Madrid,
In 2016, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Espacio Mínimo Gallery, Liliana Porter, a regular at this room, presented her recent work there: a trio of large-format paintings, made up of four- and five-piece polyptychs, and a video; In both cases he invited viewers to consider their ways of relating to the representation and whether or not it was close to reality. Her expressive use of spaces also stood out, which on occasions this Argentine artist uses as support and on other occasions as a way to highlight absences through emptiness.
Then their first anthology would arrive in Spain, from the hand of Artium Museoa, in 2017; Porter’s participation in the Venice Biennale with his most ambitious project, that same year; and the Francisco Prieto Prize, which she received in 2023 and which will take her to the Mint next November; On one occasion and another, the woman from Buenos Aires has introduced us to playful but significant games, both with space and proportions: using very diverse techniques (painting, prints, video, installations, sculpture, theater and drawing), she has captured in They have a personal world with traits that are also very much theirs, such as fine irony, subtlety and expressive intensity that does not need large sizes or provocative evidence.
Porter defends that the world, the story of history and our time, needs to be narrated from alternative perspectives that break with established orders, which is why he seeks, whatever the discipline he manages, to break and disorder given situations and behaviors, to propose new ways of understanding time and space and building languages that can respond flexibly to changing environments. He emphasizes that his objects are what we materially see, but also the memory they harbor, the idea that those of us who contemplate them have of them and their emotional implications; For this author, who defines herself as postconceptual, everything has a real dimension and a virtual one, and she is interested, above all, in delving into the second.
The proposal with which the autumn exhibition season has opened, again, in Espacio Mínimo is titled “Other unfinished stories”, continues to have as its axis the reflection on the nature of representation and is articulated from a perspective of estrangement towards the environment, which recreates from a small perspective, accentuating its potential timeless and abstract dimensions, trying to combine all places and all times and seeking to merge what an object or figure is and its plastic expression, that is, blurring the much debated limits. between what is real and what is represented.
Awaiting us in the Doctor Fourquet gallery, as the axis of the exhibition, the installation The sweeperwhich with its extensive dimension and its differences in scale between one piece and another practically takes over the surface of the room. The artist began to shape this type of work a little over two decades ago, in the series Forced laborto which he has gradually added new situations and dialogues; and he also decided to present one of these macro-installations seven years ago at the Venetian Biennale: his project at that time was titled The man with the axbut paradoxically it was not carried out by this character in the exercise of destruction but by a woman the size of a finger who, with her broom, erased the mess. For Porter that work was a metaphor of time, of memory, of what is built and reconstructed during life.
The simultaneous narratives proposed in Espacio Mínimo, in addition to wanting to break with temporal linearity, isolate the characters in a non-place that represents a perceptual and interpretive challenge for the viewer, faced with a certain path of disobedience and subversion; We are invited to lose caution in the face of the unexpected, the small but significant gesture.
Other installations in the exhibition will be small and medium format, will be completed with works on paper and will influence Porter’s vocation for the superposition of codes and realities with open and even uncertain readings.
Liliana Porter. “Other unfinished stories”
MINIMUM SPACE
C/ Doctor Fourquet, 17
Madrid
From September 12 to November 8, 2024