Laura Letinsky: To Want for Nothing at Brancolini Grimaldi in Rome
Until December 13, 2009
The gallery has the pleasure to announce a new project of Laura Letinsky’s work, which has been commissioned on site in Rome, Italy. During one month this past spring, the Canadian artist photographed tabletops in historic and elegant Roman palazzi. These new still lives will be presented in an exhibition of Laura Letinsky’s work, alongside other recent projects: “The Dog and the Wolf” and “Fall”.
Laura Letinsky's elegiac photographs of detritus on a table-top are both elegantly prosaic and art historically resonant in their reference to Dutch vanitas still life painting of the Seventeenth Century.
This dialogue with painting is an important aspect Letinsky's photographs. As the artist has explained:
"It's so important for me that the photographs hover between being painterly - in the sense of light, colour, composition and plasticity - and being insistently photographic. They're photographs on photographic paper; they're made with the camera, they aren't digital effects. I'm really interested in the plasticity of photography and the way one reads it - like 'How can that be possible? That must be digital!' But no, it's not digital. Photography is like painting; it's an incredibly plastic medium."
Ranging from domestic setting to studio staging, Letinsky's still lifes are both everyday and infused with significance. Lyrical and formal, the subjects are dissolved by light, often set off against white walls and table cloths.
I explore formal relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plentitude, pleasure and sustenance.
Laura Letinsky is a Professor and Chair at the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts. Museum and gallery exhibitions include Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Casino Luxembourg; Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Nederlands Foto Institute; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Publications include Now, Again, Galerie Kusseneers, 2005, Hardly More Than Ever, The Renaissance Society, 2004, Eating Architecture, MIT Press, 2004, Blink, Phaidon Press, 2002, and Venus Inferred, University of Chicago Press, 2000. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.
Recent shows include To Say It Isn’t So, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY, Dirty Pretty Things, Brancolini-Grimaldi Gallery, Rome, Italy, Interiority, Hales Gallery, London, and Allusive Moments, Rena Branstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Letinsky received her B.F.A. from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and her MFA from Yale University 1991. She has received support from the Richard Driehaus Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the Canada and the Manitoba Arts Council. yanceyrichardson.com
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