Louise Lawler came to prominence in New York in the early 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation. Pictures artists, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine, among many others, made critical work through the appropriation of widely circulated advertising imagery, slogans, and fine art, probing their audience to ask questions about the nature of art itself. Lawler is known for making photographs that capture cropped details of artworks installed in collectors’ homes, museum storage facilities, or auction rooms. By emphasising the “look” of the artwork in unity with its environment, she also shows a subjective, behind-the-scenes view of the art world, presenting what is often swept under the rug by austere white-cube galleries. In her recent works, Lawler began experimenting with digital effects, adding distortions and stretching images to engage their site of display. Lawler’s work for the The Milk of Dreams combines her many photographic methods into a multi-layered installation titled No Exit (2022): photographs of MoMA’s 2020 Donald Judd retrospective – taken with the lights off, after hours, in the dark – are positioned directly on top of Hair (adjusted to fit) (2005 / 2019 / 2021), a room-filling vinyl image. Lawler’s continued re-engagement with her images challenges the assumed meanings we attribute to art, status and culture.
Isabella Achenbach
