Bonnie Lautenberg: Art Meets Hollywood

2^nd Floor Focus Gallery

Complementing Art of the Hollywood Backdrop is an exhibition of photographs by Bonnie Lautenberg who pairs iconic artworks with stills from Hollywood movies released the same year the artwork was made. Her process is intuitive; she finds images that “speak to each other” in ways that disrupt the way we experience both the film and the artwork. She sometimes chooses the artwork first and searches for a connection to that year’s film, or reverses the process to find an artwork that relates to the movie. Lautenberg, who is known for her photographs of individuals and events from the worlds of politics and the arts began this series in 2017 and continues to work on it.

This exhibition runs the gamut of film and art. The first work is a pairing of a movie and painting both made in 1928, Rene Magritte’s The Lovers and The Mysterious Lady starring Greta Garbo. The Golden Age of Hollywood is well represented by such pairings as The Philadelphia Story with a Stuart Davis painting once owned by Lautenberg’s father. Coinciding with the downstairs exhibition that includes a backdrop created for 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain, Lautenberg’s work connects a work by Yayoi Kusama with a still from that movie.