BIENNIAL PROJECT
Farnsworth House / Crown Hall
Luisa Lambri’s photographs of the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe appear to us as distant memories of a former inhabitant. By focusing on the house as a frame for the landscape and letting the building fade away in our peripheral vision, Lambri partially erases the canonical architecture and leaves us with the bits and pieces of life that get captured in its corners. In their abstraction, her images of the Crown Hall, also by the German master, reduce architecture to a series of rhyming lines and soft textures. In her installation at Yates Hall for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Lambri combines these two series of photographs together in a rhythmic sequence that echoes and engages the architecture of the room, creating a new work that departs from Mies’s original intent to insinuate a contemporary and playful leveling of architecture and inhabitation.
BIO
Luisa Lambri is an artist who currently lives in Milan. Her work has been included in the Venice Art Biennale in 1999 and 2003, and in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004 and 2010. Solo exhibitions include the Menil Collection, Houston; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Lambri’s work has been included in thematic exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; the Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; the Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo; Tate Liverpool; and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, among others.
