2017 Catalogue Archive

San Francisco photographer Matt Lipps’ theatrical compositions benefit from the luxurious detail found in photographs from old textbooks and publications. In the series Looking Through Pictures, he frames classical and modernist art and architecture with pastel painted book scraps. Here, Lipps focuses on the history of sculpture by centering a printed photograph of Amedeo Modigliani’s Tête within a bordered cutout of a Greco-Roman sculpture. Dramatic shadows and the polished surface in the foreground toy with spatial depth, tricking the viewer into seeing the two-dimensional cutouts as actual three-dimensional objects.