Elad Lassry
Opening Reception: October 29th, 6 - 8pm
Book Signing: October 30th, 4 – 6 pm
Luhring Augustine is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of new work by Elad Lassry. This exhibition will feature photographs as well as unique works, and will also debut a 35mm film.
Throughout his oeuvre, Lassry is persistent in his exploration of the status of the picture in the 21st century. His visually complex pictures are at once present and elusive, familiar and alien. Lassry investigates the opposing pictorial realms of the analog and the digital to create a tension that unfolds within the photographic space.
In his staged photographs, collages made from found material, and intimately crafted films, Lassry employs seemingly mundane subject matter such as publicity shots, portraits of animals, nondescript landscapes, and still lifes of vegetables. The artist liberates each image from its existing visual history by negating origin, authorship and intentionality. At once disquieting and mesmerizing, Lassry’s compositions are emptied of their associations and compel the viewer to consider a new conceptual space for the picture.
Lassry’s new 35mm color film, the format typically used for theatrical projections, reduces the cinematic to an intimate scale that highlights the physicality of film as a succession of pictorial frames. The camera’s lingering shot alternates between a woman and a California King Snake; this methodological treatment of the subjects shifts between a structuralist approach and that of an instructional film. Presented in the same context as his photographic work, the film serves as two interchangeable portraits that provide a relational narrative devoid of resolution.
Elad Lassry (b.1977, Tel Aviv, Israel) has exhibited extensively in major international institutions and solo exhibitions of his work were recently presented at Kunsthalle Zurich, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and The Art Institute of Chicago. His first major monographic exhibition in the United States, Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views, is currently on view at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis. Lassry’s work is also featured in the current group exhibitions New Photography 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and At Home/Not at Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Lassry currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
In conjunction with this exhibition, the gallery will host an artist’s book signing of Lassry’s exhibition catalogue from his solo show at the Kunsthalle Zurich.