Liliana Porter

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1941. She is one of her country’s most exemplary conceptual artists. Through printmaking, paintings, drawings, photographs videos, installations, theater, and public art, she explores representation, time, and their relationship with what we call reality. Her work is easily recognizable from that mixture of humor and anguish, banality and the possibility of meaning. For example, in the photographic series Forty Years (2013), she juxtaposes her hand as it looks today with an image of that same hand from the 1970s, crossed by an expressive pencil line traced on the wall. Often she moves from laughter to tears through situations she constructs out of found objects, which she isolates against a neutral background.

Her artistic journey began early, at the age of twelve, when she enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano in Buenos Aires. From ages 16-19 she lived and studied visual arts in Mexico City, where she held her first exhibition at age 17. She returned to Buenos Aires to take classes at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón and continued her training at the Escuela Superior Ernesto de la Cárcova’s printmaking workshop, with Professors Fernando López Anaya and Ana María Moncalvo.

In 1964 she traveled to New York, where she has lived ever since. Together with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo, she founded the New York Graphic Workshop, a printmaking workshop and key center of operations for the development of conceptual art. During that period Porter worked with shadows, wrinkles, and empty space on the boundaries between the object and its image. At the participatory installation Wrinkle (1969), for example, she accumulates offset prints that become wrinkled. Shortly thereafter, in 1973, her work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was awarded a prize at the Cali (Colombia) Biennial.   

In the 1980s she began to include the use of inanimate objects, toys, and figurines in her narratives, a cast of characters that became her personal stamp. With them she creates dialogues among beings from different times and places. At first her characters were photographed; then they invaded the format of the picture and destroyed it, erasing the borders of time and discipline, and ultimately attaining video form. Currently they have expanded to the third dimension in her theatrical productions. Regardless of format, Porter builds scenes in which humor and evil, tenderness and dismay, as well as a poetic perspective on life, reign in equal measure.   

Her work has been exhibited in more than 35 countries and in over 450 group exhibitions, at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, three fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1985, 1996, 1999), the Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship (1994), and seven PSC-CUNY research prizes (1994-2004). She was a professor at Queens College, CUNY, until 2007.

Individual shows of her work have been held at institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson in San Juan, Argentina; Museso de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, Mexico; the Sicardi Gallery in Houston; the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston, and Galerie Mor-Charpentier in Paris.

In 2017 Porter’s work was included in Viva Arte Viva at the Venice Biennale, the 57th International Art Exhibition, with a widely acclaimed work: El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves (The Man with the Axe and Other Brief Situations), an installation in which she condenses her most memorable characters with other, new ones in flash fiction that describe a great tragedy. In that same year she made her debut with Domar el león y otras dudas (Taming the Lion and Other Questions), her third theatrical production at the Second Performance Biennial, Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires.

Her work can be found in public and private collections like the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in  Buenos Aires, the Philadelphia Art Museum, Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Museum of Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Daros Collection. The artist is represented by galleries in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.