Submitted by Leslie Cade on
For Cleveland’s new Art Triennial, FRONT International: An American City, Italian artist Luisa Lambri was invited to produce a site-specific installation at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Working primarily in photography, Lambri studies the relationship between the human condition and the built environment. In her photographs, Lambri invites the viewer to enter a space as she does, feeling both its emotional and physical weight through images of minute details – light streaming through a window or the texture of stone – that create abstract compositions of a moment in time. Her photographs for FRONT feature the museum’s Marcel Breuer building, an iconic example of mid-twentieth century brutalist architecture. The exhibition is on view in the east wing glass box gallery until the end of December.
Ms. Lambri often spends years researching a building or architect. For her installation at the museum, she studied archival images documenting the construction of the Breuer wing. The artist considers the as-built photographs works of art in themselves. “They do document the construction process from beginning to end and offer precious insights into that and that moment in history,” she says, “but are also very sophisticated, beautiful, and often abstract images”. Her enthusiasm for the archival images inspired her to create a special companion exhibition in the Ingalls Library that features two sets of architectural images displayed as individual works, inviting the viewer to see the building in a new way. A third set of images selected and arranged by Ms. Lambri is featured above.
