Lila Katzen

Lila Katzen was discouraged from continuing her study of sculpture by her professor at Cooper Union, who told her that she must be a painter because she “wanted things to happen too quickly”[2] Katzen's paintings were abstract, semi-figurative works, in which she took certain aspects from the figure and related them to a spatial concept.

Eventually, feeling restricted by even the semi-transparent nylon, Katzen started to paint on acrylic sheets in the late 1950s.

[5] Katzen's experiments and discoveries led her to construct Light Floors, exhibited at the Architectural League in New York City in 1968.

Reflectiveness, transparency, emission, and the transformation from spatial to temporal coordinates is situated.’ The result is that ‘arbitrariness and effect are canceled out.”[6] Katzen continued to use light as a medium in The Universe is the Environment (1969) and Liquid Tunnel, an octagonal tunnel that featured fluorescent light shown through water, which played with the variations of optics and the similarities of liquids and solids.

[7] In the early 1970s, completely immersed in and known for her sculptures, Katzen created some of her best-known works, such as Slip Edge Bliss (1973) and Trajho (1973).

"[8] Starting with thin sheets of metal foil, Katzen would manipulate and fold the material with her fingers, transforming the cold steel with human sensuality.

Katzen also designed her sculptures to relate to the site of the work while withstanding and encouraging human interaction, a direct contrast to the Minimalist aesthetic that was so prevalent in the 1960s.

Whereas her best-known sculptural work begun in the 1970s was characterized by smooth, sinuous, rounded curves often described as "lyrical," in the early 1990s, she produced a new body of work whose pieces consisted of welded sharp and jagged pieces of steel described by one writer as "harsh and aggressive," representing a fragmented and fragile culture.

[14] Another exhibition of later work was "Lila Katzen: Force I Sculptures and Drawings" at the Ulrich Museum of Art in the Fall of 1995.

In an article released in conjunction with the exhibition "Lila Katzen: Force I Sculptures and Drawings", Dana Self, Curator of Exhibitions, noted, "The past sculptures, while stylistically and contextually aggressive, were often smooth, sinuous, gently rounded and looping steel shapes that demonstrated her adherence to canons of beauty such as the notion that is lyrical and graceful.