SHE’S HERE. Louise Lawler. Works from the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna

SHE´S HERE

Louise Lawler (born in 1947 in New York) is an important American artist. She belongs to the so-called Pictures Generation, which has critically questioned the function of the mass media with the medium of photography since the beginning of the 1980s. An extensive show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017 looked back over her 40 years of creativity. The VERBUND COLLECTION in Vienna is now the owner of the biggest Lawler collection; since it was established in 2004, it has acquired twenty-seven works by the artist. Now in 2018, the first Louise Lawler exhibition in Vienna is being held on the eight floors of the Vertical Gallery. The show fits into one of the two focal points of the collection, namely the ‘perception of spaces and places’; alongside the other focus of the ‘Feminist Avant-Garde’, the title SHE’S HERE refers cheekily to this focus.  

Louise Lawler’s extraordinary photographs make it clear that our perception of an artwork is always influenced by its immediate surroundings. Depending on whether the artwork is located in a gallery, museum, vault, auction house or in the private rooms of collectors, its meaning, presence, effect and statement changes. Lawler never changes the situation in which she photographs artworks. The high-gloss surfaces of her photographs convey the impression of a painting.
 
The publication SELECTED AND RELATED. Works by Louise Lawler from the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna & Others brings together for the first time all twenty-seven works of the VERBUND COLLECTION and shows them alongside related photographs selected by the artist. It appears in a German and an English edition by the publisher Buchhandlung Walther König.

Photos: © Gregor Titze, Vienna