Louise Lawler
No Drones
17 September 2015–30 January 2016
Blondeau & Cie
5 rue de la Muse
1205 Geneva
Switzerland
Hours: Thursday–Friday 2–6:30pm,
Saturday 11am–5pm
T +41 22 544 95 95
F +41 22 544 95 99
muse@blondeau.ch
Blondeau & Cie is delighted to announce a new exhibition by Louise Lawler: No Drones, organised in collaboration with Metro Pictures, New York. The exhibition features a set of works on vinyl, two new photographic prints, and works on paper.
A major presence on the American scene, Louise Lawler started her career in the 1970s alongside artists of the “Pictures Generation” such as Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince, developing a practice grounded in conceptual strategies.
Using photography as her main medium of expression, the artist represents artworks both on display and in storage. Taken in museums, galleries, auction houses, storerooms and the homes of collectors, Lawler’s photographs are framed so as to reveal the surroundings, context and mode of presentation of artworks.
Her work is effectively about the re-presentation of the image in various forms. As Philippe Kaiser writes of her famous Salon Hodler:
“Salon Hodler, a color photograph taken in the noble home of a collector in Geneva, exists in a variety of [other] formats, as a black-and-white matted print, as a paperweight, a projection in public space, as well as a tracing. […] Whereas the black-and-white version appears as a document of the original work, in the best spirit of structuralism, the traced and enlarged version represents the skeleton of the picture. Having mnemonically lodged in our mind and imagination, the picture resonates merely as its own ghost. [The tracings] demonstrate empirically the further steps that can still be taken to explore the extreme ends and corners of pictures and their contexts.”
In her recent series of tracings, created in collaboration with illustrator John Buller, Lawler revisits her photographic compositions in the form of drawings reproduced as black lines printed on vinyl. Applied directly to the wall, these tracings, which exist in digital form, can be printed and reprinted in dimensions that may be varied to fit the wall on which they are exhibited, while still respecting the proportions of the original work.
In the “adjusted to fit” series, the artist retains the original photographic image but digitally distorts this to match the proportions of the given wall. Printed on vinyl, these works are installed, centred and produced in any chosen scale, creating a direct relationship with their display settings.
In the “traced and painted” works on paper, the tracings are reprised in smaller formats, with certain motifs hand-painted in what is a first for this artist.
The eponymous installation of 12 glass vessels, each printed with the words “No Drones,” shifts ambiguously between the status of ordinary objects and artworks, implying a direct exchange between art and society.
These installations express an idea also found in the many ephemera that play a central part in this artist’s work—the colouring books made from her tracings, matchboxes, paperweights, serving mats with reproductions of photographs, and invitation cards expressing a political opinion, like one made by Metro Pictures in 2003: “No drinks for those who do not support the anti-war demonstration”—and which query the status and finality of the artwork.
Born in Bronxville, New York in 1947, Louise Lawler lives and works in Brooklyn.
Her work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States. In recent years, she has had significant solo shows at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013), the Albertinum, Dresden (2012), the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2006), Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York (2005), the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2004), Portikus, Frankfurt (2003), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1997).
She has taken part in a number of historic group shows, including The Pictures Generation: 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Documenta 12, and the Whitney Biennial.
Louise Lawler’s works are held by numerous institutions, including: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; MoCA, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Glenstone Foundation, Potomac, Maryland; MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunstmuseum, Basel.
The exhibition Louise Lawler: No Drones is showcased in the gallery space (ground floor of the building). Also showing on the second floor from 17 September 2015 to 31 October 2015 is Martin Szekely: Manière Noire.
