Opening: Friday April 7th
Les Abattoirs presents the first retrospective of the work of artist Liliana Porter (born in Argentina in 1941, living in New York since 1961). The exhibition, which features around a hundred works, is intended to be a journey through her art. By bringing together historical and recent works, it highlights a new generation of women artists who pushed the boundaries of conceptual art and transformed the poetics of the installation.
Liliana Porter explores different media, such as engraving, painting, sculpture, photography, and video, the result of a long research process focused on the perception of reality and the notions of time and space.
From the 1960s, at the New York Graphic Workshop - which she co-founded with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo - the artist contributed to reinventing the practice of printmaking, a technique that plays a central role in her work. Taken up by Pop Art artists and valued in South America for its political dimension, this technique affords her a critical look at the notion of authorship and collective work and provides her with narrative forms. In the 1970s, she began to work with photography and incorporated images of her own body in drawings, mainly murals, echoing the concerns of feminist artists of the time. The first part of the exhibition revisits this period, while offering a new reading of the historical, artistic, and social context of the time through Liliana Porter's commitment and that of the community of artists she interacted with.
The second part of the exhibition presents her installations, two of them created especially for Les Abattoirs. These installations, which have been part of her oeuvre for a couple of decades, are made from popular figurines and objects from contemporary folk culture gleaned from flea markets throughout her travels, which she also uses in paintings and videos. Porter’s poetic exploration of reality prompts her to challenge the codes of representation and to constantly experiment with the process of creation and the surreal power of the image.
