Liliana Porter .- The Light
12/Jun/2021 - 31/Jul/2021
To celebrate the 80th Anniversary of LILIANA PORTER (Buenos Aires, 1941), Espacio Mínimo gallery presents a solo exhibition entitled The Light, the same as one of the pieces that make it up. After a few dark months, which forced us to postpone this project initially planned for last February coinciding with an ARCO that was also postponed, The Light could not be a better fit to illuminate the way to the future.
The bulk of the exhibition is made up of a resounding group of paintings created by LILIANA PORTER for this show in different formats, multi-piece polyptychs, large-format canvases and other smaller ones, in which she combines painting, found objects and installation. In them she shows referents and obsessions to, in the words of Ana Tiscornia, to make a metalinguistic exercise, focused on the question of the border between reality and its representation or more fittingly his enunciation, which, as Inés Katzenstein says, she has done since, between 1968 and 1977 Liliana constructs a language to express that view as its fundamental philosophical concern: the question about the nature of representation and its consequences. This question will always be stated from a position of estrangement and will present the viewer an event that leads him to question how often we relate to representation.
In these works the artist emphasizes the importance of the space theme that she has granted since her beginnings, the background as surface, as support, as empty space, as absence. In each case, the work undermines any appeal to a metaphysical, that is, the fund as a stable territory or fundamental structure through which identity can be traced, or the representation confirmed, as noted in another text of Charles Merewether about his work.
Each of the paintings shown on this occasion, the three great paintings and other small formats, transcend the mere pictorial support to act as a stage in which actions and situations take place. Are spaces, white in this case, where are recreated for us, perplexed viewers, those impossible dialogues, this game of presence and absence, of illusory realities and accurate appearances that constantly question the limits of our perception. Steadily, Tobias Ostrander writes – Porter structures our active participation as spectators. As readers, she placed us at the end of the reception and search for meaning. Her works literally ask us to “act” the philosophical questions that motivate and to which the artist returns relentlessly. Porter, often described as his old virtual collaborator and guide, Jorge Luis Borges, he spoke of the ease with which one can become a good writer, facing extreme skill needed to become a reader talent. Porter’s work challenges us to dynamically read and creatively prolong their strategies towards our areas of interest. What would equally happen when speaking of sculptural works and small facilities that are part of this project.
The exhibition is completed with the video ‘The Riddle / Charade’ an open narrative, based on a cast of inanimate figures, that works as a question intentionally directed at the wit and humour of the viewer to solve a mystery and indulge in the game. With an approximate duration of 20 minutes, the work has the support of Ana Tiscornia as co-director, Sylvia Meyer music and videography and editing Federico Lo Bianco. The characters come from her personal list of objects and figurines with the eventual appearance of a human hand to underline the scale of objects-actors.
LILIANA PORTER (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941) studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and, from 1958 to 1961, at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. In 1964 he traveled to New York, where she lives and works. In 1965 she was co-founder of The New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo. She has received, among others, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 and Fellowship New York Foundation for the Arts in 1985. In 1973 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York (room Projects). She has exhibited since then in major museums and institutions from various countries and her work is represented in the collections of some of the most prominent museums in the world – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, Tate Modern, London. Whitney Museum, New York, Brookling Art Museum, Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA), Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art. Mexico City, The Bronx Museum of Arts, New York University Art Museum, Austin, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas, La Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, Museo del Barrio, New York, Musee d’Art Contemporaine, Montreal, Institute Wifredo Lam, Havana, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, National Museum Center Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Daros Latin American, Zurich, ATT Corporatiom, New York, Phillip Morris Collection, New York, CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals art Foundation, Miami, IBM Corporation, New York, The Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, Hong Kong , Buenos Aires…
