ROSEMARY LAING

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is honoured to present a tribute exhibition to Australian artist Rosemary Laing (b. 1959 – d. 2024). In 2002, we presented her first solo exhibition in the United States, bulletproofglass, which inaugurated a close relationship that would lead to solo exhibitions one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape (2004), weather (2007), a dozen uesless actions for grieving blondes (2009), leak (2012) and The Paper (2014). In a career spanning over four decades, Laing created photo-based works that are cinematic in vision and large in scale and scope. Instead of using digital manipulation, Laing photographed real-time performance and physical installations, meticulously staging scenes that interrogate the socio-cultural issues of her native Australia and in the process echo a global awareness of climate change, indigenous rights, and migration. Her work demonstrates not only her distinct and rigorous artistic vision, but also her keen understanding of the issues facing both society and the environment. Writing in the artist’s definitive monograph, rosemary laing, published by Prestel in 2012, art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau noted that Laing’s ‘artwork is not only of the highest quality, but her ethical and political convictions and ideas are a model of what it means to be a ‘responsible’ image maker.’