An effort both to reposition the viewer and to bring into question the status of art, Louise Lawler’s photographic work strives to blur the conventional art-world boundaries that obtain among artists, curators, dealers, critics, editors, and publishers. Drawing upon the methods in institutional critique developed by a number of her conceptual-art predecessors (Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke among them), she directs the force of her gaze at the bastions of the poststudio art-world infrastructure—galleries, museums, auction houses, and art fairs. She thereby makes salient art’s ambiguous, and often ambivalent, relationship to money, prestige, power, and the still-entrenched hierarchies of gender. Recent venues at which she has had solo exhibitions include Sprüth Magers in Berlin, Metro Pictures in New York City, and Yvon Lambert in Paris. Recent group exhibitions include such venues as the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (Florida, USA) and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA). Lawler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.Seminar Reading
Douglas Crimp & Louise Lawler. "Prominence given, authority taken: Louise Lawler interviewed by Douglas Crimp." Grey room (New York), no. 4 (Summer 2001): 70-81
