Liliana Porter: For Instance
Valentina Bonomo Gallery, Roma
23 May – 20 September 2007
Pidgeons, plastic rabbits, little clay saints, elegant little ceramic statues, anonymous soldiers, miniscule glass animals, little men that trace gigantic designs or take forced works and divide the scene with a figure of Mickey Mouse, an altar boy, a Nazi. Toys belonging to the world of fairy-tales or taken in loan of reality populate the colored universe of Liliana Porter.
The artist brings life to her photographs, engravings, designs, creating the sensation that, liberated from the rules of real life, there is a grade of dialogue between the objects and their desires, and asks if they can tell us their stories as we watch. They establish in this way an empathy that destabilizes conventional relationships and suggests new confrontations, inviting us to immerse ourselves in a joyful dimension, without the space of time in which absence is coordinated to open us anew to horizons of perception.
The show is accompanied by a catalogue of essays by Irma Arestizàbal, cultural director of the Italian-Latin American Institute.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1941, LILIANA PORTER moved to New York in 1964, where she currently lives and works. In 1965 together with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo, she founded the New York Graphic workshop.
Liliana Porter has always followed a rigorous visual path, expressing herself through engravings, designs, paintings, collages and photography. The intuition of the artist, already defined by a series of engravings created in the ‘70s based on the reproduction of works by Magritte, resides in the consciousness with which the arrival of mass reproduction is thinly confined between images and broken reality; frequently in her works from the ‘80s the images are broken into pieces that move on the plane, never recombining together in coexistence in one insecure state. The works of Porter enrich the little figures, furnishings and toys that, in their first juxtaposition on the canvas, become followed by the protagonists in the photographic portrayals of the artist. At the end of the ‘90s Porter broadened her horizons of experimentation, creating “films” which are then transformed in video format.
Liliana Porter has exhibited in some of the most important museums of contemporary art, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Panama, and at the Bronx Museum for the Arts in New York. Her works take part in important collections in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. She has received important international recognition from the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 and the New York Foundation for the Arts Scholarship in 1985.
With the collaboration of Nicole Mathysen-Gerst
VALENTINA BONOMO
Via del Portico d'Ottavia 13 - 00186 Roma
