Strolling through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Liz Larner discusses her interest in separating color from form in her sculptural work. Using Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith’s large-scale geometric piece Smoke (1967) as a starting point, Larner shares her personal love for the sculpture, currently installed in the atrium of the museum’s Ahmanson Building. “Just to see what sculpture can do,” says the artist, “this I think is probably one of the greatest examples of that ever.”

Smith’s work functions as both an investigation of abstracted geometric forms and an activation of the spatial voids surrounding the piece. Larner sees her own work as a continuation of this idea, with one notable difference: color.

“Color, it’s such a huge part of our perception,” says the artist, “so to be able to use it as a material and make it work volumetrically…is something that’s very interesting to me.” Larner’s approach is especially evident in her 2010 sculpture 6, filmed while on view at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. “There doesn’t have to be an equivalency between volume, mass, and density.”