Liliana Porter: The Riddle / Charada

Hosfelt Gallery is pleased to present the world premiere of the most recent video by Liliana Porter, The Riddle/Charada, featuring an idiosyncratic cast of characters culled from her ever-evolving collection of toys and figurines that she finds in flea markets, antique stores, and souvenir shops. The narrative is constructed from a sequence of vignettes wherein these characters interact in unexpected and darkly humorous ways, accompanied by an evocative soundtrack.

Porter’s quirky objects have a double existence. On the one hand they appear as banal or kitschy curios; at the same time, they possess a gaze that evokes a certain pathos, provoking the viewer to endow them with an interiority and identity. Each theatrical vignette in the video presents a pointed visual commentary that speaks to the human condition. Leaving the narrative intentionally ambiguous and open to a variety of interpretations, Porter entices the viewer to unravel the riddle.

The film was conceived by Liliana Porter and directed by Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia. Music composed and performed by Sylvia Meyer. Videography by Federico Lo Bianco. Edited by Liliana Porter, Ana Tiscornia, Federico Lo Bianco and Sylvia Meyer. 

Early Conceptual Prints

To elucidate the conceptual and philosophical foundations of Porter’s work, accompanying the film are a group of seminal prints made in the 1960s and ‘70s. At the age of 22, Liliana moved from Argentina to New York, where she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo in 1965. Together they radically re-defined the meaning and purpose of printmaking by putting technique at the service of ideas.

While absorbing the movements that permeated New York in the mid 1960s—Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art—Porter ultimately concluded that the complexity of the traditional printmaking process produced merely excellent technicians rather than brilliant artists. Her realization of “the trap of technique” led to a drastic shift in Porter’s practice. She began situating simple objects (a nail, hook, or thread) in an empty white space, and combining them with representations of those objects. This groundbreaking conceptual approach to printmaking became the genesis of philosophical explorations into notions of time and reality—themes that would continue to occupy her throughout her career.

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941. Porter has shown extensively internationally, including most recently solo museum exhibitions at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville (on view through May 2, 2021); Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay; MALBA, Buenos Aires; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museo Rayo, Roldanillo, Colombia; Centro Cultura de España, Santiago, Chile; and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, as well as a two-person exhibition with Marcel Broodthaers at The New Museum, New York. 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 of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Daros-Latinoamerica Collection, Zurich; and Tate Modern, London.