Liliana Porter

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941

            From her early exhibitions in the 1960s to the present, Liliana Porter's work has succeeded in establishing its own recognizable and subtle world. Trained at the Manuel Belgrano National School and the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts, she found in installation syntax a sophisticated fictional laboratory. Each of her works entails attention to detail and exudes a formal delicacy that has become a stylistic hallmark. Her production has traversed the halls of museums, galleries, and international biennials and is part of the most important collections of contemporary art, populating them with small sensory traps, perceptual paradoxes, and neat narrative exercises starring little ornaments, toys, and dolls.

            Varying and mixing media and languages—drawing, painting, video, collage, photography—the artist had a notable inclination for printmaking in the early stages of her training, the rudiments of which she had incorporated at the Ernesto de la Cárcova National School of Fine Arts. Settled in New York since 1964, where she founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo, graphic work soon transitioned into languages in which the issues inherent to conceptual art, those of simulation and reproduction, acquired greater density. In this way, her trajectory ventured into an aesthetic that was simultaneously hyper-realistic and minimalist, which with a notable economy of resources managed to generate tensions between language and reality, between representation and object.

            In this sense, the artist's search found, in the mid-1990s, in the composition of playful microcosms, a powerful tool of artistic communication. Mickeys, lead soldiers, unique figurines, or mass-consumer toys led to the coexistence of the world of the everyday with a feeling of exposure, loneliness, desolation. Arranged in minimal scenes, but of enormous spatial and sensory projection, Porter works like a great scenographer, a silent demiurge who stages situations that blur the boundaries between illusion and truth, between childish fantasy and the sinister, between innocent play and caustic denunciation. Sometimes endowed with humor, sometimes with a melancholic tone, in Porter's universe, perplexity coexists with fascination.