Madrid: The Espacio Minimo Gallery will inaugurate on Thursday, January 20, the sixth individual exhibition by New York-based Argentinean Liliana Porter represented by the institution since 1998. The Gallery has taken Porter’s work, on individual and collective displays, to many international contemporary art fairs–ARCO (Madrid), Art Basel Miami Beach (Miami), Frieze Art Fair (London), PINTA (London, Nueva York), CIGE (Beijing), SH Contemporary (Shanghai), Zona MACO (Mexico).
Situations with Levitating Rabbitis the name of both the exhibition and the large-format painting shaping the display in which the artist, within the parameters of a canvas, combines painting, sculpture, found objects and installations. She captures on them a great deal of her references and obsessions like the levitating rabbit mentioned in the name as –in Ana Tiscornia’s phrase–a meta linguistic exercise focused on questioning the line between reality and its representation or, even closer, its enunciation. As Ines Katzenstein wrote in an article about Porter’s work, this is what the artist has been doing since between 1968 and 1977 Liliana Porter builds in the form of a language her main philosophical concern: the question about the naturalization of the representation and its consequences. This question will always be formulated from a skeptical position consisting on introducing the viewer to an event that leads them to question the way in which we usually relate to representations.
In the paintings included on the exhibition, Porter insists on the importance she has granted since her beginnings to the background theme; the background as surface, as support, as empty space, as absence … In each case, the work of art undermines any call to metaphysics; that is, the background as a steady territory or fundamental structure whereby the identity can be laid out, or the representation confirmed, as Charles Merewether said in another writing about the artist.
Each of the canvas shown on the display transcends the simple pictorial format to act as a scenario on which actions and situations take place. They are spaces, in this case blank spaces where impossible dialogues, games of presences and absences, of both illusory realities and certain appearances that constantly question the limits of our perception are performed for us, perplexed viewers. As a constant–Tobias Ostrander once wrote– Porter organizes our active participation as viewers. As readers, she places us at the end of the grasping and searching for the meaning. Her works of art literally ask us to “act out” the philosophical questions that motivate them and which the artist tirelessly returns to. Porter usually makes reference to her old virtual collaborator and guide, Jorge Luis Borges’ thought of how easy one could become a good writer as oppose to the strong skills needed to become a talented reader. Porter’s work challenges us in a dynamic way to read it and creatively extend its strategies into our fields of interest.
LILIANA PORTER (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941) studied at the National School of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires. From 1958 to 1961, she attended the Iberian-American University of Mexico City. In 1964, she traveled to New York where she currently lives and work. In 1965, she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop1 together with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo. She won the Guggenheim Scholarship in 1980 y and the New York Foundation for the Arts Scholarship in 1985, among others. In 1973, Porter inaugurated an individual exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) of New York (Projects hall). Since then, her work has been showcased in important museums and institutions of different countries and some of her pieces are part of collections of some of the most important museums of the world: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum, New York; 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 Biblioteque Nationale, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; Museum of Modern Art, Bogota; Museo del Barrio, New York; Musée d’Art Contemporaine, Montreal; Wifredo Lam Center of Contemporary Art, Havana; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Daros Latinamerican, Zurich; ATT Corporation, New York; Phillip Morris Collection, New York; CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation), Miami; IBM Corporation, New York; The Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.
Source: Press Release by Galeria Espacio Minimo
SITUATIONS WITH LEVITATING RABBIT: LILIANA PORTER (January 20 –March 5, 2011)
Galería Espacio Mínimo, Doctor Fourquet, 17
E-28012 Madrid (Spain)
Tel: 34 91 467 6156
Twitter-icon: http://twitter.com/#!/espaciominimo
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 We recommendreading in our magazine Art by Excelencias(a. II, no. 7, 2010, pp. 8-17) the text "Luis Caminitzer, the hand holding the horizon, " published by the artist and art critic Antonio Eligio (Tonel), which discusses the significance, and provides additional references, on the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW, 1964-1970).
