Luisa Lambri’s first exhibition at Parra & Romero presents an overview of the artist’s practice emphasizing her interest in both architecture and sculpture.
The exhibition features recent photographs of buildings designed by Marcel Breuer and Álvaro Siza, two architects known for their sculptural approach to architecture. In addition, a group of photographs of sculptures by Donald Judd and Nancy Holt will be on view. Similarly to Lambri, all four made the interplay between materiality, light, and space a key subject in their work.
Focusing on the immersive experience of encountering an environment or artwork, Lambri’s photographs do not produce a representational image of a building or sculpture. Rather her exploration of space results in abstract images that are simultaneously reductive and refined. Her minimal works often highlight lines and grids featuring a notably subtle spectrum of colors.
Frequently working in series, Lambri isolates details such as corners and windows, and different qualities of light, to create personal and intimate impressions of space.
For over two decades, Lambri has looked at the history of modernist architecture as a starting point for her work. The buildings are never depicted in the style of classic architectural photography but are deconstructed through the personal gaze of the artist.
The Met Breuer series was commissioned by this museum in 2017, when it opened its new venue designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966. In these photographs, Lambri focuses on the specific dialogue between the interior and exterior of Breuer’s building and the interplay of light and space, form and volume. In 2008 Lambri photographed Álvaro Siza’s Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (1993) in Santiago de Compostela. The resulting works reveal a profoundly poetic side of the otherwise stark and austere building.
Donald Judd’s 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (1982–86) in Marfa, Texas, attracted Lambri in 2012 due to its austerity and its constantly altered appearance in the harsh desert light. Lambri plays with its multifaceted reflections and its occupation with and references to architecture.
Lambri’s series Untitled (Sun Tunnels) (2012) was photographed in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, taking as its subject Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76). It consists of four concrete cylinders arranged on the desert floor to align with sunrise and sunset on the summer and winter solstices, and which every dawn and dusk create ever-changing light and shadow plays.
The display of her photographs is a quintessential part of Lambri’s work. Her meticulous installations allow the artist to further connect the two-dimensionality of photography with the three-dimensionality of space and sculpture.
Born in Como, Italy, in 1969, Lambri currently lives in Milan. She studied in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Milan and received her Ph.D. from the Department of Visual Arts, Music, and Theater, University of Bologna. Since late 1990s her works have been exhibited around the world including solo exhibitions at Met Breuer, New York (2017), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010),Baltimore Museum of Art (2007), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2006), Menil Collection, Houston (2004), and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK (2000). Lambri’s work has been presented as part of a number of large scale international group exhibitions such as 1st Cleveland Triennial (2018), the 2nd Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), the 12th and 9th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010 and 2004), the 9th Shanghai Biennial (2012), the 4th Liverpool Biennial (2008), and the 50th and 48th Venice Biennale of Visual Art (2003 and 1999). A forthcoming survey exhibition at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, will open in June 2020.
