Biography

Liliana Porter uses a whimsical collection of toys and figurines of animals and people to populate work that, with wit and a wry sense of humour, offers a metaphor of the human condition.

Working in printmaking, painting, photography, video and installation, Porter plays with the scale and fragility of the tiny objects that become the characters in the stories she tells. Porter showed five works in the 2009 Sharjah Biennial, including her acclaimed video Fox in the Mirror (2007).

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1941, Porter moved to New York in 1964.  Since an early solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1973, she has exhibited widely throughout Europe, South America and the United States, with a recent solo retrospective at the Museo Tamayo De Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2008). She has worked on numerous public art projects over the years and was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation to create her first web-based project in 2008. Her work is found in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate, London, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.

Professor at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) from 1991 to 2007, Porter has been the recipient of significant prizes and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1999, 1996, 1985), the Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship (1994) and seven PSC-CUNY research awards (from 1994 to 2004). Several monographs of her work have been published and the scholarly work, Liliana Porter and the Art of Simulation (Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Ashgate Press) was published in 2008.  The artist continues to live and work in New York.

October 2010