FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Yasumasa Morimura

November 23, 1996 - January 4, 1997

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce the opening of a solo show of new photo-based work by Yasumasa Morimura on November 23. 

In this most recent series, “Self-Portrait as Actress”, Morimura continues his practice of inserting himself into the canonical images of art history and twentieth century pop culture via photographic technologies.  For the Actress series, Morimura has posed in the costume, set, and posture of the cinema’s most celebrated actresses, in the most emblematic moments of Hollywood’s golden age.  Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, and Vivien Leigh star in these color-saturated prints with Technicolor impact.  These are the quintessential shots, yet the sense of familiarity with which one might greet these images is almost immediately dislocated upon closer examination of the settings that Morimura has created...  Brigitte Bardot on her motorcycle in a Tokyo street, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara under Japanese cherry trees, Catherine Deneuve in a Japanese tea house.  Morimura has once again expanded his repertoire, now challenging national identities, in addition to his continuing interrogation of gender, cultural, and historical identities.

This work was inaugurated this year in a solo show of Yasumasa Morimura at the Yokohama Museum of Art.  Also this year, Morimura was nominated for the Hugo Boss Award, and his work will be included in a group show of the nominated artists at the Guggenheim Museum Soho, to take place concurrently with the exhibition at Luhring Augustine.

For further information, please contact Rachel Knecht, at (212) 219-9600.