Arles in Paris, part 2

Jan Groover & Laura Letinsky
Still-life Photography, a dialogue

Exhibition: 5 October - 5 November 2023
Finissage: Saturday, 4 November, 4 - 6pm in the presence of Laura Letinsky

In October, the gallery will propose works by two major references of contemporary still life photography: Laura Letinsky (1962, American, exhibited in Arles for the first time in Europe), whose delicate, large format tableaux of image fragments, from the series 'Ill Form and Void Full, 2014), will be proposed alongside selected vintage chromogenic prints by Jan Groover (1943-2012, American).

The two women artists sublimate the domestic environment, a feminist message expressed in the late 70s with Groover's pristine, gleaming stacks of dishes and silverware, that continues to resonate in the ethereal, contemporary works of Letinsky. Delicately composing painterly tableaux with collaged images and real dining objects - left overs, crumbs, spills, ashtrays, plates, glasses of wine, fruit - Letinsky creates beauty with mess and the unfinished and subtly evokes the perpetual and thankless labour that is housekeeping.

Jan Groover trained in fine art and worked as an abstract painter until her 30s. She cited Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) as a central influence, his calm hues and 'flat' still lives can be seen in her photographic work. Groover prepared her ‘fabricated’ compositions in minute detail before taking the final photograph and, in his preface to the 1992 Jan Groover monograph, John Szarkowski of MoMA wrote that her training as a painter "disposed her to think of a picture as something that was made, not discovered." In the late 1970s, for her celebrated 'Kitchen Still Lifes' series, Jan Groover created poetry out of a kitchen sink piled up with fork tines, butter knife blades, scalloped cake tins and indoor plants. An image from this series graced the cover of ArtForum magazine: according to critic Andy Grundberg, it announced that “photography had arrived in the art world - complete with a marketplace to support it." Selected vintage chromogenic prints from these two chapters of Groover's work will be presented at the gallery.

Laura Letinksy creates delicate, meticulous tableaux that sublimate and honour the forgotten details of everyday domestic life. Her large-scale, carefully crafted scenes often focus on the remnants of a meal or party, as she plays with ideas about perception and the transformative qualities of the photograph. Her series Ill Form & Void Full (2010-2014), explores the tension between material and image, as Letinsky extracts elements from already existing imagery in magazines of food and domestic wares, calling attention to the constructed nature of all photographs.

Works presented in friendly collaboration with Yancey Richardson Gallery for Laura Letinsky and Janet Borden Gallery for Jan Groover.