Liliana Porter (1941, Buenos Aires). She has lived in New York since 1964.
“Active from the 1960s to the present, Liliana Porter is, without a doubt, one of the most notable and prolific creators in the contemporary art scene. Her works make up a vast body of work developed from the experimentation of diverse media that travels through the techniques of engraving, drawing, photography, painting, video and more recently theater. As representational material, he appropriates a repertoire of objects and images from popular culture to configure a personal universe of fragments and memories. Each of his approaches subverts the conventions between what we call real and virtual, proposing an oblique gaze and a polysemic reading of the work.
Through his acute sense of humor and the use of sophisticated irony, he speculates on that other truth, closer to fable, poetry and the absurd. In the construction of the represented space, the idealized figures of toys and characters that he collects and classifies by genre, operate as substitute actors for the real, thus creating a distorted sense of identity that implicitly underlines the vulnerability of the human condition. In works such as The Weaver and Black Drip, Porter excludes the object from all context and temporality and introduces a specific poetics of the small that heightens the sense of relativity and points to the paradox between a dramatic yet hopeful world.
His work is represented in numerous public and private collections in Latin America, Europe and the United States including MoMA, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and the Tate Modern, London, among others.”
Ruth Auerbach