NYAB Event - Luisa Lambri "Certain Variables"

Luisa Lambri "Certain Variables"

Luhring Augustine Gallery

This event has ended.

Luhring Augustine presents "Certain Variables", an exhibition of work by Italian artist Luisa Lambri; this will be her third solo exhibition with the gallery. These works are part of a larger series of photographs made in Southern Californian houses designed by architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph M. Schindler, John Lautner and Richard Neutra. Some of the photographs were previously included in her recent solo exhibition Being there at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. For this exhibition, the artist will debut several previously unseen works from the same series.

Since the start of her career, Lambri has focused almost exclusively on photographing modernist residential buildings. Lambri’s personal relationship to the buildings she photographs is evident in her highly poetic and abstract pictures; each work embodies her psychological response to the space she encounters. She deconstructs architecture by focusing on details such as corners, doors, or windows. Windows are a particular point of interest for her as they are the conduits for light affecting both the buildings and their inhabitants. Lambri’s attention to perceptual phenomena such as light, space, scale and volume reflect her shared concerns with the Light and Space movement of 1960s Southern California. At that time artists such as Robert Irwin and Larry Bell created a form of minimalism that pushed the viewer’s experience beyond the everyday limits of perception to propose a nearly phenomenological condition.

Certain Variables refers to the continuous cycle of change that affects our perception and experience of every building we encounter. Architectural structures appear to be relatively static, but we never experience them in the same way twice. Examples of Lambri’s examination of these cycles of change are her photographs of a single skylight in Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein House. Taken over several months, these pictures poetically capture how her relationship to the space is in constant transformation. The way in which these works relate to the gallery space is also unique and different from the way in which they would be arranged in any other space. Lambri's work represents an archetypical struggle: the desire to retain a constant identity while longing to transform and be open to the influences around her in order to progress.

A small catalog will be published on the occasion of this exhibition.

Luisa Lambri was born in Como, Italy, in 1969; she currently lives in Los Angeles.

[Image: Luisa Lambri "Untitled (Sheats-Goldstein House, #01)" (2007) Laserchrome print 32 5/8 x 26 5/8 in.]