Art as a Universal Language: Mokha Laget, One of the Only Women in Geometric Abstraction

CONTAINER is thrilled to announce the opening of Mokha Laget : Perceptualism. The exhibition will kick off with a public opening on March 31 from 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m., and will run through May 15, 2023.

The Laget exhibition is coming to CONTAINER fresh from its success at Washington, DC’s American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, and featured more than 40 works by Laget and was curated by Kristen Hileman. The exhibition ran earlier this year to great acclaim, including a glowing review in Art and Antiques.

“Laget’s art is incredibly significant historically,” said CONTAINER and Turner Carroll Gallery co-founder Tonya Turner Carroll. “She was Washington Color School painter Gene Davis’ most trusted studio assistant toward the end of his life, and carried out many of his final compositions. Though she is much younger than the Color School artists, she carries this important legacy into contemporary art as a bridge between the past and future. Laget’s innovative folds and juxtapositions of color add a female perspective to an otherwise male-dominated genre of painting.”

The exhibition title, Perceptualism, is a playful nod to the experience of standing in front of one of Laget’s shaped canvas paintings. Laget studied traditional geometric abstraction as a studio assistant to Washington Color School painter Gene Davis, and takes advantage of our natural inclination to wrestle representation from art objects. Laget plays with expectations, holding the viewer on a knife’s edge between clarity and abstraction, and engaging with the viewer’s perceptions. The diagonal lines that cut through her paintings are like the underdrawings of Renaissance masterworks, giving a sense of distance and movement. Her constructions fold back in on themselves, taking vanishing points to a seemingly logical conclusion, while simultaneously looping back to the viewer in Escher-esque puzzles. Space is bent and overlapped in a dream-like fashion.

Perceptualism, in the philosophical sense, centers on the “truth value” of what we perceive, often through emotions. Perceptualists claim that our feelings connect to truth and are objective, real-world experiences. The assertion that our subjective realities hold significance is a fitting one for Laget’s exhibition. Like Rorschach tests, each viewer is apt to see their own truth in the rise and fall of the precise lines. Laget’s palette and architectural linework speak to her childhood in North Africa, and her current residence in an off-grid studio outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Her commodious, vast configurations stem partly from Laget’s extensive travel; her worldview is a global one. Laget obtained her BFA in Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC There she studied under several prominent members of the Washington Color School, an influential non-objective painting group whose principal members included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, and Paul Reed. With an additional degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, she has also spent part of the last 25 years traveling throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe as a French interpreter and translator.

Her commodious, vast configurations stem from Laget’s extensive travel; her worldview is a global one. Laget obtained her BFA in Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC There she studied under several prominent members of the Washington Color School, an influential non-objective painting group whose principal members included Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, and Paul Reed. With an additional degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, she has also spent part of the last 25 years traveling throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe as a French interpreter and translator.

Mokha Laget has exhibited internationally over the past 30 years and has been featured in Art in America, The New Art Examiner, The Washington Post, and Art Ltd., among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Ulrich Museum, Harnett Museum, George Washington University, Museum of Geometric and MADI Art, US Department of State, National Institutes of Health, and numerous private and corporate collections around the world.