Rick Wester Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of Jungle Road, our third solo exhibition of photographs by Laurie Lambrecht. For the last 25 years Laurie Lambrecht has quietly woven together a body of luminescent photographs often built on her active collaborations with artists she has known and respected. In the early 1990s she assisted the Pop Art master Roy Lichtenstein in his studio. While there she found herself inspired to document the activities she was immersed in. Her extended portrait was built on using the painter’s works and studio not only as props and subjects but to often stand in for the painter. Later, she created similar portraits of Esteban Vicente and Robert Wilson. In 2009 she went to China to photograph for two weeks but not before studying the Chinese painter Luo Ping.

The images of Jungle Road began in December 2012 after Christopher Rauschenberg, the noted artist’s son, asked Ms. Lambrecht to photograph at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency program on Captiva Island, Florida. Robert Rauschenberg had a studio compound there that, after his death, was transformed into a multi-disciplined retreat for working artists. Christopher Rauschenberg, an accomplished photographer himself, was familiar with Ms. Lambrecht’s work, and encouraged her to explore her own project while working on the commission. Inspired by the lush and miraculous plays of light, color and texture of the vegetation surrounding the compound, she created a body of work surprisingly redolent of an earlier career. From 1980 to 1990 Ms. Lambrecht was a successful designer of women’s hand knit sweaters, selling through Henri Bendel, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus and other venues. An innovative inclusion of metallic, iridescent and variously textured threads and yarns characterized her unique creations.

The thread-like forms of the hanging vines in Captiva, brilliantly colored and plunged in radiant light, recall this creative experience and, in that regard, make Jungle Road an unlikely but parallel version of her extended portraits - only this time a metonymic selfportrait. Unlike her previous bodies of work that found her embracing the influence of the artists she collaborated with, Jungle Road is a sum of all that came prior, an embodiment of a vision informed by the work of some of the 20th century’s.