September 5 – October 14 2023
Reception: Saturday September 9, 3-5pm, with a curatorial tour at 3pm
LILIANA PORTER
Unfinished Tales
Hosfelt Gallery presents a solo exhibition of the work of one of the most significant Latin American artists working today – the 81-year-old Argentinian, Liliana Porter.
In photographs, video, drawings, and sculptures Porter creates artworks at the intersection of object and image. By mixing the absurd with the philosophical, she creates extraordinary situations which lure us into the realm of an idiosyncratic cast of characters drawn from an eclectic collection of figurines, knickknacks, toys, and souvenirs. Porter places these characters in unexpected combinations and circumstances, creating scenarios tinged with humor and pathos involving incongruous events and unlikely protagonists.
Conceptually rigorous in spite of their playfulness, Porter’s artworks invite a range of political, philosophical, and existential interpretation, as well as a full embrace of the human experience in all of its messiness and paradox.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1941, Liliana Porter studied art in Mexico and Argentina before moving to New York in 1964. There, at age 22, she co-founded the famed New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo after an acquaintance offered her access to the printing press in his Greenwich Village apartment. Porter has shown extensively internationally, including most recently solo museum exhibitions at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay; MALBA, Buenos Aires; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museo Rayo, Roldanillo, Colombia; Centro Cultura de España, Santiago, Chile; and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, as well as a two-person exhibition with Marcel Broodthaers at The New Museum, New York. Her work is in numerous public and private collections in Latin America, Europe and the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Daros-Latinoamerica Collection, Zurich; and Tate Modern, London.
Current solo museum exhibitions include a career retrospective, Liliana Porter: Reality Play—From the 1960s to the Present Day, on view at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France through August 27, and Actualidades/Breaking News, on view at the San Jose Museum of Art from July 28, 2023 to February 25, 2024.
Organizer
Hosfelt Gallery represents an international roster of artists whose work is grounded in a broad understanding of history — visual, cultural, political and social. Our program is built around artwork with a refined level of execution that offers new perspectives on critical discourses in contemporary art, culture, and politics.