L, an artist whose sculptures and paintings imbued galleries and museums across the US with spiritual potential, has died. ARTnews was unable to confirm a cause of death for L, whose passing was announced this week by various galleries that had shown the artist’s work.
The Los Angeles–based artist would have been either 41 or 42.
In exhibitions staged by art world institutions ranging from Documenta to the Getty Center, L showed work that had an explicitly spiritual purpose. The artist created sculptures consisting of objects suspended in mineral oil, which they described as “spells.”
A spiritual practitioner as well as an artist, L meant for these works to help their viewers reach a higher state. In 2019, a Marlborough Gallery exhibition came with a press release that noted that L’s spells had “become more about helping others achieve states of being—and the ultimate state is perhaps enlightenment.”
The sculptures, which were also exhibited at galleries such as 56 Henry and the Ranch, were greeted with a mix of admiration and befuddlement due in part to the works’ titles. When L showed their art in a Los Angeles shop operated by controversial collector Stefan Simchowitz, one critic wrote for Hyperallergic that the works “contain a twinge of sadness, filled not only with their respective quotidian objects, but with the latent weight of their prospective owner’s anxieties and unfulfilled desires, ready to be tapped into and profited from.”
L was born under the name Jason Metcalf in 1984 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a Mormon family. According to a release for L’s 2023 show at 56 Henry in New York, L was a triplet alongside their siblings Jenny and Nathan, the latter of whom “visited Earth for one month before transitioning to aetherial realms.” The 56 Henry release said that L was neurodivergent because of birth complications, and that “the triplets see themselves as gifted—as oracles—with abilities to see, do, and know things that are beyond what can be quantified or contained.”
After completing high school, L took a scholarship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. In that city, they began staging such early works as Original Skin, a performance involving a 20-foot-long latex tube, which the artist moved through while painted in red. In 2008, speaking to 15 Bytes, a Utah-based art magazine, they described the work as a “baptism” and a “narrative about birth, exploring the relationship between me, my sister and brother.”
They returned to Utah and completed their education at Brigham Young University. Gradually, they gained notice in that state for shows such as one staged in 2013 at Salt Lake City’s Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, where they exhibited objects such as a jar of pennies and a lime with a nail driven through it.
“When an individual knowingly recreates or re-enacts a particular legend or myth as a kind of forgery, such singularities effectively become real through their physicalization,” L said in the release for the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art show. “The subsequent belief by a third party that these actions are the real-life manifestation furthermore becomes proof of the myth or legend’s reality.”
L, Spell to witness the origins of creation, 2023.
Courtesy 56 Henry
After attending LA’s Mountain School of Arts in 2013, their career started to take off, and in 2015, they became the first to show at JOAN, a closely watched LA alternative space founded by Summer Guthery, Gladys-Katherina Hernando, and Rebecca Matalon. One work involved casting a spell on the building by enacting a prompt: “To cleanse a new home, sweep the place in its entirety, at highnoon, and dispose all of the debris and dust into an outer wall of the structure. Then burn the broom and also place the ashes of it in the same wall where the dust was put. The final thing to do is to seal it all up in the wall with fresh plaster.”
That same year, L also had a show at Martos Gallery in New York that they named after Kolob, the star closest to God in the Mormon tradition. The exhibition featured paintings of starbursts that seemed to contain an obviously religious character, which was then a rarity for art shown in New York galleries. One Artforum reviewer noted that the paintings were “not cynical works.” The year afterward, with Naomi Larbi and Grace McGrade, L founded A.S.T.R.A.L.O.R.A.C.L.E.S., which billed itself as “an open source community dedicated to the full frequency alignment of astral and terrestrial body.”
By 2016, when L was profiled for Frieze, the artist had begun to use the name Lazaros, meaning “helped by God.” Then, by the time their work was shown at Documenta 15 in 2022, they had begun going only by L.
At Documenta, L exhibited work at the invitation of Atis Rezistans, a Haiti-based group also known as Ghetto Biennale that the artist had long worked with. The collective’s contribution to the famed art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, featured one of L’s spells, this one containing circuitry and wiring. The piece’s title was Vessel to honor and express gratitude to Atis Rezistans + Ghetto Biennale community members’ extraterrestrial and inter-dimensional entities, spirits, and holaetherial beings.
