Louise Lawler:
The Tremaine Pictures
1984-2007
13/09/07 – 20/10/07
BFAS Blondeau
Fine Art Services
5, rue de la Muse
1205 Genève
Tel. +41 22 544 95 95
Fax +41 22 544 95 99
http://www.bfasblondeau.com
On 24 May 2007, at the upcoming opening of the “QuARTier des Bains” in Geneva, BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services will have the pleasure of presenting, on its premises at 5, rue de la Muse and in cooperation with Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, an exhibition by the American artist Louise Lawler entitled Louise Lawler: The Tremaine Pictures 1984-2007.
Born in 1947 in Bronxville/NY, Louise Lawler lives and works in Brooklyn. A member of the Appropriationist Movement (alongside figures such as Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger), Louise Lawler began her career in the late nineteen-seventies. Photographing works of art, she repositions them by examining both the way in which the public reacts to such works and the place that they occupy in the spatial, social or economic environment. She therefore plays on the contrast between the way that a work of art is conventionally represented and the detail of its presentation. She often focuses less on the work than on its immediate surroundings. This in turn affects our perception of the work, which comes to be defined less by its putative ‘essence’ and more by the context in which it is seen: the collector’s apartment, the museum or the auction house. Over and beyond the issues of representation that her photographs seek to illustrate, Lawler’s work is also that of a visual artist researching space and light to exquisite effect.
We are especially happy to devote a first exhibition to the complete Tremaine Pictures series. For this exhibition, we have assembled 26 photographs (color and black & white) produced between 1984 and 2007, all of them representing works of art that belonged to the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine. The Tremaine brought a well-informed and visionary eye to their collecting between 1945 and 1970. They built a group of over 400 major works including the excellence of American Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art (Warhol, Pollock, Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg …). In 1984, Louise Lawler met Burton and Emily Tremaine and photographed their remarkable collection in situ, in their residences in New York and in Connecticut. Later, she will photograph the same works exhibited in a museum, in 1984, and then, in 1988 and 1991, hung in auction houses.
Louise Lawler’s work has been widely showcased at major solo exhibitions in Europe and the US and the public is able to see her photographs in important art institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago and Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris or the Sprengel Museum of Hannover.
To coincide with the exhibition, we are publishing a 94 pages catalogue reproducing the complete series and enriched by two documented essays. An edition of 100 in black & white will be also available.
For more information, please contact Philippe Davet mailto:philippe@bfasblondeau.com
