Liz Deschenes and Louise Lawler exhbition: Hôtel Le Lièvre #4

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce the fourth iteration of Hôtel Le Lièvre, a series of two-person fortnightly presentations, in which an artist from the gallery invites another artist to each present a single work. The exhibition centres around the Paris gallery building, Hôtel Le Lièvre La Grange, site of an intense cultural and fashion trade now disrupted. The rhythmical reconfigurations of the space perform as an attempt to counter our current sense of detachment. The fourth instalment of the series is dedicated to the work of Liz Deschenes and Louise Lawler, two artists who call into question long-held assumptions about the function of photography and the context of photographic display.

Each artist presents a series of three works that will alternate every four days, introducing the element of time within the display. Lawler’s photographs of venerated artworks in museums or collector’s houses investigate the boundaries between public and private to make them circulate beyond the walls of the institutional complex, intervening in the mediation of the object’s value. Lawler’s series of photographs render the “Judd” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from different standpoints, after hours with the gallery lights turned off. The works emphasize the dim passage of light in the absence of viewers, outside the conventional well lit pristine display.

Deschenes’ series of itinerating works resonate with different aspects of Donald Judd’s practice, affirming photography as an object which engages directly with the specific context of the exhibition. Judd’s notion of shape as a carrier of colour is in conversation with a work by Deschenes, that utilises kodak’s dye transfer print process, involving a 3 colour separation process, that is analogous to technicolour, and was discontinued in 1993. The reflections, transparencies and light interactions in Judd’s work are addressed in Deschenes’ large photogram recording the exposure of photosensitive paper to outdoor light. The sculptor’s repetition of elements in stacks, channels or progressions is present in Deschenes’ sequential group of photograms. Evoking proto-cinematic explorations on movement, they result in a subtle, continuous change of light across the space and onto different surfaces, activated by the viewer’s movements.