Hosfelt Gallery
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • About
  • Fairs
  • Events
  • Press
  • News
  • Climate Action
Wishlist
0

Favorites

This artwork has been saved in your favorites list. You can either review your list and make an inquiry, or continue to browse and find other artworks.
View favorites
Continue browsing
Menu

Art Basel: Liliana Porter

Past event
Messe Basel, Messeplatz 10, 4058 Basel, Switzerland 21 - 26 September 2021 
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Liliana Porter, "Untitled (hook and string)," 1973, silkscreen and string on paper, unique, 20 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches
Liliana Porter, "Untitled (hook and string)," 1973, silkscreen and string on paper, unique, 20 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches
Messe Basel, Messeplatz 10, 4058 Basel, Switzerland Booth J1, Hall 2 11 am - 7 pm

Hosfelt Gallery presents a selection of Liliana Porter’s seminal conceptual works from the 1960s and early 1970s that radically re-defined the meaning and purpose of printmaking by putting technique at the service of ideas, laying the foundation for Porter’s vast and widely acclaimed oeuvre in the decades to follow.

 

Born in Buenos Aires in 1941, Liliana Porter studied art in Mexico and Argentina before moving to New York in 1964. There, at age 22, she co-founded the famed New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo after an acquaintance offered her access to the printing press in his Greenwich Village apartment.

 

Deeply engaged in her own printmaking practice while absorbing the exciting gestations of Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art that permeated New York in the mid ‘60s, Porter began to realize that revolutions in art had always occurred through painting and sculpture, not printmaking. The reason, she concluded, was the extreme complexity of the traditional printmaking process, which tended to produce merely excellent technicians rather than innovative artists.

Her realization of “the trap of technique” prompted a drastic shift, simultaneously formal and conceptual, that would define Porter’s work from this point onward.  She turned her focus to images devoid of charged meanings, which initially meant trivial objects such as a nail, a hook, or thread.  She began situating these mundane items in an empty, decontextualized space, and combining them with representations of those objects.  The negation of context and temporality, and the conflation of real versus representation, opened up a vast realm in which meaning could be defined in entirely new ways.  This groundbreaking conceptual approach to printmaking became the genesis of philosophical explorations into notions of time and the substance of reality—themes that would continue to occupy her throughout her career.

 

Liliana Porter has shown extensively internationally, including most recently solo museum exhibitions at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville; 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.

 

  • For Tickets

Related artist

  • A smashed metal alarm clock with a small figurine of a janitor sweeping at the bottom.

    Liliana Porter

Share
  • Facebook
  • X
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Location

260 Utah Street

San Francisco, CA 94103

 

Gallery Hours

Tu, W, F & Sa: 10am–5:30pm

Th: 11am–7pm
Closed Sun & Mon

Contact

(415) 495-5454

General Inquiries

Sales Inquiries

We do not accept artist submissions.

Instagram, opens in a new tab.
LinkedIn, opens in a new tab.
Artnet, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
View on Google Maps
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2025 Hosfelt Gallery
Site by Artlogic

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences

Your shopping bag

This purchase may be subject to local rates of import, sales and use taxes for which the purchaser is 100% liable.
No items found
Total
$
Checkout now
Close

Your Favorites

Create a list of works then send us an inquiry.
No items found
Items in list
Send us an inquiry
Share with a friend