The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents a new exhibition by Tel Aviv-born, Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassry. Featuring new and recent works, this exhibition is the artist’s first major museum monograph in the United States.

Elad Lassry makes intimate, framed photographs that slip effortlessly between genres and iconographies—capturing plastic still-lives, uncanny publicity portraits, collages, animals, and landscapes, all to hyper-stylized effect. Each isolated subject is cloistered within saturated fields of color, and while his pictures might possess a sense of distant familiarity, further context is often erased from view. Despite their extreme realism, these toothsome vegetables, sunny faces, and pristine products are overwhelmed by their own formal properties. Vivid objects dissolve into backdrop, folding into bold combinations of color, shape, and pattern, and merge representation with abstraction. Thoroughly familiar and blank at the same time, Lassry’s compositions move beyond the simple category of “photography” and ask us to reconsider the way we look at pictures.

Lassry’s work exists between stillness and movement, where static photographs sustain a sense of fleeting motion. The potential for an image to become unfixed is equally relevant to the artist’s practice as a filmmaker. Capturing an elegant dancer, a zebra, or an actor performing empty gestures, Lassry’s short 16mm films explore the suspension of moving bodies in space. Sum of Limited Views features over thirty photographs and a selection of films, where—through layered exposures, a staccato rhythm of colors, or the abstraction of moving bodies­—the works possess a magnetic but unstable hold on our vision as “unstill” still lives.

Elad Lassry is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Anthony Huberman, Chief Curator, with Laura Fried, Associate Curator.