Naturaleza muerta

Naturaleza muerta

"…I became interested in the superposition of the image, the representation of something over the thing itself, shadow on shadow, wrinkle on wrinkle." In this screenprint, the photographic apparition of a woman’s hand appears to make contact with a heavily-contoured, art-school study of a jug, sphere, and pyramid. Where these two illusory worlds meet, they seem to transfer their qualities onto one another, the finger leaving a blue print on the jug, the jug coating the fingertip in its creamy hue. Neither illusion is real, of course; they are the material facts of various inks on paper. For five decades, Porter has explored the radical possibilities of printmaking as conceptual art. Here she exploits the serigraph, a process by which each color is hand-applied through a separate silkscreen, to combine very different kinds of representation in a single space. The resulting image becomes a metaphor for the human body’s uncanny experience of encountering the world, the ways in which we endow objects with identities and interiority even as we become increasingly estranged from ourselves.

Liliana Porter

1981

2013. AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States (OAS). All rights reserved.

Still Image

serigraph

21 x 19.5 in.