Elad Lassry — Première exposition en France — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 20 → December 9, 2018

Exhibition curator: Xavier Franceschi

The frac île-de-france is presenting the first exhibition in France of the artist Elad Lassry, at Le Plateau (Paris). Lassry was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv and lives and works in Los Angeles. His work with photography, film and sculpture explores the production and reception of pictures―their meaning and essence, rather than the technology used to create them.

Elad Lassry is an heir to the Pictures Generation theorized by art critic DouglasCrimp―American artists who utilized appropriation and alteration in their détournements of the media icons of the 1970s and 80s. Lassry favors figurative images, gleaned from a range of sources including advertising, fashion, film, textbooks and scientific publications. Appropriating them for himself, he shifts and interrogates reality in today’s image-dominated world.

His outrageously colorful, theatrically framed photographs reference the formal appeal of commercial imagery, a Pop aesthetic and a structuralist approach to re-staging, concealment and reframing. Lassry questions the true nature of our relationship with pictures: do we interpret them and decode the information they contain, or do we simply experience them? With his gently ironic re-staging of images, showing how they are structured visually through processes of composition, reproduction, duplication, abstraction and interpretation, the artist follows the readymade tradition and the structuralist movement in American experimental film, focusing on form as much as content.

Elad Lassry aims to show what he calls the “contemporary condition” of photography―a flexible, appealing entity but one that is disconnected from reality: “I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories. And the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph.”

The exhibition at Le Plateau features a series of new works specially produced by Lassry for the occasion.