
LILIANA PORTER
Almost There
PARIS
SOLO SHOW
17.05.2025-14.06.2025
1. EXHIBITION TEXT
Almost There traces over five decades of Liliana Porter’s artistic production, from her early conceptual experiments in the 1970s to her most recent installations. It is also an intimate portrait of an artist who, arriving in New York from Buenos Aires at the age of 22, found not only a vibrant city but a technical and emotional laboratory that would profoundly transform her way of seeing the world. Her first works in printmaking — produced at the Pratt Graphic Art Center under conditions unimaginable in Argentina at the time — mark the beginning of a conceptual investigation into image-making. That initial experience — which she described as “a party” filled with pristine plates, high-quality paper, and sophisticated machinery — pushed her to subvert the rules of traditional printmaking: wrinkling the matrix, layering mistakes, photographing the errors, and extending the image into other disciplines.
It is in this context that her earliest collages — presented here for the first time — emerged. These works already articulate key ideas that would shape her practice: the tension between the real and the represented, the image as an active agent, and the possibility of a non-linear narrative. This foundational period reveals a conceptual root that helps us understand how her later works unfold.
Over time, Porter’s practice would take a more explicitly political turn, increasingly shaped by the social, economic, and cultural realities of Latin America. At the same time, her discovery of surrealism — and of Magritte in particular — sparked a poetic impulse that runs throughout her work: the notion that an object can become something more than itself when placed in a different context. The absurd, the metaphysical, and the playful emerge not as escapes from reality but as portals to critical thought and resistance.
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The exhibition spans this arc — from her experimental prints and her work with the New York Graphic Workshop (co-founded with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo), to her most recent large-scale installations in which humor and play draws us back to a kind of animism rooted in childhood. Throughout the show, we encounter miniature figurines engaged in absurdly monumental tasks from her series Forced Labor: a tiny weaver working on an oversized cloth; a miniature painter trying to cover an impossibly vast wall; a solitary gardener tending to a chaotic flower garden made of broken dishes and teacups. These fragile, tender, and tragic scenes operate as contemporary parables — meditations on the excess of labor, the vulnerability of existence in the face of an unmanageable world. Almost There, the piece that lends its title to the exhibition, condenses many of these tensions. A diverse cast of characters — plastic workers, religious icons, supermarket objects — all look toward the same point, as if waiting for something. It is a scene of collective hope, of shared direction, but also of uncertainty and vulnerability. In the artist’s work, scale becomes a language in itself, while the spotlight shifts from the human to the object, from the visible to the implied, from the formal to the political. Humor becomes a method, absurdity a form of critique, and play a tool for reflection.








