PARIS.- Gagosian announced the presentation of Union Springs (2025) by Deana Lawson in the vitrine at the rue de Ponthieu gallery. The photograph, which was taken in a sun-shower in Union Springs, Alabama, is shown in one of the artist’s distinctive mirrored frames.
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Lawson’s images explore the ways in which communities and individuals occupy shifting ecological, economic, and social terrains. Drawing on the aesthetic traditions of snapshot photography, social documentary, and studio portraiture, she links the representational function of the camera to the defiant power of beauty.
Union Springs depicts a lowrider car with an almost animalistic feel, its arboreal environment appearing less incongruous than one might expect. Lawson was captivated by the way in which the vehicle’s vibrant chrome finish was heightened by the rainy conditions in which the shot was taken.
Lowriders, which are characterized by lowered bodies, trace their origins to Mexican American youth culture of the 1940s. Typically decorated with elaborate designs, they feature rims fitted with hydraulics that allow the vehicle to be lowered or raised. In the 1990s, these ostentatious motors became associated with West Coast hip-hop and G-funk culture and appear in music videos of the time by such artists as Eazy-E, Snoop Dogg, and most recently Kendrick Lamar, on the cover of his album GNX (2024).
The reflective frame in which Union Springs is shown adds to its chromatic dimensionality, and derives from Lawson’s fascination with mirrors, which she has previously pursued in photographs of Ivanpah, a solar farm in the Mojave Desert. The artist is interested, too, in the fact that mirrors were considered magical tools of the dead in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and were often placed in tombs as representations of the sun and the divine power of light. Many of the earliest mirrors, she has also noted, were made from polished black obsidian and were used for divination in Mesoamerican antiquity.
This presentation in Paris coincides with a survey of Lawson’s work in the exhibition Corps et âmes at Bourse de Commerce, opening on March 5, 2025.
Deana Lawson was born in 1979 in Rochester, New York, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Collections include the Huis Marseille, Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Exhibitions include the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2018); Planes, Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2018–19); Huis Marseille, Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam (2019); and Centropy, Kunsthalle Basel (2020). Lawson’s first comprehensive museum survey traveled from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2021), to MoMA PS1, New York (2022), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022–23). Awards include the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize (2020) and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2022).
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