YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
NY 10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
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W: www.yanceyrichardson.com
Laura Letinsky Untitled #03, From the Series Ill Form & Void Full, 2011 31.5 x 39.5 Inches, Archival Pigment Print, Edition of 9.
September 6 – October 20, 2012 Reception for the artist, Thursday, September 6, 6-8pm
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Ill Form & Void Full, an exhibition of new photographs by Laura Letinsky. In this new series of still lifes, a genre that has occupied her for 15 years, Letinsky reflects on the temporality of the still life, the self-referentiality of the photographic medium and the mutability of perception. By combining images from her own photographs and those culled from magazines with actual objects, she dissolves the difference between what is real and what is mediated, and between what is flat and what is dimensional. In addition, by using white as a color, the edges of paper as lines, and shadows as planes, Letinsky upends the viewer’ s sense of space and perspective.
The arrangements in Ill Form & Void Full employ two-dimensional elements as sculptural objects, to dizzying effect. Collaged cutouts of food and tableware are pinned, taped or glued onto reproductions of table surfaces or white paper, all of which are placed on the studio wall and actual tabletops, creating a multiplicity of facades that collapse perspective and float in an indecipherable space of light and shadow.
In Untitled #3 (above), reproductions of an orange in a net and a slice of honeydew are placed next to the reproduced image of a platter, on top of which is set an actual half-eaten peach. A reproduction of a curling melon rind and mysterious, flattened swaths of color mingle with these objects. The whole arrangement is set on a white paper, atop a table against the studio wall. The juxtaposition of three-dimensional objects alongside their reproductions conceptually defuses the temporal urgency associated with vanitas. The tension here is rather the play between real and illusory space, and the puzzling implication of dimensionality on a flattened picture plane.
Rooted in the Dutch-Flemish vanitas tradition, Letinsky’s arrangements address the notion of time and the relationship between ripeness and decay; however, they do so by questioning notions of photographic authenticity, and the medium’s capacity to illustrate temporality vis-à-vis form, material, and narrative. As Letinsky states, “My photographs are very much about this medium, its self referentiality…I want an acute tension between what is in the picture – the image, what is name-able – and its status as an object.”
Born in Canada in 1962, Laura Letinsky received her MFA from Yale University in 1991, and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. Ill Form and Void Full was presented as a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in Winter 2012, and a mid-career retrospective will open at the Denver Art Museum in October 2012. Letinsky’s work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Amon Carter Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and the Stuttgart Museum, Germany, among others. Letinsky’ s work has been the subject of three monographs: Venus Inferred (University of Chicago Press), Hardly More than Ever (Renaissance Society), and After All (Grafiche Damiani).
Mary Lum: Small Structures Project Gallery September 6 – October 20, 2012 Opening Reception Thursday, September 6, 6-8 pm
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Small Structures, the inaugural exhibition at the gallery for artist Mary Lum. The exhibition comprises a series of small-scale photographs and acrylic based collage works on paper, hung end to end in a line encircling the project gallery space.
Influenced by the Situationist International movement and Guy Debordʼs concept of psycho-geography, Lumʼs interdisciplinary practice uses the urban environment as a foundation from which to explore geometric abstraction, perspectival space, and color field. Photographs of city streets and alleys, signage and storefronts are fragmented and stripped of their loci within Lumʼs layered, often disorienting arrangements of color and line.
The collages combine excised fragments from comic books, photographs, and planes of bright color in varying combinations that allude to the transitory state of urban space. Lum ʼ s esthetic stretches and expands perspectival space and then collapses it into dense layers of color and pattern. Writing for ArtForum on the occasion of a 2009 exhibit, Emily Hall states that “the combination turns out to be breathtaking, full of the movement of time and space…But these spaces are more than physical: They are metaphorical, psychological, temporal. Here is modernism ʼs orderly progression upended by Escherʼs splendid illogic.”
Six paintings by Lum are currently on display in the exhibition Invisible Cities at MASSMoCA, in North Adams, MA, through February 3, 2013.
Mary Lum was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan and her MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study (2004-2005), and a McDowell Colony Fellowship (2012). She is a professor of painting and drawing at Bennington College, in Bennington, VT.
KUNST HALLE SANKT GALLEN presents David Renggli - Scaramouche
17 August - 27 October 2013
David Renggli - in some respects a prodigy of the Swiss art scene - has repeatedly aroused the curiosity of the public for more than ten years thanks to a unique mixture of themes and forms, of spectacle, humour and poetry.
The Showroom, London presents Ricardo Basbaum: re-projecting (london)
12 July - 17 August 2013
The Showroom is delighted to present re-projecting (london), a major new commission by Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum, and the first significant presentation of his internationally renowned artwork in the UK.
