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| Untitled (Whitney Museum of American Art, #01, #02), 2005 Laserchrome print, cm 66 x 74 cm each |
Luisa Lambri | photographs
| Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by Italian photographer Luisa Lambri (Apr 7 - Apr 29, 2006). This exhibition is the first solo exhibition of her work in New York and will feature photographs taken of buildings by Modernist architects such as Luis Barragan, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. The photographs taken in Mexico City, in 2005, continue the work that begun in the late 1990s, when Luisa Lambri started traveling around the globe in search of landmarks of Modernist architecture: mostly private houses. Among the images taken by the artist, there are buildings by architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Giuseppe Terragni, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Oscar Niemeyer, Philip Johnson and several other master architects. What looks at first glance as carefully crafted architectural photography is in fact rather oscillating between an objective representation of these spaces and Lambri's entirely subjective perception and apprehension of them, an interpretation of spaces rather than a document of them. In contrast to the objective image of classic architecture photography that mainly approaches the building from the outside (the facade), Lambri’s photographs have always been taken from within, looking from the inside to the outside, establishing a physical and conceptual position for herself and the viewer. Luisa Lambri’s ephemeral photographs stand in clear contrast to the idea of supposedly everlasting buildings of Modernism. Using her camera as well as new digital printing technologies, the artist appropriates these places in a very abstract manner, capturing her own personal relationship to the architectural structures and spaces. In this exhibition, her photographs of Luis Barragan’s house are a study of one window where the changing position of the shutters dramatically affects the light conditions. The photographs reference minimalism and abstract painting and evoke moments of transcendence. The selective framing and editing of the images pays homage to the Modernist aesthetic and establishes an atmosphere that goes beyond the immediate function of the structure. |
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| Untitled (Whitney Museum of American Art, #01, #02), 2005 Laserchrome print, cm 66 x 74 cm each |
Lambri utilizes her camera as well as new digital printing technologies to move her photographs beyond documentation. In this exhibition, her photographs of Luis Barragan’s house in Mexico City are a study of one window where the changing position of the shutters dramatically affects the light conditions. The photographs reference minimalism and abstract painting and evoke moments of transcendence. Similarly, in her photographs of Konstantin Melnikov’s house in Moscow, built 1927-29, Lambri studies the building’s diamond shaped windows, careful not to affect the space by her presence and allowing for the evidence of the structure’s history. Working in another historic space, the Mandel House in Bedford Hills, New York, by Edward Durell Stone, 1935, Lambri explores the space by examining the various mirrors hung in the house. Mirrors are a different kind of aperture, and by way of the reflections, the viewer is enveloped in the space. Lambri’s selective framing and editing of the images pays homage to the Modernist aesthetic and establishes an atmosphere that goes beyond the immediate function of the structure. Luisa Lambri was born in Como, Italy, in 1969; she currently lives in Milan and travels extensively to make her pictures. Her work has been included in two Venice Biennales, 1999 and 2003 and in Living Inside the Grid at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2003. More recently her work has been seen in The Fluidity of Time: Selections from the MCA Collection, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In 2003 she spent two months working in Rio de Janeiro as part of the artists-in-residence program of the Colecção Teixeira de Freitas. She had a solo exhibition at The Menil Collection in Houston in 2004 and will have a one-person exhibition at The Baltimore Museum of Art in 2007 and at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008. Luhring Augustine -------------Luisa Lambri at Menil House |