The new exhibition “Bonnie Lautenberg: Art Meets Hollywood”, on view now at Boca Raton Museum of Art until August 21st, is the museum premiere of Lautenberg’s new series. Her digital collages in this exhibition are 28 diptychs where she pairs scenes from famous films alongside iconic works of art. Lautenberg’s only rule for her experimental process is that both the film and the artwork originated within the same year.
Lautenberg channels the creative zeitgeist between filmmakers and artists during each year that she intuitively chronicles, starting in 1928 up until 2020. You can watch a video here featuring Lautenberg in conversation with Irvin Lippman, the Executive Director of the Museum, expanding more on the theme of the exhibition. Her pairings can be surprising and intriguing: who would have imagined the 1963 scene of Paul Newman from the classic movie Hud would look so ideal next to Warhol’s seminal painting of Elvis from the same year? (pictured as the featured image of this article)
Lautenberg also plays matchmaker to the 1957 movie Funny Face (pictured above) by combining Audrey Hepburn’s bold pose with Clifford Still’s painting PH971--both majestic, and both glamorous. When viewed together this way in the museum gallery, the combination seems to make perfect sense, as if they were made for each other.
In another work from this series, the terrifying scene she selects from the 1975 movie Jaws literally screams above a Willem De Kooning painting that conjures what could appear to be blood spilling into the water below . . .
During the past five years she has worked on this series, Lautenberg made a crucial discovery: the artist Lucio Fontana was so moved by the Antonioni film Red Desert that he created one of his largest red paintings, influenced by what he saw up on the big screen (pictured below is the pairing of the two, by Lautenberg).
“This solidified my belief,” says Bonnie Lautenberg. “Throughout art history, artists have always been influenced by some force going on in the world around them.”“I started thinking about how artists who work in different art forms might have influenced each other. I decided to explore how one art form can influence another,” adds Lautenberg.
One of TML's favorites of this series is the iconic image of Uma Thurman featured on Tarantino's cult classic Pulp Fiction, paired with Kenny Scharf’s painting Globe Glob, both from 1994.
These are just a few of the pieces created by Bonnie Lautenberg, and just a small taste of what her exhibition has to offer. You can enjoy "Art Meets Hollywood", at the Boca Raton Museum of Art until August 21st
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