Luisa Lambri (b. 1969 Italy) travels the world photographing architectural interiors. Often spending extended periods of time investigating notable Modernist buildings designed by such architects as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Giuseppe Terragni, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Oscar Niemeyer, Philip Johnson, John Lautner, and other masters. Her photographs not only capture the physical topology of these structures but elaborate on the profound psychological and emotional responses they elicit in her. Rather than take a distanced view of an overall structure, Lambri attends to architectural details—windows, skylights, cabinets, closets—necessities that embody the questions of form and function that engulf any endeavor of design. Perhaps paradoxically, Lambri’s poetic photographic abstractions are derived from her adamantly straightforward approach to her subjects, yielding not only pictures of architectural details but also evoking what it feels like to experience those architectural spaces.

Luisa Lambri studied Literature and Philosophy at Universities in Milan and Bologna. She began to take pictures while traveling and soon discovered an affinity for the geometrically simple voids of modernist architecture. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in many public collections including the Carnegie Museum of Arts, Pittsburgh; Colección Fundación Arco, Madrid; Minas Gerais, Brazil; Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo, Torino; Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Menil Collection, Houston; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 1999 Lambri was awarded the "Leone d'Oro" at the Venice Biennale. In 2010 she exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and in 2009 at Studio Guenzani, Milan, Thomas Dane, London and in 2007 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Recently her work was shown at the Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. Luisa Lambri currently lives in Los Angeles.

Luisa Lambri came to the Gardner Museum with her daughter in 2009 and spent an intensive week photographing objects, nooks, and spaces in the galleries and courtyard. Since then, Lambri has returned to the Gardner Museum twice to photograph during different times of the year under changing light conditions. She will return in 2011 to photograph details of the new building once it is finished.