Liliana Porter bio

liliana porter

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941
Lives and works in New York City
Studied at Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City

Printmaking, photography, and filmmaking are important media in my work. I used to make photo-etchings and also photo-silkscreens to print images on paper, on canvas, or directly on the wall. In 1995 I started to work directly with photography (black and white and Cibachrome prints), and since 1999, I have completed two short films. Then in the summer of 1999, during a residence in Italy ,I produced a series of small drawings and collages that were probably influenced by my own films, I incorporated sound into some of the drawings. As a logical consequence of these drawings and collages, the lithographs produced at Tamarind Institute where born. Drum Solo, for example, is a lithograph that represents a pig ( a small, plaster piggy bank pig) playing the drums. When the viewer puts on the earphones attached to the back of the frame, he or she hears a compact disk recording of this pig trying to follow the music with his drums. The wonderful thing is that the pig is an immobile drawing, so the viewer has to "unite" in his or her mind the two dissimilar kinds of information (music and image). In Dreamer, Three of Them, Broken, and Disguise, the situations all have the potential of being funny but actually have multiple interpretations. With a minimum of manipulation, I want the characters to act as recipients of our subjectivity and make evident our role as animators.

Selected recent exhibitions
2000	The Secret Lives of Toys: Liliana Porter Photographs, Phoenix Art Museum The Space Inside the Mirror, Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York Emiso Art Center Gallery, De Pauw University, Greencastle, Indiana Latin American Still Life: Reflections of Time and Place, El Museo del Barrio, New York Territorios Ausentes, Casas de Americas, Madrid, Spain Tamarind: 40 Years, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque
1999	For You, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York For You, Projects, ARCO, Madrid
1998	Ellos y Algunos Otros, Espacio Minimo, Murcia, Spain Arte Poetica, University Art Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, SUNY at Stony Brook
1996	Fotografias, Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires, Argentina Them, Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York
Selected public collections
Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela Museum of Modern Art, New York City Museo de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina Philadelphia Museum of Art La Biblioteque Nationale, Paris Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia Museum of Contemporary Graphic Art, Fredrikstad, Norway Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Musee d'Art, Lodz, Poland Musee d'Art Contemporaine, Montreal, Canada