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.
The Italian photographer Tina Modotti is known for her documentation of the mural movement in Mexico...
Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D...
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram...
#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...