Louise Lawler

Key Points

• As a key member of the influential Pictures Generation, Louise Lawler has become a central figure in the photographic medium
• Her work is collected by some of the most important institutions around the world, including the MoMA, the Tate and the Centre Pompidou
• Originally photographed in 1989, A Spot on the Wall dates from the artist’s most desirable decade
• The Joseph Beuys portrait by Andy Warhol is a recurring theme in Lawler’s practice, which often explores the intersection of art and money

In Context

As one of the key artists from the influential Pictures Generation, Louise Lawler has long engaged with notions of originality, representation, authorship and contextualisation through her impressive oeuvre. Her debut exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York in 1982, titled Arranged by Louise Lawler, took the act of appropriation to an extreme by creating an installation using the gallery inventory and re-presenting other artists’ work as part of her own artwork (offered for sale at their cumulative price plus 10%). 

Such radical appropriation was extremely relevant at a time when photography had come to cast doubt over the function of authorship and originality. As postmodern French philosophers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault’s influential essays on the topic were being translated into English, Louise Lawler alongside contemporaries such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, would not only complicate notions of authorship by depicting other artists’ work in her photographs, but also engage in institutional critique by emphasising the physical circulation of art, whether it was in museums, private collectors’ houses or in storage spaces. 

Crucially, she would often engage with the relationship between art and commerce, as in the case of A Spot on the Wall from 1989-98. Here, three artworks by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are shown hanging at a Sotheby’s preview in 1989. The Warhol portrait of Joseph Beuys is a recurring theme for Lawler, as the Warhol-Beuys dichotomy (the American being the symbol of capitalism and the German the symbol of socialism), reflects her own interest in the relationship between the cultural and monetary values in art.

Comparable works

The market

Although not as famous as her contemporary Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler has a strong primary and secondary market across the United States and Europe. Whilst her auction record stands at over USD 500,000 her work has privately sold for over USD 1 million. For an early work, A Spot on the Wall is attractively priced.

Biography

Presented at Explore Sydney Contemporary (11-21 November 2021)