Liliana Porter

Overview

New York Gallery

Liliana Porter’s work playfully subverts convention, disrupts time, and messes with reality. Using a wide range of media, Porter mixes the absurd with the philosophical, creating extraordinary situations that lure us unwittingly into the realm of her idiosyncratic cast of characters.

Drawing from an eclectic collection of figurines, knickknacks, toys, and souvenirs, Porter features these characters in unexpected combinations and circumstances. The peculiar situations she invents, where disparate events occur simultaneously, or dissimilar protagonists interact, wittily invite political, philosophical and existential interpretation.

Catastrophes proliferate in Porter’s new body of work. Thick black or white liquids threaten, and sometimes engulf, her tiny figures. Stoic in the face of daunting tasks — recovery or clean up — the characters elicit empathy from occupants of a similarly disaster-filled world.

Juxtaposed with this new body of paintings and photographs will be a related collection of exceptional work from the early 1970s.

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lives in New York. In 1965 she founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo, which is the subject of a current exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.Her work is also currently on view in “Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Porter’s “Rehearsal” will launch as part of the Dia Art Center’s web project on November 6 and she will have a solo exhibition at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City opening on February 5, 2009.

Porter has shown extensively internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires; the Museo Castagnino, Rosario, Argentina; Palacio Aguirre, Cartagena, Spain; and the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona. Her work is in numerous public and private collections in Latin America, Europe and the United States, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Daros-Latinoamerica Collection, Zurich; and Tate Modern, London.

Hosfelt Gallery featured the work of Liliana Porter at the PINTA Art Fair November 14-16, 2008, at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th Street in New York.