Liliana Porter
Liliana Porter was born in 1941 in Buenos Aires
She currently lives and works in New York
One of the most cited Argentinean artists in contemporary culture, Liliana Porter has long questioned the boundary between reality and its representation. She is a master at distilling life and art to simple profundities through humorous juxtapositions of incongruous objects. Over the years, Porter has amassed a prodigious and eccentric collection of figurines, knickknacks, toys, and souvenirs from her global travels. These kitschy objects appear regularly in her work, inviting political, philosophical, and existential interpretation through their arrangement in unexpected situations. Each tchotchke represents a different era and cultural/historical narrative. Porter delights in manipulating time, history and reality by combining them as though in dialogue in a timeless white space. In 1964 Liliana Porter moved to New York, where she has lived and worked since. The same year, she founded The New York Graphic Workshop with two fellow artists: Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo, with the goal of redefining the practice of printmaking.
Since an early solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in 1973, she has exhibited widely throughout Europe, South America and the United States, with important solo retrospectives at the Museo Tamayo De Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2008) and ARTIUM Vitoria, Spain (2017). She was also part of the main exhibition, Viva Arte Viva, at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).
Her work is in numerous public and private collections in Latin America, Europe and the United States, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and the Tate Modern, London.
Professor at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) from 1991 to 2007, Liliana Porter has been the recipient of significant prizes and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1999, 1996, 1985), the Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship (1994) and seven PSC-CUNY research awards (from 1994 to 2004).
Several monographs of her work have been published and the scholarly work, Liliana Porter and the Art of Simulation (Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Ashgate Press) was published in 2008.
