Liliana Porter
1941–
Trained in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Liliana Porter was drawn to the experimental art scene in New York in the mid-1960s. At a time when Conceptual artists were questioning the definition of art and reacting against modernism’s emphasis on medium specificity, Porter, together with two other Latin American expatriate artists, Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo, determined to bring these concerns to printmaking. Their New York Graphic Workshop, founded in 1964, radically reconsidered the print medium, shifting its focus from the age-old craft of printing individual images to championing a broader view in which editioned works became the essence of printmaking. In addition to exploring the relationship between the individual work and the multiple, the Workshop produced unconventional manifestations of the medium, such as inking the sides of stacks of paper and using them to print on paper-based installations.
In Porter’s Arruga y sombra derramada, a partially excised section of paper that has been wrinkled and then mostly flattened falls over a screenprinted swath of black ink. Here, the relationship between the basic materials of printmaking—paper and ink—is inverted: the ink is printed on one piece of paper and then covered by another. Rather than forming the image, the black ink masquerades as the upper layer’s shadow. Porter expressed a conceptual interest in “the representation of something over the thing itself, shadow on shadow, wrinkle on wrinkle.” The use of screenprinting here raises questions about the status of images in printmaking and foregrounds the complex exploration of perceptual effects central to Porter’s practice, which also extended to photography, video, and installation.
Introduction
Liliana Porter (born 1941) is an Argentine contemporary artist working in a wide variety of media, including photography, printmaking, painting, drawing, installation, video, theater, and public art.
Wikidata identifier
Q528501
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 5, 2025.
Introduction
Porter received her art education at the Ibero-American University in New Mexico and at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop and opened a summer art school in Lucca, Italy.
Country of birth
Argentina
Roles
Artist, collagist, graphic artist, painter, photographer, teacher
ULAN identifier
500116707
Names
Liliana Porter
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 5, 2025.
