Louise Lawler

Part of the Pictures Generation, Louise Lawler has used photography since the early 1980s to examine the conditions under which art is seen and the networks through which it is circulated, displayed, and sold. Exploring how such changes of context not only engender different experiences of art but produce different meanings, Lawler uncovers the various, often conflicting, interests that underpin the sites in which art is encountered and commodified: galleries, museums, art fairs, collectors’ homes, auction houses, and art storage facilities. Her photographs have captured items such as wall labels, packing and shipping materials, and exhibition vitrines—ancillary elements, usually unremarked upon or unseen, that nonetheless affect an artwork’s reception and meaning.

Salon Hodler, Lawler’s image of the living room of a Swiss art collector, demonstrates the centrality of context in the experience of viewing art. It features two large fin-de-siècle paintings by the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler that hang on adjacent walls. In this room the paintings function as status symbols, taking their place alongside other emblems of wealth and taste such as an ornate chandelier and antique furnishings—an elegant décor that seems to neutralize Hodler’s vibrant palette and even temper the eroticism of his embracing couples. Lawler relies here on photography’s presumptions of objectivity—the image, like those in many of her works, has a clinical, detached feel—even as she exploits the aesthetic possibilities of her medium through the use of large-scale, glossy prints that document her prepossessing subjects.