérie Bach.