Louise Lawler

(b. 1947)

Louise Lawler mines the instability of the photograph and the gallery space. Lawler began her career in the late 1970s alongside artists of the Pictures Generation, an informal group whose photographs interrogated the social coding underlying mass media images. She is perhaps best known for her photographs of artworks by other artists, which are often taken in storage or installed in private homes, subverting the ability of the appropriated motifs to function as commodified images. In 2011, Lawler began making her “adjusted to fit” works, which manipulate the aspect ratio of digital files according to the dimensions of particular gallery walls. Her work in this period contends with the persistence of war and the militarization of American life.