At 80, artist Lita Albuquerque is queen of the desert with two new shows

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Set us as preferred Artist Lita Albuquerque walks through the Malibu home she and her husband, writer Carey Peck, moved into just weeks ago.White walls and broad windows keep the mountains and ocean in view, while a blue door opens onto an entryway capped by a 24-karat gold-leaf dome.

Below, a circle of polished black granite set within green marble mirrors the dome — a reference to Albuquerque’s 1989 public artwork, “Site, Memory, Reflection,” and to the architecture of her Tunisian childhood.The house took eight years to build on the property where the couple’s previous home burned during the 2018 Woolsey fire, along with Albuquerque’s studio, archive and many of her paintings.The home’s dissolving interior boundary suits an artist who has spent her career questioning where humans fit within the vastness of space and time.Albuquerque, 80, describes her work as examining the limits of human perception and asking what lies beyond.But she is not dwelling on what was lost.“Now I don’t even think about the fire — I mean, at all,” she said.

“Look at this,” she added, gesturing around her.“It is such a different life, and I’m so ecstatic about it.”Albuquerque has much to look forward to.

On Friday, a survey of her work, “Lita Albuquerque: Cosmic Land,” opens at the Palm Springs Art Museum.And on Nov.

14, her installation “The Interval Between Things” opens at A–Z West in Joshua Tree — artist Andrea Zittel’s 80-acre compound that now serves as the headquarters of High Desert Test Sites, a nonprofit presenting experimental, site-specific art.Other projects are also underway.Albuquerque’s painting “Visible Light” (2026) will appear in “80s,” a group exhibition opening Nov.

7 at Des Artistes in Culver City, and she is beginning a project for the Powder Art Foundation at Powder...