Louise Lawler

Louise Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York, and holds an MFA from Cornell. In many of her projects, Lawler photographs artists' works after they have left the studio, which allows her to comment on the way the art is lived with, exhibited, handled, stored, consigned, reproduced, repackaged, and/or ignored. For example, Lawler will photograph pieces hanging in private collectors' homes or in auction house showrooms waiting to be sold. She is most interested in the juxtaposition of the works with their settings more than the individual works themselves. But Lawler's closely cropped photographs also frame specific ambiguities in art's relationship to notions of longing, exchange, prestige, gender, and power. Lawler constantly mines her archives, trying to find new potential, new crops, and new relationships that could be coaxed out of source images and past work.
Lawler's works are held by a number of institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou; the Guggenheim Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern.
Mary O'Donnell Hulme