Elad Lassry
303 Gallery
507 W 24 Street
New York NY 10011
tel 212 255 1121
September 12- October 26
303 Gallery is presenting the first exhibition of Elad Lassry’s new work. What is the philosophical location of a picture? Working with images culled from advertising, films, illustrated magazines, and commercial catalogues, Lassry lifts them out of their original contexts, alters them, and radically destabilizes their function. He not only points to the processes of photographic production and reproduction (underscoring the idea that a picture de facto relates to other pictures), but also to the material attributes of the picture as an object. In his rigorously formatted photographs, which never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread, Lassry elaborates on the potential of a photograph to exist as a sculpture. Often displayed in frames that derive their saturated colors from the dominant hues in the pictures, or more recently featuring pleated sheets of 4-ply silk affixed to the frame, his works “stretch” the concept of image-making. Taken as a whole, Lassry’s works create an archive of significations, of images that critically investigate other images, which leads to more elastic ways of articulating representation.
Over the last several years, Lassry has distinguished himself as an outstanding thinker and experimenter within the expanded field of contemporary art. Mining the relationship between traditional modes of analogue production and digital intervention within an unprecedented “blitz” of image proliferation, Lassry has creatively reassessed what it means to make pictures in the post-photographic age. His image-driven, interdisciplinary practice-including photographs, films, sculptures, performances and site-interventions-is positioned within an art historical genealogy that taps the readymade, post-appropriative practices, structuralist filmmaking and relational modes of exhibition display.
In 2014, Lassry’s work will be the subject of a major exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningan in Rotterdam. Solo exhibitions devoted to his work have also been held at The Kitchen, New York; Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Recent group exhibitions include “Film as Sculpture”, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; “Beyond. International Curator Exhibition of Tallinn Month of Photography”, KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; “The Anxiety of Photography”, Aspen Art Museum; “Secret Societies. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence”, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and CAPC de Bordeaux, “Time Again”, SculptureCenter, New York; and “New Photography 2010”, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lassry was born in Tel Aviv in 1977; he lives and works in Los Angeles.
