Louise Lawler - New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York Wednesday, September 25, 2024 | Phillips
  • “Art is part and parcel of a cumulative and collective enterprise viewed as seen fit by the prevailing culture.”
    —Louise Lawler
    American artist Louise Lawler is perhaps most well-known for utilizing photography as a conceptual tool to explore the production, circulation and presentation of art. A prominent figure in The Pictures Generation – a collective of artists known for appropriating images from media, cinema, television, music, magazines, and even other artworks – Lawler reinterprets traditional forms of representation through her unique lens. In the early 1980s, Lawler established her distinctive approach by photographing artworks created by other artists in diverse contexts, including museums, storage facilities, auction houses, and private collectors’ residences. Through these images, Lawler critically challenges the value, significance, and function of art, highlighting the ways in which contexts of display and circulation shape the meanings of artworks. 

    “A work of art is produced by many different things. It isn’t just the result of an unencumbered creative act. It’s always the case that what is allowed to be seen and understood is part of what produces the work. And art is always a collaboration with what came before and what comes after you…No work is really produced alone.”
    —Louise Lawler
    Executed in 1987, Untitled 1950-51 captures a Joan Miró painting on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Created in the format of a triptych, this 3-part work serializes this curious photographic capture. The photograph, boldly cropped to reveal only the lower half of the Miró painting, centers attention on an ultra-polished wooden bench positioned in front of the work, ironically – or unironically – reflecting the work upon its surface. Strategically placed by MoMA, this bench subtly establishes the painting as a masterpiece worthy of focused and prolonged contemplation, contributing to the value-production process through viewers’ reception. As Claude Gintz observed, “While shifting to reframe a fragment of a work to include a piece of its outside, the eye of [Lawler’s] camera negates the very notion of individualized work as totality, and the emphasis is put on the field of inscription…within which it is shown.”i In a clever play on the image, this triptych was in fact exhibited with an almost-identical bench to the one in the photo in MoMA’s Enough. Projects exhibition in 1987, and later at Larsen Warner in 2023.

     

    Lawler, by deliberately framing the Miró painting from this distinct angle, makes tangible the generally invisible mechanisms by which the museum’s arrangement of artworks orchestrates the viewer’s experience, inviting viewers to reflect on the very institution and how its display strategies influence the reading of a work of art.

     

    i Rosalyn Deutsche, “Louise Lawler’s Play Technique,” in Not-Forgetting: Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of Mastery, Chicago, 2022, p. 204.

    • Provenance

      Metro Pictures, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      New York, Museum of Modern Art, Enough. Projects: Louise Lawler, September 19–November 10, 1987
      Stockholm, Larsen Warner, Louise Lawler Revisited, February 4–April 1, 2023

    • Literature

      Andreas Petrossiants, “Inside and Out: The Edges to Critique,” e-flux Journal, no. 110, June 2020, online

45

Untitled, 1950-51

each signed and dated "Louise A. Lawler 1987" on the reverse of the backing board
cibachrome on museum box, in 3 parts
each 29 3/8 x 39 1/4 in. (74.6 x 99.7 cm)
Executed in 1987, this work is unique.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$70,000 - 100,000 

Sold for $63,500

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Specialist, Head of New Now Sale
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com
 

New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art

New York Auction 25 September 2024