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reviews lUIsa lambrI
Luisa Lambri
Thom as Dane Gallery, lonDon
21 novem ber – 21 Decem ber

Untitled (Teatro Regio,
#03), 2007, laserchrome
print, 48 x 40 cm,
edition of 5 + 1aP.
courtesy Fondazione
Teatro regio, Turin

For her first London exhibition, Luisa Lambri has photographed internal of the traditions of the domestic decorative historically associated with
details from modernist architectural masterpieces, abstract and perhaps the female. By choosing such spaces and turning them into ‘portraits’ of
slightly mysterious: Frank Lloyd Wright, Carlo Scarpa and Gerrit Rietveld her own physicality, is Lambri making a comment on this? For sure. She
are all present. By making the shots tight and anonymous, markedly more is presenting a masculine product as a small-scale, closely shot, delicate
so than in any of her previous work, and leaving the building designer absent portrait, using natural light to charge the works with emotion.
from the titles, she avoids the distraction posed by their fame and by the Lastly, Lambri gently plays around with the visual references the
history of the buildings portrayed. The work could be seen as a portrait of buildings are able to provide. She works with film, prints of which are then
Lambri’s physical relationship with the architecture, and by extension a more digitalised, causing a loss of the original’s high level of detail. In the two-
universal human relationship with built space. The restricted parameters work series Rietveld Shroeder House (2006, architecture by Gerrit Rietveld,
of the images offering a truer reflection of how an individual experiences 1924–5), this distortion flattens the form, turning an image of Rietveld’s
a building; not with the wide angle of an architectural portrait, but in the work, a member of the De Stijl group, into an almost visual homage to
detail, as the eye wanders, surveys and concentrates on the peripheral. his contemporary, Mondrian. The simplicity of the imagery, the initial
It’s an impression further supported by the work’s cinematic qualities. abstraction, together with the uncluttered curation of the exhibition
Each is made up of a series of shots taken in quick succession, displaying as a whole, belies Lambri’s intricate, powerful interplay between the
only minute visual differences to its neighbours, like a series of film stills. environmental and the personal. The spectacle of guidebook-approved
This, together with the manner in which the light flows into many of the architecture is cleverly superseded by something more subtle, by something
images through a window or door adds a performative element, the light more ethereal: a beautiful, successfully observed personal relationship
suggesting action just around the corner, accentuating the unseen artist as between the artist, the viewer and the built environment. Oliver Basciano
the lone human presence within the work.
The modernist buildings viewed – all of which were built as
domestic spaces – are minimalist, perhaps even a little stark. They were
built by the traditionally male profession of architecture as a rejection
artreview 120
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