“Liliana Porter’s impressive, sometimes unsettling visual universe probes the mysteries of representation and the trials of human existence. She is fascinated by the conflicting boundaries of what we call “reality” as well as by our relationship to the concept of time. For 40 years, she has worked across printmaking, drawing, painting, installation, photography, video, and during the last decade, theater—always using humor as an ally in her work. Her spatial “situations,” which frequently take the form of sculptural stagings, bring together a pantheon of little flea-market-find characters—Elvis Presley, Che Guevara, Jesus, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Pinocchio, Alice, toy soldiers, piggy banks, rubber ducks, and Benito Juárez—in sardonic confrontations that turn seemingly lightweight pieces of kitsch into expressions of philosophical heft.” _ MARIA CAROLINA BAULO

Liliana Porter´s diverse oeuvre comprises printmaking, works on canvas, and time-based media as well as installations and public art projects. Porter began her career as a printmaker and studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the mid-1960s, shortly after arriving in the United States. In 1964 she and Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937) as well as the Venezuelan printmaker José Guillermo Castillo (1938–1999), founded the experimental New York Graphic Workshop, active until 1970. The NYGW promoted the destruction and disposability of the art object through the creation of FANDSO (Free, Assemblage, Nonfunctional, Disposable, Serial Object). Among her most celebrated early works was a series of photoengravings and installations of sheets of crumpled paper from the 1960s. In these works the artist troubled obvious distinctions between object and image and cemented Porter’s reputation as an important early exponent of conceptualism.

By the late 1960s photography would replace printmaking as her primary vehicle, prompting a profound change in the character of her work over the next several decades as she increasingly employed photomontage and appropriation to question distinctions between mimetic images and their referents. In the early 1970s Porter created a series of photographic installations of faces and hands, including her own, augmented with pencil lines, often extending into the space surrounding the image, which continued the trenchant critique of representation begun in her earlier works. Since the mid- 1980s she has created paintings, drawings, collages, videos, and photographs of kitsch and everyday objects, often integrating images of books and other textual represen-tations, which expand her engagement in processes of illusion and signification.