One Wall, One Work: Louise Lawler

“Louise Lawler specializes in taking nuanced photographs of other artists’ work. Specifically, she shoots art in its context, after it leaves the studio, silently commenting on the way it’s lived with, exhibited, handled, stored, consigned, reproduced, repackaged, sidelined, or ignored. She will, for example, show us a brawny Jackson Pollock hanging in someone’s dining room, its visual habitat intruded upon (and its colors echoed) by a fussy porcelain soup tureen perched on a sideboard below it. Or she’ll photograph remarkable pieces in auction-house showrooms looking like chattel as they wait to be sold.”
–Rachel Wolff

In addition to her iconic photographs, Louise Lawler has continually created installations. For the work on view at Krakow Witkin Gallery, the eponymous short story was first encountered by the artist’s mother on the wall of a roadside cafe. Over the years, Lawler has paired this found text with a photograph of a living room (1985), printed it on glass tumblers (1986), and in 1993, she made the exhibited work which consists of the text always in the same size (1 ½ x 5 inches), in a specific blue press-type, and centered on a wall painted a particular pink. What varies in each installation is the size of the walls (the artist’s instructions are for the pink “to fill a given space from boundary to boundary”).

In such an abbreviated text, issues of idealism, innocence, purpose, reality, sentimentality, and time are all engaged. Juxtaposing such a dense and compact story in a stereotypically gendered blue (that could be mistaken for black without close attention) on a pale pink that is often much larger than the text creates a scenario where the potentials of the words are engulfed in a large expanse of semi-vibrant, semi-pale, stereotypically gendered pink. As the text is found and the size of the “installation” is responsive to the space, Lawler balances between choice, control, and happenstance to create a work that provides both obvious and nuanced opportunities for inquiry. Lawler’s presentation is energetic, gentle, and humorous, recalling the comfortingly familiar pages of a story book, all while leaving room for ambiguities and refraining from passing judgment.

Louise Lawler (born 1947) grew up in Bronxville, New York, earned a B.F.A. at Cornell, and moved to Manhattan in 1969. In 1978, she had her first official gallery exhibition at New York’s Artists Space. For the show, she borrowed a small 1883 portrait of a horse that had been hanging over a Xerox machine in the gallery’s back office and installed it on an empty wall in the gallery. To highlight her appropriation, she installed two spotlights: one above the picture and another pointed out the window at the building next door, connecting those outside to the space upstairs.

The artist has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. She has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2006); Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York (2005); the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2004); Portikus, Frankfurt (2003); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1997); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (1987). Her work has recently been featured in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which included her in its 1991, 2000, and 2008 biennials. Her works are held by a number of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou; the Guggenheim Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern, among many others. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.