The Bielefelder Kunstverein is pleased to hold the first survey of works by artist Brandon Lattu held in a European institution. Working in his adopted home of Los Angeles, Lattu has developed a broad body of work that contributes to the understanding of the state of representation today. Citing Fox-Talbot and Duchamp as primary influences he has developed a growing body of work that sits squarely between the characteristics of both photography and the readymade. Looking back to the gestures of direct selection and the provincial grounding of late nineteenth and early twentieth century art, the works in this exhibition utilize photography, sculpture, and video to explore issues of empiricism without generalizing the subject but by carefully specifying individual sites and by presenting multiple vantage points of each subject for the viewer.

A case in point is Banqueting House (2007), a sculpture made from photographing the complete interior of the famous Neo-Palladian building by Inigo Jones in London. Using these photographs, Lattu has digitally produced a form that is a hybrid between the double cube of the buildings’ great hall and the sphere of the cameras’ recording. This form was then wrapped with an image of the interior of the great hall, making the interior of the building the exterior of the sculpture, as well as presenting a model of Vitruvian architecture re-formed by the model of perspective of a camera.

The works Selected Products (2001) and Rejected Products (2002) display boxes of consumer goods presented as hollow, transparent carriers of commercial information, showing the gorgeous, overwhelming, and seductive mixture of branding and decoration used to differentiate the product inside from other competing versions. In these works, Lattu finds a means to counter quantitative stylistic evaluation through objectification of issues of taste.

Resisting the conformity of a serial practice, Lattu approaches each subject with a process suggested by its implicit characteristics. For example, Sand, Pt. Dume, Malibu, California, (2001) is a monochrome painting as well as a sort of photograph of an evocative location. Produced by spreading the sand evenly across a scanner and resulting in an image of twenty by twenty-four inches, the subject is presented in a reproduction of sand with the verisimilitude of pigment through the contemporary digital technology of scanning.

This exhibition is accompanied by the publication of Office Gray Case, an artist’s book showing the deconstruction of a work by the same title in the exhibition. This book is published by Leo Koenig Inc., New York and is distributed by Verlag Walther Koenig in Europe and D.A.P. throughout the rest of the world.

BIOGRAPHY
Brandon Lattu was born in Athens, Georgia in 1970. He graduated with an MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1998 and teaches art, photography, and digital imaging at the University of California at Riverside. Brandon Lattu is represented by Leo Koenig Inc., New York, Vacío 9, Madrid, and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver. His work is in numerous museum and private collections.

In 2006 the Bielefelder Kunstverein showed photographic artists who experimented with different methods of image manipulation in analog photography in order to reveal the structure of a photographic image. Brandon Lattu – Jenseits des Physisch Möglichen continues our goal of exploring this developing medium in depth.

For more information contact: Claudia Turtenwald at kontakt@bielefelder-kunstverein.de