The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents a new exhibition by Tel Aviv-born, Los Angeles -based artist Elad Lassry. Featuring recent and new works, this exhibition will be the artist’s first major museum monograph in the United States. Open through January 2, 2011.
Lassry’s intimately framed photographs slip effortlessly between genres and iconographies, capturing plastic still-lives, uncanny publicity portraits, collages, animals, and landscapes. Thoroughly familiar and blank at the same time, his images move beyond the simple category of “photography” and instead ask us to revisit the perceptual experience of a picture. Duplicating and then cloistering his subjects within saturated fields of color, excised from their original context, Lassry attends to the singularity of his subjects, while also immersing them in their own formal properties. While clearly depicting specific objects, people, animals, or places, the images are overwhelmed by their own colors, shapes, and patterns, effectively merging their representation with their abstraction.
Lassry’s photographs often slide between stillness and movement‹challenging the eye to register, in certain blinks, fleeting vibrations in the picture. Whether through layered exposures or the staccato rhythm of colors, and between field and ground, his still-lives and portraits possess a seductive, if slippery, hold on our vision.
Sum of Limited Views spotlights the artist’s recent explorations, including several new works, with a focus on Lassry’s capacity to create the “unstill” picture. Combining over thirty photographs with a survey of his 16mm films, Sum of Limited Views presents an overview of an artist’s exploration in making pictures.
Elad Lassry, Woman and Paper Clips, Woman and Pencils, 2009, C-Print, framed Diptych, 12 x 9.75 inches each. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
Elad Lassry is curated by Anthony Huberman and Laura Fried and organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Top image: Elad Lassry, Eggs, 2010, C-Type Print, 14.5 x 11.5 inches, framed. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. The Contemporary’s exhibitions, programming, and operations are member supported and privately funded through contributions from generous individuals, corporations, public funders, and foundations. Additional General Exhibition support is generously provided by the Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Regional Arts Commission; Arts and Education Council; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
www.contemporarystl.org