Lizi Sánchez’s practice reflects on the emergence of modernist abstraction, combining this with references to confectionary brands, party paper chains, and articles of mass consumption. She uses common quotidien ubiquitous items such as packaging or building materials, looking ‘at making and production in a market–driven world where surface, style and presentation seem to be the ultimate end’.
The artist re–purposes these materials, employing handmade processes that ‘imitate, but essentially contrast with those of the mass market and the glossy high–end manufacturing of art production’.
Sánchez is interested in how the often severe and highly serious language of geometric abstract painting has been co–opted and transmuted to commercial ends. Rather than the virtuality of pure abstraction, divorced from material referents, Sánchez maintains a connection to the actual by appropriating her compositions from commercially available sources, often referencing high-end packaging. She takes designs and colour schemes from commercial sources and reproduces them, stripping them in the process of any logo or identifying text. Minus the branding, the original source is rendered unrecognisable – instead they recall their initial inspiration, the abstract language of Modernist painting.