Jac Leirner, Miami Art Museum - Adhesive 44

Jac Leirner — Adhesive 44
Miami Art Museum
July 16 – October 10, 2004

Miami Art Museum presents the work of São Paulo-based artist JAC LEIRNER in her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. in over a decade. Jac Leirner creates sophisticated abstractions out of mundane objects. She collects what most of us usually throw away—cigarette packs, airline tickets, envelopes, brochures, museum store shopping bags—and turns them into graceful objects. Jac Leirner has created a new piece for MAM entitled Adhesive 44, her 44th sticker-based work and the largest to date.

Jac Leirner — Adhesive 44 is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by MAM Associate Curator Cheryl Hartup as part of its New Work series of projects by leading contemporary artists.

Adhesive 44 consists of window panes arranged in two 40-foot-long rows and covered with stickers.  Jac Leirner has been collecting stickers for 20 years and draws on her vast personal collection for this exhibition. The windows are of the domestic type found at hardware stores and this is the first time Jac Leirner has used them in her work. Previously, Jac Leirner applied stickers to free-standing bus windows and colored sheets of Plexiglas.

The stickers in Adhesive 44 are divided into categories based on color, subject, material, and form. They are mostly promotional in nature, advertising museums, art fairs, hotels, airlines, and punk rock bands, among others. Adhesive 44 also includes stickers made for children and stickers affixed to crates that transport art. Jac Leirner works with mass-produced stickers such as mailing labels, as well as stickers for one-time only events, and highly specialized stickers with beautiful designs, which she refers to as “small jewels.” Such a “jewel” might comprise the outstanding element in one of her compositions. The artist purchases some stickers, most in the course of her worldwide travels. She also receives many as gifts. Since each sticker has its own history, Jac Leirner’s work is a record of her personal experiences and encounters. Her work also reflects her abiding interest in visual design and the ways commerce and culture interact. The formal rigor of her arrangements gives these random, everyday found objects a sense of ordered beauty.

Adhesive 44 is a harmonious whole comprised of enormously varied parts. The work is at once painting-like and sculptural, and it vividly demonstrates how stylized, mass-disseminated systems of information can be made to seem extraordinary and unique.

Jac Leirner grew up in São Paulo surrounded by her parents' important collection of Brazilian art from the 1950s and 60s, which influenced her ways of thinking and seeing. She arranges shape and color with formal rigor and clarity much like the highly rational geometric abstractions created in Brazil in the 1950s. A decade later, in the 1960s, Brazilian artists strove to break down barriers between art and everyday life and Jac Leirner's choice of materials reflects a similar sensibility.

Jac Leirner also sees her work connected to the generation of artists in Brazil that preceded her own, which includes Cildo Meireles, Tunga, Waltércio Caldas, and José Resende. Her works convey the physicality and sense of refinement found in the works of this generation from the 1970s.

“Jac Leirner is one of the most important artists of her generation working in Brazil today,” notes Cheryl Hartup. “Like Cildo Meireles, whose work was exhibited at MAM last year, Jac Leirner is a pivotal figure in the history of Brazilian art, and Miami Art Museum is delighted to present her work to a wider audience in South Florida.”

JACQUELINE LEIRNER was born in São Paulo in 1961. She studied at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo from 1979 to 1984 and taught there from 1987 to 1989. Jac Leirner’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2002); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2001, 1998); Sala Mendoza, Caracas (1998); The Bohen Foundation, New York (1998); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (1993); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1992); and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1991). Jac Leirner's work has been included in the Venice Biennale (1997, 1990), Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany (1992), and the São Paulo Bienal (1994, 1989, 1983). In 1991 she was a visiting fellow at University College in Oxford, England, and an artist in residence at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she had solo exhibitions. In 2001 she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Jac Leirner lives and works in São Paulo.

About the Curator: CHERYL HARTUP is Associate Curator at Miami Art Museum. Before joining MAM in September 2000, Ms. Hartup served as the McDermott Curatorial Assistant at the Dallas Museum of Art from 1998-2000. Among the exhibitions she has organized for MAM are Light and Atmosphere (2004); Visual Poetics: Art and the Word (2003); New Work: Cildo Meireles (2003); and New Work: Odili Donald Odita (2002). She is currently working on the upcoming exhibitions Fabian Marcaccio and Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s–70s. Ms. Hartup received a M.A. in Latin American Studies and Museum Studies from New York University and a M.A. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.

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101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130
www.miamiartmuseum.org