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Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera – LACMA

Claes Oldenburg

Vera Lutter, Rodin Garden, I: February 22, 2017, 2017, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, promised gift of Sharyn and Bruce Charnas, © Vera Lutter, photo courtesy of the artist.

Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera – LACMA The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents ‘Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera’, featuring 44 photographs made by New York-based artist Vera Lutter. March 29 – August 9, 2020.]]>

Source: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

”Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera” presents 44 works from the artist’s two-year residency (February 2017–January 2019) at LACMA, with photographs organized in three categories: the museum’s campus, its interior galleries, and select individual artworks from the collection. Using a custom-built mobile camera, she captured exterior views of LACMA’s buildings and grounds. In addition, working with LACMA curators, Lutter photographed the interiors of two galleries, including a vSiew of the museum’s European painting and sculpture gallery that follows in the tradition of 17th and 18th-century “picture gallery” paintings. Lutter also used her camera obscura method to photograph artworks in LACMA’s permanent collection, including Georges de La Tour’s “Magdalen with the Smoking Flame” (1635–37) and Jackson Pollock’s “No. 15” (1950). Although Lutter has previously photographed classical and modern sculptures, this was her first time using her camera obscura to capture twodimensional works of art.

Born in Germany in 1960, Lutter was educated at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany, and received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2015–16 her work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective, “Inverted Worlds”, organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (which traveled to New Orleans Museum of Art). Other solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted by Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; and Dia: Beacon in Beacon, New York. Her work is included in the collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Dia Art Foundation, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

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Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera – LACMA