Lisa Kereszi
Walls, Surfaces, Illusions
May 16 - July 3, 2019
Lisa Kereszi explores the world of recreation and escapism, viewing with a critical eye the sites she has photographed for over 20 years, such as amusement parks, movie theaters, dive bars, strip clubs, and arcades. Inspired by environments that transport us into a fantasy realm, Kereszi strips away the thinly veiled façade to reveal a far more gritty and pedestrian view of these spaces.
In Fun and Games, Kereszi focuses on the banal details within venues of cheap popular entertainment, such as the base of a stripper pole, the steps up to a theater, and golden stage curtains. Removed from their larger context, these closely cropped images hone in on the low-cost materials and crude construction of these environments, forcing us to consider how little is required to create a fantasy world that people will believe.
In her later series, The Party’s Over, Kereszi seeks out abandoned sites and the forgotten ephemera from similar venues. We see an old cardboard box containing a disco ball and a plastic shark’s head poking out of the water in a lake behind a sports bar. These stark images are paired with photographs in which Kereszi takes a less direct approach, using windows and reflections to soften the somber tone of the series, positioning them as metaphorical portals to a better time.
Lisa Kereszi was born in 1973 in Chester, Pennsylvania. She received her BA from Bard College in 1995 and her MFA from Yale University in 2000. She was awarded the Baum Award for Best Emerging American Photographer in 2005, and is the author of four monographs: Fantasies (2005); Fun and Games (2009); Joeʼs Junk Yard (2012); and Mourning (2023).
Keresziʼs work has been exhibited at numerous major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; Mand Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; among others. Her work can be found in many public collections including Museum of Fine Arts Houston; New York Historical Society; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others. She is currently a Senior Critic and Assistant Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at Yale University.
January 27, 2023
Lisa Kereszi is a recipient of the 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant. Established in 1918 by Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the founder of Tiffany & Company, the Foundation remains one of the largest single sources of monetary grants to artists working in America today. Since 1980, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation’s biennial competition has awarded artists working in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, and craft media with grants to produce new work and push the boundaries of their creativity. Since 1980, more than $10,000,000 in awards has been distributed to more than 500 artists nationwide.
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.
| Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland 1861 - 2008 "…the first major exhibition to use visual art as a lens to explore the lure that Coney Island exerted on American culture over a period of 150 years. An extraordinary array of artists viewed Coney Island as a microcosm of the American experience, from its beginnings as a watering hole for the wealthy, through its transformation into an entertainment mecca for the masses, to the closing of Astroland Amusement Park following decades of urban decline." |
Work by Lisa Kereszi is included in the show Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 on view now at the Wadsworth Museum of Art in Hartford Connecticut through May 31st, 2015. This multimedia show chronicles the rise and fall of the "World's Greatest Playground" located on the shores of Brooklyn, New York. Kereszi's color photographs from the early 2000s document the final stages of the park's decay through her focused attention to often overlooked details. Read more.
Lisa Kereszi's exhibition, Joe's Junk Yard & Other American Dreams, curated by Rebecca Soderhold, is on display through October 11 at Drew University's Korn Gallery.
Lisa Kereszi's solo exhibition, The Party's Over, will open at Yancey Richardson Gallery on May 24, 2012. Her work is currently on display in Beyond Words: Photography in the New Yorker, at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China from April 15 – June 10, 2012. Additionally, Kereszi's 4th book, Joe's Junk Yard, will be published by Damiani this Fall, and distributed by DAP. A solo exhibit, Joe's Junk Yard, will be on display at Metronom in Modena, Italy from September 14-16 as part of the Festival Filosofia.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Lisa Kereszi, Andrew Moore, Alex Prager, and Victoria Sambunaris are all included in People Power Places: Reframing the American Landscape, a group exhibition at Davidson College, North Carolina, on view through March 6, 2011.
Allure, Lisa Kereszi's solo show at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery opens September 30th. The artist will be present the evening of the opening for a gallery talk.
Kereszi is also participating in Group Shows at Biblioteca Civica d'Arte Luigi Poletti during September, at Showtime Show House (Cassa, Gramercy Park, NYC) through October 22nd, at Gallery Out of Place (4-14-2 3F Minamiazabu Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan) through October, and at Pool Gallery in Berlin from Nov. 19- Jan. 15, 2011.
Lisa Kereszi's monograph Fun and Games will be released in September 2009 by Nazraeli Press. Titled after the name of a Jersey Shore arcade and the Ancient Roman wrestling phrase, "It's all fun and games, until someone loses an eye," the book documents the artist's self-described obsession with what is hidden behind the facades of strip clubs, haunted houses and nightclubs and other places of fantasy and entertainment.
Victoria Sambunaris and Christian Patterson have been nominated for the 2009 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographer. Lisa Kereszi was the 2005 recipient.
