MILAN.- On April 10th Massimo De Carlo gallery is presenting a new solo exhibition by Elad Lassry. The exhibition unveils a series of new works that synthesize the artists last few years of research, challenging for the second time the industrial space of Massimo De Carlo’s gallery in via Ventura.

At the core of these new works is an inquiry into what engagements are possible with the picture, as well as a questioning of the picture’s condition, capacities, and failures as a contemporary unit. Elad Lassry resorts to questioning the picture itself as an entity, as well as an unresolved space of representation, bouncing back and forth between an acknowledgement of the picture as an image-based unit to a treatment usually reserved for an object. In doing so, the artist challenges the picture’s given status of flatness, allowing at times, the participation that occurs between the picture and multiple agencies, economies, and systems to take on an actual form.

These works take further Elad Lassry’s philosophical proposal where the image oscillates between its picturehood and objecthood, to an almost literal space. This idea is rooted in an exercise of dismantling the photograph, where its indexicality is lost, leaving it stripped of its details and down to formal elements only.

Elad Lassry is interested in the use of analog methods in exposing contemporary phenomena - one of fluidity, elasticity, and new opportunities for experience with the picture.

These strategies in the work relentlessly ask the viewer to abandon the act of deciphering between photographic information and visible marks, or objects (non-photographic information). For example, in a new body of works titled Untitled (Swimmers), 2015, Elad Lassry turns to an industrial technique in which a set of silver gelatin prints, beads, and pigments are embedded within acrylic glass. While obscuring the translucence of acrylic glass, each element is married to a different art history – the tropes of black and white photography versus the gestures, marks, and compositions in the plastic arts.

Elad Lassry was born in Tel Aviv in 1977. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Elad Lassry has had solo exhibitions in prestigious institutions such as the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2013), The Kitchen in New York (2012), the PAC – Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea in Milan (2012), the Kunsthalle in Zurich (2010), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2009) and at the Art Institute in Chicago (2008). Elad Lassry has taken part in many prominent group shows such as, among others: Perfect Likeness, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), Photo Poetics, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015), A World of Its Own: Photographic Practises in the Studio, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014), Off the Wall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012), The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2011), The Reach of Realism at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami (2009), Dance with Camera at the Institute of Contemporary Art of Philadelphia (2009) and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum in New York (2008). Elad Lassry has taken part in ILLUMInations, the 45th Venice Biennale curated by Bice Curiger in Venice (2011).