Leanne Shapton’s “Swimming Studies”
Leanne Shapton's Asphalt Green (Upper East Side Pool), New York City
The New Yorker has posted a slideshow from Leanne Shapton’s new book Swimming Studies. Jordan Awan writes:
Toward the end of the book is a chapter titled simply “Swimming Pools.” It’s a series of seventy-two paintings, each one representing a pool that Shapton remembers swimming in. The paintings abstract the pools to their surface shape, which we see flattened and in perspective from above, as if we are approaching the edge of the pool. That use of perspective, inconspicuous at first look, eventually serves as a constant, subtle reminder to the viewer that what we are interested in is not the pools themselves but the author’s remembered experience of them.
Each painting can stand alone with an iconic quality reminiscent of an early work by Ellsworth Kelly. Taken together, they amount to a memoir-within-a-memoir, a small tour de force of memory, experience, and representation.
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