Louise Lawler

Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer. From the late 1970s onwards, Lawler’s work has focused on photographing portraits of other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculpture in a gallery being viewed by spectators. Along with artists like Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and Barbara Kruger, Lawler is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation. Louise Lawler lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York. She earned a B.F.A. at Cornell University, and moved to Manhattan in 1969, where she soon took a job at the Castelli Gallery. There, she met Janelle Reiring, who would go on to co-found Metro Pictures with Helene Winer in 1980.

Lawler has photographed pictures and objects in collectors’ homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. Along with photography, she has created conceptual and installation art. Some of her works, such as the "Book of Matches", are ephemeral and explore the passing of time, while others, such as Helms Amendment (963) (1989), are expressly political. Lawler's work, in its diverse manifestations (installations, events, publications, souvenirs...) addresses or confronts prevailing systems of establishing art, taste and style. She is, however, less interested in the original process of creating a work of art than in the context lying beyond the artist's sphere of influence and in which the work is subsequently situated. Often framed as “appropriation art” or “institutional critique”, Lawler’s photographic work lays bare the day-to-day operations of the art world and its circulation and presentation of art works.

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