Review: Luisa Lambri, an artist looking at artists, at Marc Foxx

Known for exceedingly subtle photographs of the windows and interiors of famous modern homes, Luisa Lambri is fascinated with barely perceptible shifts of light and color.

Since moving to L.A. from her native Italy, she has turned her eye to the work of Minimalist and Light and Space artists. The images in her current show at Marc Foxx are elegant abstractions that truly capture the visual experience of looking at such art.

“Orange Wedge, #01” depicts a slender tower of translucent color vertically bisecting a pure white picture plane. Composed of shifting tones that vibrate and nearly fade away, it appears almost animated and suggests an abstract painting somewhere between Barnett Newman’s hard vertical “zips” and Helen Frankenthaler’s limpid pours.

Another series capturing the steel surfaces of Donald Judd’s sculptures in Marfa, Texas, is even more luxuriant. Each is centered around a vertical edge from which soft stripes of gray, white and gold emanate, forming enveloping, seductive washes of light and color. Judd’s work never looked so luscious.

Lambri’s photos capture particularly delicate visual sensations but also turn the works into something new and strange.

A group of close-ups of Lucio Fontana’s famous sliced canvases are little more than black verticals with the faintest volumetric shading, like the involutions in a much less histrionic Georgia O’Keefe. Rather, they make O’Keefe’s voluptuous flower petals seem a bit melodramatic.

With the barest invocation of volume, Lambri’s work evokes an ever-so-subtle turning from the outside in.

Marc Foxx, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5571, through Nov. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcfoxx.com

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