Liliana Porter: LILIANA PORTER

New York Gallery

With enchanting incongruity, 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. For this exhibition she will present a new video entitled “Fox in the Mirror,” in addition to photographs, works on paper, paintings, 3-dimensional prints, and installations.

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 characters interact, wittily invite political, philosophical and existential interpretation. Her third and latest video, “Fox in the Mirror,” with music by Sylvia Meyer, takes the concert as its theme. Wind-up toy dancers and musicians perform amidst a series of droll, incompatible incidents.

Some of the characters are brought out of their two-dimensional representations to interact with the real world. Tiny figures on shelves perform colossal tasks, at once pathetic and hilarious. Photographs paired with the actual object depicted, though in different form, bend reality and reverse time. With masterful simplicity and humor, Porter blends the real with the representational in hypothetical yet convincing mini-dramas starring mass-produced, kitsch objects that inadvertently elicit compassion and laughter.

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and lives in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include 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 museum collections in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Daros – Latinoamerica Collection, Zurich; and Tate Museum, London.