On April 11th, 2014, the exhibition of “Miranda Lichtenstein: Polaroid’s,” was presented by the Hermes Foundation in the Gallery at Hermes on Madison Avenue. The exhibition is comprising of 46 works produced between 2002 and 2013 is the first of two that the maison will stage this year as part of its efforts to support people and organizations in creative and artistic fields. Most recently, in September 2013, it staged another photo exhibition, “Martine Fougeron: Teen Tribe,” a series of 23 color prints of the artist’s two sons and their friends as they grew up in both New York and France.
This exhibition ranges from washed out family snapshots to work by artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Walker Evans, spanning more than a decade of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, offering a glimpse into her creative process.
Using a 4×5 Linhof camera with a Polaroid back, Lichtenstein started by photographing flowers at the moment they began to wilt, then created complex compositions by arranging the cuttings against shadows that she painted by hand. She took it a step further by creating more layers using Japanese paper known as ‘washi’ as both background and screen. She also looked to still life for inspiration, and experimented with distorting reflective surfaces.
“I’m interested in instilling a sense of wonder in the viewer in an age when very little surprises,” said Lichtenstein.
The photographer-videographer graduated with an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and has had solo exhibitions of her work at UCLA Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in New York, Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York and Gallery Min Min in Tokyo.
The exhibition was curated by Cory Jacobs.