Elad Lassry

Education

Lassry attended the California Institute of the Arts for film and visual art. He received his BFA from CalArts in 2003 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2007. At USC, his instructors included Sharon Lockhart and Frances Stark.

Work

Lassry defines his practice as consumed with “pictures” — generic images culled from vintage picture magazines and film archives, redeploying them in a variety of media, including photography, film, drawing and sculpture. Leaving little distance between the commercial and the analytical, he is sometimes described as a post-Pictures Generation artist.

Photography

Starting with popular modes of production such as magazine advertising, he uses silk-screening and photography to revive iconic art-historical arrangements, such as the pairing of mother and child or the arrangement of fruit a conventional still life, disrupting their original harmony with geometric displacements or a palette of bright colours. His chromogenic color prints — still life compositions, photocollages, and studio portraits of friends and celebrities — never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread (35 x 28 cm) and are displayed in frames that derive their colors from the dominant hues in the photographs. For a couple of traditional black-and-white gelatin silver-prints, the frames turn out to be silver.

Films

Lassry often displays his photographs beside 16mm film projections in a continuous loop on the wall. The films are projected according to dimensions similar to the still images on view, allowing them to be seen in the context of the basic photographic image of which each frame is finally composed; in addition, the films are not converted into a digital format and are always presented in their original form. In his silent 35 mm film Untitled (king snake) (2010), Lassry alternates between two different scenes. In the first, a woman — played by the actress Rose Byrne — appears who seemingly converses with another person. In the second, the viewer sees only the woman’s hands, in which a California kingsnake coils itself together.

Performance

In early 2012, Lassry staged a warm-up with dancers from the New York City Ballet at the Hayworth Theater in Los Angeles. In September 2012, he debuted Untitled (Presence) at The Kitchen, an exhibition and corresponding performance under the same title. The performance work featured ten dancers from the American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet interacting with brightly colored moving walls that had cutouts similar to those in the gallery space and on Lassry’s billboard along the High Line. Karen Rosenberg reviewed the exhibition and performance in The New York Times, calling it "seductive and thought-provoking" and stating that "it encouraged you to think about the camera as a choreographer of vision." Tim Griffin, director of The Kitchen, curated the exhibition.

Exhibitions

One year after graduating from the University of Southern California, Lassry mounted a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Film, Video and New Media gallery. The exhibition consisted of two films, Untitled (Agon), 2007 and Zebra and Woman, 2007.

Solo exhibitions of Lassry's work have since been held at, among others, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Tramway, Glasgow. His first major monographic exhibition in the United States, Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views, was on view at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis and subsequently travelled to Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland. In conjunction with the 2010 show Sum of Limited Views, the Kunsthalle Zürich published the exhibition book, Elad Lassry.

At the 54th Venice Biennale, Lassry debuted the film Untitled (Ghost), 2011, along with several photographs in the ILLUMInazioni - ILLUMInations exhibition at the Venetian Arsenale.

For the High Line in 2012, Lassry created an alluring image of two young women, both dressed alike, gazing out of two small portholes into a sea of green.

Collections

Lassry's work is represented in numerous important collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Castello di Rivoli-Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; amongst many others.

Art market

Lassry is currently represented by Massimo de Carlo in Milan, and White Cube in London. As of 2013, he is also represented by 303 Gallery in New York City, as well as Galerie Francesca Pia in Zürich.

Recognition

Lassry was the winner of the 2007 John Jones Art on Paper Award. As part of the prize, Lassry exhibited several works at the 2008 Zoo Art Fair made over the 12-month period after receiving the award. In 2010, he was nominated to the Rencontres d'Arles Discovery Award (France) and exhibited his works.

In 2011, art critic Sarah Schmerler reviewed Lassry's debut exhibition at Luhring Augustine Gallery for Art in America, stating that if, "Elad Lassry hadn't come along at this particular moment in photography's history, theorists would probably have had to invent him." The exhibition opened in October 2010, featuring a large selection of photographs and the film, Untitled (King Snake) (2010).

In 2011, Lassry was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

Literature