Liliana Porter’s work playfully subverts convention, disrupts time, and messes with reality. Using a wide range of media, Porter mixes the absurd with the philosophical, creating extraordinary situations that lure us unwittingly into the realm of her idiosyncratic cast of characters.

Drawing from an eclectic collection of figurines, knickknacks, toys, and souvenirs, Porter features these characters in unexpected combinations and circumstances. The peculiar situations she invents, where disparate events occur simultaneously, or dissimilar protagonists interact, wittily invite political, philosophical and existential interpretation.

Catastrophes proliferate in Porter’s new body of work. Thick black or white liquids threaten, and sometimes engulf, her tiny figures. Stoic in the face of daunting tasks - recovery or clean up - the characters elicit empathy from occupants of a similarly disaster-filled world.

Juxtaposed with this new body of paintings and photographs will be a related collection of exceptional historical work from the early 1970s.

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and lives in New York. In 1965 she founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo, which is the subject of a current exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Her work is also currently on view in “Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.