I don’t know how to offer criteria for a “bookish” painting, but I know one when I see it.– Nick Irvin (from Tape Notes)5b and Theta are delighted to announce A landscape shredded, the first book devoted to the work of New York-born and based artist, Molly Rose Lieberman. Working across painting, sculpture, poetry – and moonlighting as a museum archivist – Lieberman moves freely between objective systems and expressive invention. Pre-formats lay foundations for the artist to explore textures, colours, shapes, and energies that are built through unique rules she crafts to move compositions forward. Sometimes works are built around previously used frames, utilised conventionally or as sites for transmutation. Observations drawn from life – a passerby’s posture, a handwritten sign – become catalysts for emerging forms. What surfaces are works that hold both structure and drift, each becoming a strangely romantic container for time, place, and process.This book arose from a refusal to summarise Lieberman’s work through broad terms such as ‘abstraction’ or ‘collage’, and from a shared delight in the layered, often circuitous stories of how her works come into being: recounting how a painting was carried daily on a dolly to a park so it could be spray-painted in dialogue with a shoe that inspired its palette, or how a cold-wax and oil painting of two figures evolved from the handwritten phrase, ‘Coffee is the devil’. A landscape shredded takes these anecdotes seriously. At its core is an index: a catalogue of process, reference, and association that resists linear explanation.The publication brings together 37 works made over the last eight years, including new paintings from Lieberman’s 2026 exhibitions in Glasgow and New York, which coincide with the UK and US book launches. Works are accompanied by layered commentary: from the artist herself; from Joel Dean, who has previously written about Lieberman’s work; and from Theta director Jordan Barse, sometimes in the professional register of her dealer, sometimes in the more intimate, anecdotal voice of someone who cannot help referring to the artist as ‘Molly’ when describing the wallpaper above her bed.A landscape shredded offers an entry into the fragments, references, and lived moments that shape Lieberman’s practice, with two original texts by Nick Irvin and Molly Rose Lieberman framing the book as both records and extensions of her way of working.
