In Sara VanDerBeek’s “Lace Interlace” (2023, 2024) works, images of handmade and industrially produced textiles, and fragments of contemporary and historical costumes are layered and presented in custom designed frames made of lace-like perforated steel. The arrangement and layering of images, printed via advanced UV and Dye Sublimation processes, is inspired by the arrayed and accumulative organization of early photographic albums by Julia Margaret Cameron, Anna Atkins and Isabel Agnes Cowper that VanDerBeek has researched and captured over the course of her multi-year development of the project. The tint and toning of 19th century albumen prints influenced VanDerBeek’s overall palette of mauves, coppers, and grisaille.

VanDerBeek presents Lace Interlace in dialogue with select works by Louise Lawler. VanDerBeek responds to Lawler’s to “A Part of the Picture” (1989/1994), which features a moisture indicator atop lace at the Isabel Stewart Gardener Museum, with “Soeurs” (2024), a UV relief print of handmade lace collected in France by the Cone Sisters that VanDerBeek photographed amongst the extensive Cone collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art. In both works the pictured subject is a symbolic study resonant of photography’s early history and a stand-in for contemporary institutional networks often established and maintained by women in the predominantly female led fields of curation and conservation. A more intimate assemblage by VanDerBeek, Women & Fiction, War is Terror, (2024) presents a reproduction of Lawler’s work, layered upon an image of lace by Isabel Agnes Cowper (1826-1911) that was rephotographed by VanDerBeek in 2022 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Recent museum exhibitions include VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek at the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, North Carolina (with Stan VanDerBeek) and Women & Museums at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (both 2019). Sara VanDerBeek has also exhibited at The Hammer, The Whitney, The Guggenheim, Fondazione Memmo, Rome, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, LACMA, Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, and others. Sara VanDerBeek was born in Baltimore in 1976 and lives and works in New York.

About Altman Siegel, San Francisco

Altman Siegel was founded by Claudia Altman-Siegel in 2009. The program focuses on internationally recognized, museum-level artists whose work contributes to the cultural dialogue domestically and abroad. The gallery presents significant Bay Area artists and brings international artists to San Francisco for the first time. The core gallery program focuses on contemporary artists from emerging to established, but the gallery also punctuates the program with historical exhibitions to provide depth and context.

About The Approach, London

The Approach is co-directed by Jake Miller and Emma Robertson. Located in Bethnal Green above The Approach Tavern, for over twenty-five years it has operated an internationally recognised programme from its East London base. The gallery is known for discovering artists and establishing their careers as well as making intergenerational curated group shows a strong focus.