Liliana Porter

Overview

Argentinian artist Liliana Porter is a master at distilling life and art to simple profundities through humorous juxtapositions of incongruous objects. For her first exhibition at the gallery in four years, Porter premieres a new video,Actualidades/Breaking News. In addition to the video, the exhibition showcases a full range of new work, including paintings, sculptural objects, installations, works on paper, and photographs, each challenging the proposition that time is linear and reality graspable.

Over the years, Porter has amassed a prodigious and eccentric collection of figurines, knickknacks, toys, and souvenirs from her global travels. These kitschy objects appear regularly in her work, inviting political, philosophical, and existential interpretation through their arrangement in unexpected situations. Each tchotchke represents a different era and cultural/historical narrative. Porter delights in manipulating time, history and reality by combining them as though in dialogue in an atemporal white space.

In her new video, titled Actualidades/Breaking News, Porter structures each scene as if it were a segment from a newscast or section in a newspaper, including “Arts and Leisure,” “Fashion and Style,” “World News,” and “Religion.” With music arranged and composed by Sylvia Meyer, each scenario becomes an evocative portrayal of the absurdities and tragedies perpetuated by poignant human surrogates in the form of shabby children’s toys, hilarious religious and political icons, and other peculiar and pathetic mass-produced objects.

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941. In 1961 she moved to New York, where she has lived and worked since. In 1965 she founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo. Porter has shown extensively internationally, including most recently solo museum exhibitions at the Museo Caraffa, Cordoba, Argentina; 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.