This work examined the legacy of religious pictorial traditions as they transitioned through the Enlightenment into secular imagery, specifically, that of romance and romantic love.
[6] Following the tradition of Dutch-Flemish still life paintings of the Northern European Renaissance, Letinksy found room for exploration in “its association with the feminine, its characterization as ‘less important,’ its affiliations with domesticity and intimacy.”[6] She realized still lifes could “explore the tension between the small and minute and larger social structures.”[6] Referencing Jan Groover and Giorgio Morandi, this work interrogates the question of meaning as it relates to what is described in the image as compared to how it is described.
In 2004, The Renaissance Society exhibited the long-term series she had been working on since 1997, Hardly More Than Ever, cementing her significance as a critically engaging contemporary artist.
[12] In the 2010 photography book After All, Letinsky showcased an arrangement of her latest work, which included the series The Dog And The Wolf, To Say It Isn’t So, and Fall.
For an essay in Time’s Assignation, curator Nathalie Herschdofer writes, “The Polaroid, now anachronistic, is here conjoined with Laura Letinsky’s still life subject: the remains of appetites never entirely sated.”[13] The monograph Ill Form And Void, which includes all works from the series, “creates references to the table from existing photographs, Martha Stewart, Dwell and Good Housekeeping magazines, her old work, the art of friends, and actual objects.
This process shows how ideas about the private sphere and their manifestation in our lives are always predicated upon what has come before: that is, perception itself is a construction.”[14] Reviewing the publication, Aline Smithson from Lenscratch said that the book “shifts the way we think of the classical still life.”[15] In 2022, continuing her ceramics work, Letinsky presented a new porcelain sculpture series titled Preparing for Flowers.
The detritus left behind from other artists-in-residence, as well as flowers and weeds growing nearby also found their way into her images.”[17] Speaking on the work, Letinsky explains, “I make pictures of very ordinary things in a way that destabilizes and questions the camera’s authority while also indulging in its sexiness, solicitating a visual pleasure that is tethered to other senses.”[18] Extending these interests, she has made a series of tintypes from iphone images that, while in dialogue with the past (cubism, tintype technology) refer to the mutability of time and perspective.
Reviewing the exhibition For, And Because Of…, art critic Vince Aletti wrote in the New Yorker, "Working mostly in la Maison Dora Maar in the South of France, she lets the light of Provence bleach her prints to abstraction.
What remains are after-dinner jumbles of dirty plates, crumpled napkins, and wilted flowers, with the tabletops teetering and all but dissolved in a white-on-white aura that never strains to be painterly.