Museum Ludwig

LOUISE LAWLER
Adjusted
11 Oc­to­ber 2013 - 26 Jan­uary 2014

Cu­ra­tor of the ex­hi­bi­tion: Philipp Kais­er

Louise Lawler's pho­to­graphs of works of art in mu­se­ums, pri­vate col­lec­tions, at auc­tions, or in stor­age em­pha­size the as­pects that we usu­al­ly fail to no­tice. They show just how much the mean­ing of art is shaped by its con­text, sur­round­ings, and ar­range­ment - and that there is no im­par­tial way to pre­sent art.

As­tute, some­times iron­ic, and nev­er shy of de­bunk­ing, for 30 years now this con­cep­tu­al artist born in 1947 has an­a­lyzed the art sys­tem and all of its com­plex rules. Lawler di­rects her gaze to­ward the fringes of art, as it were, cre­at­ing sub­tle com­men­taries of a po­et­ic ca­su­al­ness via com­po­si­tions that distin­guish them­selves by their for­mal ap­proach as well as by their ec­cen­tric­i­ty. Louise Lawler, who em­barked on her oeu­vre in the late 1970s, be­longs to the broad­er field of the "Pic­tures Gen­er­a­tion," which al­so in­cludes Sh­er­rie Levine, Jack Gold­stein, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sh­er­man. At the same time, her be­gin­n­ings were al­so strong­ly shaped by the in­sti­tu­tio­n­al cri­tique of the ear­ly 1970s, and conse­quent­ly her works were ini­tial­ly in­ter­pret­ed as so­ci­o­log­i­cal com­men­taries re­flect­ing on es­thet­ic, eco­nom­ic, and his­tor­i­cal fac­tors in art.

The Mu­se­um Lud­wig has grant­ed the artist to­tal ac­cess to its build­ing for her first large sur­vey ex­hi­bi­tion in Ger­many. The ex­hi­bi­tion com­pris­es around 80 works, which are po­si­tioned through­out the en­tire build­ing, thus en­gen­der­ing sur­pris­ing si­t­u­a­tions through their en­coun­ters with the Mu­se­um Lud­wig's per­ma­nent col­lec­tion.

A new se­ries of ten "trac­ings" has been cre­at­ed for the show-out­line draw­ings that are remi­nis­cent of chil­dren's col­or­ing books and draw on ear­li­er works by Lawler. Fur­ther­more, the artist has agreed to cre­ate two new, large-for­mat "stretch­es" for the Mu­se­um Lud­wig. Th­ese are pho­tos that she has print­ed out on self-ad­h­e­sive vinyl film and whose pro­por­tions she tailors to the space in ques­tion-even if that means de­form­ing the mo­tifs.

A ca­t­a­logue will be pub­lished by Pres­tel with es­says by Hal Fos­ter, Ben­jamin H.D. Buchloh, Sven Lüttick­en, and Philipp Kais­er.