A native of France, Karine Laval has successfully carved out a career in the New York photography world. She produces a highly distinctive and idiosyncratic style of images both for newspaper and magazine assignments as well as for her own personal work. Over the last 15 years, she has exhibited in three solo shows at Crane Kalman which have charted the evolution of Laval’s images from sun-drenched, bleached-out European lidos to darker, more abstracted dystopian landscapes.
Cosmos is a new chapter of Laval’s ongoing decade-long project Heterotopia, capturing public and private gardens around the world and transforming them into imaginary landscapes through analogue manipulations and experimentation. Cosmos focuses on Laval’s own garden on the North Fork of Long Island with the artist intervening in the landscape by integrating landscaping, gardening and art making as she transforms part of the space into a sustainable environment of meadows and fields of wildflowers using her own piece of land as a giant outdoor studio. Laval has been documenting the process for the past year across the seasons creating lush, ethereal landscape—characteristic of her exploration of nature, perception, and transformation.
Laval’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the US and internationally. She has recently worked on commissions for prestigious brands such as Hermès and Louis Vuitton, architects and institutions, including a monumental installation at 22 Bishopsgate in London, an exhibition of large lightboxes in the New York City subway, and an art commission by Peter Marino for the Cheval Blanc hotel in the newly renovated La Samaritaine in Paris. Her most recent commission (seen here) is a large lightbox installation for Christian Dior’s flagship new store in New York.
