Laura Letinsky
Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present Preparing for Flowers, an exhibition of new porcelain sculpture by Chicago based artist Laura Letinsky. This is our second solo exhibition with the artist, on view concurrent with a solo showing of photographs by Sandi Haber Fifield. An opening reception for both artists is sched-uled for Friday, July 22 from 6-8PM.
Letinsky’s porcelain works were born from a desire for physicality, for a respite from the digital cacophony of contemporary life, for making simply for the sake of making. The resulting pieces reflect this ethos, their ges-tural forms existing outside any need for conceptual rigor.
While a departure from Letinsky’s more prominent medium of photography, the sculptures in this exhibition are crafted with a similar sensibility and are a seamless continuation of her photographic practice. The porce-lain objects feel as if they could have been born from one of her still life photographs - a three-dimensional manifestation of a two-dimensional surface - delicate, airy, poetic, and lyrical.
Partially inspired by kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery), this work embraces imperfec-tions and unpredictably, the element of chance intrinsic to the final pieces. The thin porcelain takes on a flesh-like quality as it sags and bends during firing - adding a humanistic element to the relationships be-tween the individual forms.
Laura Letinsky received a BFA from the University of Manitoba, 1986, and MFA from Yale University’s School of Art, 1991 and is currently a Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. Past exhibitions have been presented by The Israeli International Photography Festival; Mumbai Photog-raphy Festival; MIT, Cambridge, MA; The Photographers Gallery, London, Denver Art Museum, CO; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Casino Luxembourg; Mu-seum of Modern Art, NY; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Collections include the Art Institute of Chi-cago; The Amon Carter Museum, The John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Grants and awards include the Canada Coun-cil International Residency, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, The Canada Council Project Grants, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.