LOUISE LAWLER

Lawler’s pictures of artworks installed in the house of a private collector, the storage of a gallery, an auction house or a museum show exemplifies the importance of the contextual component for the mimetic structure of an art work. Our attention is deviated from the artwork to its environment. This shift also opens up our understanding of the art institution: a system of various activities (showing, collecting, conserving, selling) and actors (curator, gallerist, collector, art handler)!

In No drones Louise Lawler shows a selection of works from her latest series. The ‘tracings’ were conceived together with illustrator John Buller and first shown in the retrospective exhibition Adjusted at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2013). The black lining, tracing existing photographs of Lawler are executed in vinyl and directly applied to the wall. Some tracings exist in an edition of ten, others exist in a unlimited edition!

In her recent work Lawler revisits older pictures as a sort of appropriation of her own work. Just as the series Adjusted to fit, the tracings exist as a digital file that can be printed and reprinted on any format, depending the size of the wall on which it will be applied. The immediate relation of these works with the exhibition architecture illustrate the artist’s continous reflection on art and its structures.