Lehmann Maupin is pleased to presentLa Grande Sortie, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist and filmmakerAlex Prager. The exhibition will feature Prager’s newest film, La Grande Sortie, in its US premiere, along with a new series of photographs shot on location during the film’s production in Paris. In this body of work, the viewer is confronted with the dual perspectives of performer and audience and asked to consider the underlying tension inherent in this relationship. The opening reception will feature live ballet solos. These performances, featuring original choreography to Bohuslav Martinů’s “Film en Miniature,” set amid the attendees and Prager’s artwork, further underscore the artist’s curatorial approach, which conflates the traditional roles of viewer and performer.

Prager has garnered acclaim for her intricately staged, highly complex imagery that makes use of cinematic convention as a tool to challenge narrative tropes and offer deeper psychological associations to seemingly ordinary themes. With the release of her film Face in the Crowd (2014), an examination of crowd dynamics and the individual, Prager solidified her standing as an auteur whose ominous, experimental works conjure feelings of anxiety, apprehension, and dread, while simultaneously offering the viewing pleasure and intrigue of a Hollywood movie. Her images often allude to their own artifice by exaggerating the on-screen manipulations of the film industry, such as makeup or lighting effects, in an attempt to reveal the often-hidden reality of the human condition on film.