LOUISE LAWLER

Earlier this year, Lawler took two pictures of Jasper Johns’ iconic painting Three Flags (1958) during the deinstallation of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and created five works by cropping these two pictures.

Each cropping of Lawler’s two pictures experiments with framing and movement, their subtitles (‘swiped’) subtly evoking our digital era and our use of cellphone cameras. While the American flag almost vanishes in Lawler’s works, it is worth mentioning that Johns started utilising the flag in the 1950s “as something the mind already knows.’ Lawler’s practice, as Johns, allows us to see differently what we already know and that ‘you are standing in your own shoes.’

The Paris show also includes pictures of Johns’ lithograph Hand (1963) and works by American painters Agnès Martin and Barnett Newman, all from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Louise Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions such as Andy in Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago (2019); She’s here, Sammlung Verbund, Vienna (2018); WHY PICTURES NOW, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); Adjusted, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking Back), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2006); Louise Lawler and Andy Warhol: In and Out of Place, Dia Beacon, New York (2005); and Louise Lawler and Others, Museum for Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2004).

Lawler has been invited to participate in numerous international group shows, including at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York; MUMOK, Vienna; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In France, she has also regularly shown her work, such as recently at the Collection Pinault – Bourse de Commerce in Paris on the inaugural exhibition (2021).