Untitled

After training and working as a painter, Jan Groover took up the camera in the early 1970s. Her earliest photographs, influenced by Conceptual and Minimal art of the period, were color diptychs and triptychs of street scenes and suburban houses. Since deciding in 1978 to work primarily indoors, she has explored the expressive potential of the still life with remarkable persistence and invention. In this characteristic image, Groover creates elegant spatial and compositional tensions through the careful arrangement of architectural fragments, various small objects and a spray-painted background. The resulting image deftly balances the painterly and the photographic.