Liliana Porter

"I arrived at the conclusion that, when one tries to say a lot, one reaches a limit, but silence, on the other hand, holds infinite potential."

Featuring works made between 1968 and 1974, Liliana Porter's fifth solo exhibition with Sicardi Gallery, Liliana Porter: The Square and other early works, offers a rare opportunity to view works from a significant period of the artist's early production. Porter arrived in New York in 1964, where she began making prints at the Pratt Graphic Art Center. The following year, she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo; the NYGW offered a forum for making prints while simultaneously redefining conventional models for producing and distributing art. Liliana Porter: The Square and other early works includes prints, photographs, and installations which reflect the artist's move toward an aesthetic austerity and rigorous conceptual approach that has marked much of her work since: “I began creating absences (using shadows) and thinking that I could use images that were in themselves sort of meaningless," she observes in a recent interview. "...for me this meant using a small nail, a hook, a shadow, a folded paper. On the other hand, I became interested in the superposition of the image, the representation of something over the thing itself, shadow on shadow, wrinkle on wrinkle... I was not interested in the trompe-l’oeil itself but in the situation… I think that even today that empty space continues to be the protagonist of my work.”

Porter is internationally recognized for her work in printmaking, works on canvas, photography, video, installation, and public art. She has shown nationally and internationally with major exhibitions in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Her most recent solo exhibition The Man with the Axe and Other Brief Situations is currently on view at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). In 2009, her solo exhibition Línea de Tiempo was shown at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1985, 1996, 1999), the Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship (1994), and PSC-CUNY research awards (1994 to 2004).