Doubles / Pairs / Couples

Louise Lawler developed work of institutional critique from works by other artists; since the late 1970s, she has documented the life cycle of artworks in different environments: the walls of art galleries, collectors’ homes, auction houses and museums’ storage areas. In her photographs, she questions the production, circulation and presentation of art, as well as the degree to which the context in which a work is placed influences its meaning and use. Through out-of-focus and clipped framing, the artist draws attention to elements such as posters with auctioning prices, or furniture and objects of decoration that surround the work. Made up of 20 photographs, the installation Doubles/Pairs/Couples alternates two series of different images: the first displays works by artist Robert Longo, also a member of Pictures Generation, and the selection and arrangement of the different elements in space are attributed to one of the founders of Metro Pictures, the gallery responsible for granting exposure to many of the artists identified with Douglas Crimp’s show; the second image shows a room where a painting by Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, a representative of geometric abstraction and kinetic art in Latin America, shares a space with a poster for the American cult horror-comedy movie Gremlins (1984). In the piece, Lawler also works on the theme of repetition and seriation, inherent in the photographic medium and underscored by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) and developed by artists from the Pictures generation.