Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04)

2007 - Photography (Photography)

Luisa Lambri

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness. Whereas avant-garde paintings strove to suggest nothing but their own essence, Lambri inverts this aim, using the two-dimensionality of the photographic print to point elsewhere.

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light. The architect’s longtime studio and residence, which he built in Los Angeles in 1922, exemplifies this philosophy, and has since become an influential part of the modernist architectural canon. In Untitled (Schindler House #01) (2007), Luisa Lambri describes Schindler’s studio by capturing its aftereffects—the play of light and shadow cast through branches onto a surface. The photograph is an ethereal portrait of Schindler’s work and ethos, evoking the building without actually depicting its concrete slabs and untreated wood.

Colors:

• minimalism.n.01
• two-dimensionality.n.01
• architecture.n.01
• expanse.n.03
• austere.s.01
• abstraction.n.04
• abstract photography
• architecture in art
• color photography
• documentary photography
• italian
• italian contemporary artists