The Photography Show, presented by AIPAD
April 25 – 28, 2024
Throughout her career, Laura Letinsky has engaged with the fundamental question of what precisely constitutes a photograph. Investigating photography’s relationship with reality, Letinsky began by photographing people but shifted to focusing almost exclusively on objects in the form of the still life. Her large-scale, carefully crafted scenes often focus on the remnants of a meal or party, as she plays with ideas about perception and the transformative qualities of the photograph.
For one of her earlier, long-term series, Hardly More Than Ever (1997-2004), Letinsky arranged and photographed leftover food and used crockery, along with various objects such as vases or fruit bowls. Thinking of the photographs in this series as observations of overlooked or forgotten details and remnants of daily existence, Letinsky ultimately transforms this refuse into a subject worthy of close study - objects of real beauty. Her more recent series Ill Form & Void Full (2010-2014), explores the tension between material and image, as Letinsky extracts elements from already existing imagery in magazines of food and domestic wares, calling attention to the constructed nature of all photographs.
Letinsky was born in 1962 in Winnipeg, Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986, and MFA from Yale University’s School of Art in 1991. Letinsky has held teaching positions at a number of prestigious American colleges, and since 1994 she has been a Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Mumbai Photography Festival, India; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Photographers Gallery, London; The Denver Art Museum; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Public collections featuring Letinsky’s work include Art Institute of Chicago; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Yale University Art Gallery.
Letinsky has received numerous awards, including the Canada Council International Residency (2014); Richard Driehaus Foundation Award (2003); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002); and the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2000). Publications include Ill Form and Void Full, Radius Press, 2014; After All, Damiani, 2010; Hardly More Than Ever, Renaissance Society, 2004; and Venus Inferred, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, September 10, 2021 - January 9, 2022
The exhibition showcases and celebrates the remarkable achievements of an impressive roster of women artists who have graduated from Yale University. Presented on the occasion of two major milestones—the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University, who came to study at the Yale School of the Fine Arts when it opened in 1869—the exhibition features works drawn entirely from the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery that span a variety of media, such as paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography, and video.
Plural Possibilites & the Female Body, Winter 2021
This exhibition features works by over twenty artists from the Henry’s collection alongside select loans from Seattle collections. It is presented as part of the Henry’s participation in the Feminist Art Coalition, a nation-wide initiative that seeks to generate cultural awareness about feminist thought, experience, and action. The exhibition locates the feminist pursuits of bodily autonomy and self-determination in solidarity with racial and sexual difference and encourages us to consider the possibilities of the individual and collective female body when freed from bounded limitations.
February 16 - March 26, 2019
Laura Letinsky, L'emprise du Temps
The work of Laura Letinsky (b. 1962) sends us back in time. Like many phtographesr working prior to the digital age, Letinsky used a Polaroid for tests. Shot with Polaroid Type 55 film - the famous instant-development process that creates a single image- Letinsky photographed fruit, flowers, food, cutlery, and other everyday objects. Those familar with the Canadian artist's work will recognize her still lifes, a genre in which she has stood out since the 1990s. But just as she was about to throw away these test images, she became intrigued by how they had deteriorated. The materials had changed in unexpected ways and offered a lesson on the vulnerability of life. Digital technology has made much of contemporary photography immaterial and, in many ways, sharp and bright - there is something gripping, therefore, about Letinsky's Polaroids, degraded as they are by the development process, chance, and the passage of time. They have an air of mystery, of strangeness: a metaphor for life itself.
December 21, 2018 - March 3, 2019
Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography
The exhibition explores how food is represented and what its significance can be by means of three themes. For Still Life, one of the most popular genres in painting is taken as the starting point. The photographs show how the artists have been inspired by the genre and how it has changed in the course of time. Around the Table looks at the ritual that takes place around food. In addition, this section also deals with cultural identity that is reflected in food. Finally, Playing with Food shows what happens when humour, fun and irony are combined with food. In addition to the photos there will be a number of cookbooks on display. The books provide an additional visual history and supply context to the photos on the wall.
September 9, 2018 – February 17, 2019
Still Life, Obstinacy of Things
With a selection of international and Austrian artists ranging from Jan Groover to Christopher Williams, Leo Kandl and Harun Farocki, the large theme-based photo graphy exhibition highlights the historical development strands that have led to today’s radical re-examination of the genre as a new field of experimentation for artistic expression. Above all, the exhibition featuresa younger generation of artists who are reflecting our very own ‘present’ in their photographs. They do so by precisely perceiving and meticulously examining the world of objects that surrounds us, with all its peculiarities, beauty, and ugliness. While some have chosen aggressively to combine highend consumer products with garbage and trash, others focus on things utterly over looked: worlds of objects that act as the traces of our everyday world with an often idiosyncratic beauty – which is precisely why they reward a closer examination.
April 28 - December 30, 2018
Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography
Drawn largely from the MCA’s permanent collection, Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography considers the artist’s work in the larger context of conceptual art. Core to the exhibition are four major series made roughly between 1960 and 1980: Images within Images, Marks and Evidence, History of Photography Series, and Archaeological Series. The exhibition also highlights links between Josephson and other contemporary artists working in photography, film, and sculpture—including Laura Letinsky, Roe Ethridge, Jessica Labatte, Marlo Pascual, Jimmy Robert, and Xaviera Simmons. Together, their work illuminates the ways images make meaning today.
(Not So) Still Life
Wave Hill's spring exhibition, (Not So) Still Life, brings together 14 contemporary artists whose multimedia work encourages a rethinking of still life as a genre.
Laura Letinsky: Still Life Photographs, 1997 - 2012
Laura Letinsky – a University of Manitoba alumna and University of Chicago professor – has returned to her alma mater to display some of her still life photography in an exhibition called Laura Letinksy: Still Life Photographs, 1997-2012 at the School of Art Gallery.
In monumental and gorgeously realized photographs, Laura Letinsky and Tanya Marcuse penetrate the very crux of the meaning of desire: to long for, to crave, to miss. They thus place themselves in an historical trajectory of the still life genre, as well as extend the genre's parameters.
| Juxtaposing tradition with innovation, this exhibition presents painting, photography, and video by artists from Israel, Holland, Canada, and the United States who build on, respond to, and transform the time-honored tradition of still life through the lens of the 21st century. |
Work by Laura Letinsky will be included in the group exhibition, Convergences: Selected Photographs from the Permanent Collection at the Getty Museum, on view July 8 - October 19, 2014, featuring Letinsky, Vera Lutter, Loretta Lux, Cindy Sherman, and James Welling, among others.
Laura Letinsky: Ill Form & Void Full is on view currently at The Photographers' Gallery in London through April 7, 2013. An exhibition of the artist's work is also on view in Laura Letinsky: Still Life Photographs 1997-2012 at the Denver Art Museum through March 24, 2013.
A retrospective of Laura Letinsky's still life photographs from the past 15 years will be on display at the Denver Art Museum from October 28, 2012 – March 24, 2013. The exhibition traces Letinsky's photographs as they have evolved from studies in melancholy and absence to explorations of perception, color and space. The artist's new collage based still-life series, Ill Form & Void Full, is currently on display at Yancey Richardson Gallery, through October 20, 2012.
A solo exhibition of Laura Letinsky's work will be exhibited at the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany from August 8 - September 30, 2012. Solo exhibitions of Letinsky's new series Ill Form & Void Full will be on display this fall at Yancey Richardson Gallery and Valerie Carberry Gallery in Chicago. Additionally, a solo exhibition of Letinsky's work will open at the Denver Art Museum in October 2012.
A solo exhibition featuring Laura Letinsky's newest series, Ill Form & Void Full, will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago on February 7. The exhibition, entitled Chicago Works: Laura Letinsky, will be on display until April 17.
Laura Letinsky's solo exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art opened June 21 and runs through September 11. A major mid-career survey, the exhibition features over thirty photographs from the artist's work from the last fifteen years.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Kenneth Josephson, Laura Letinsky and Hellen van Meene are all included in Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection, a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, on display through June 19, 2011. The exhibition also features works by Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Vik Muniz, and Richard Misrach, among others.
Gallery artists Sharon Core and Laura Letinsky will exhibit their work and give public lectures as part of Object Lesson, a still-life show curated by New Yorker critic Vince Aletti, one of several shows that make up this year's New York Photo Festival (May 12 - 16).
Letinsky will be speaking on Thursday, May 13 at 2pm at St. Ann's Warehouse, 38 Water Street, between Main Street and Dock Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Core will be speaking on Saturday, May 15 at 2pm, also at St. Ann's Warehouse.
Both Laura Letinsky and Hiroh Kikai were nominated for the 2009 Deutsche Borse Prize, awarded to UK-born photographer Paul Graham. The Prize aims to reward a living photographer who has made the most significant contribution to the medium of photography in Europe over the past year. Gallery artist Esko Mannikko was the 2008 Deutsche Borse recipient.
