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Laurent La Gamba
A Contribution to American Art History,
(26 revisited works from the Whitney Museum)
Preface by Lyn Cole
The aim of the series was to revisit some famous American works of art, exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, through thelens of the artist’s very specific use of camouflage. In A Contribution to American Art History, each photograph is an interpretation by the artist, a perfectly subjective appropriation of the work in hand. The figure of the artist is central but it merely serves to emphasise the exceptional character of the original works. Like a moth uses procrypsis on a wall to camouflage itself from the world, La Gamba uses procrypsis ironically to both hide within these famous works of art and in so doing to stand out by writing anotherpage of art history. His use of camouflage as both hiding and being on show is therefore very novel. Let us not forget that La Gamba was the first artist to set up public camouflage installations from 2001 well before it was a trend. You will delight in this reinterpretation of the Whitney works as seen by La Gamba as they border on self-portraiture and tell you both about the artist and the works themselves. Open your eyes anew!
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Laurent La Gamba
The art of camouflage
Laurent La Gamba, The Art of Camouflage, is the first book dedicated to the work of the photographer and conceptual artist Laurent La Gamba. Here are 70 reproductions of his work spanning the now famous installations by the artist from the first supermarket camouflages, to the self-portraits with fridges and the well known "pool" series. The book gives you a look into rarely seen before works too. A must see both for those who know La Gamba and those wanting to discover his work!
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Laurent La Gamba,
Works on canvas - Portraits and Self-portraits (1998 - 2001)
80 pages
ISBN: 978-1500758356
Artist Laurent La Gamba tries to explore the subversive potential of consumer society to produce satirical canvases. It’s a symbiosis of precarious ego fictions and pictorial discovery of he fundamental instability of self. The artist is playing with consumer emblems and marketing to draw an ironical point of identification with the character photographed. For the artist the self-portrait genre is an instrument, delivering a complete range of self-representation. The portraits and self-portraits melodramatize and reimagine the artist's own physiognomy displaying a kind of modern existential heroism turned into absurdity or sometimes social and political criticicism. The figure as a neurotic and obsessive pattern is absolutely predominant in all his work. His interests lie in showing how identification processes can go both ways, from one extreme to the other and sometimes how different identities can coexist forsome time before a path is chosen.
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