Triple Canopy is pleased to announce a new edition by Louise Lawler, published on the occasion of the magazine’s 2014 benefit honoring novelist, short-story writer, and critic Lynne Tillman. ORO is a photograph of an embroidery by the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti called Non Parto Non Resto (I Won’t Leave I Won’t Stay) (1987), as seen at Christie’s 2014 Post-War & Contemporary Art auction in London.
Since the 1980s Lawler has been using photography to investigate the lives of art objects and how meaning is inscribed onto a work as it moves through contexts as varied as the auction house, private home, gallery, museum, or storage facility. With ORO, Lawler embeds within a photograph a work by Boetti, an artist who shares her interest in shifting forms and meanings. The edition’s title calls attention to the graphic and conceptual wordplay in Non Parto Non Resto, which consists of the letters of its title arranged vertically in four columns. If read horizontally, the piece also contains the word oro, Italian for “gold,” twice. Lawler’s title makes a nod to Non Parto Non Resto’s recent auction appearance.
Tillman explains how the edition came about: “I gave the prompt ‘embedded’ to Louise. I told her I believed that, to some extent, all of her work is about embedding, the layering of art within art (which includes another sense of ‘appropriation’), the various politics of embedding.”
Lawler’s work was the subject of a recent retrospective, “Adjusted,” at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. This past summer Metro Pictures, New York presented “No Drones,” an exhibition of the artist’s recent work. Lawler will present a solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin in November. Her work will also be featured in upcoming group shows at Museum für Kunst & Gewerbe, Hamburg; La Panacée, Paris; Grimaldi Forum, Monaco; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde.
Special thanks to Metro Pictures for its generous support.