It Spins (inverted and pushed to one side)

Name: It Spins (inverted and pushed to one side) - Louise Lawler
Brand: Keijiban
Price: 620.000000 EUR
Availability: InStock

Louise Lawler

2023/2025

Archival pigment print

51.5 x 72.8 cm

Unframed

Edition of 60 copies signed and numbered by the artist on a certificate, plus 5 artist’s proofs and 3 publisher’s proofs

Price

€620.00

Tax included・Free shipping in Japan

The edition

In this piece, Louise Lawler examines one of the pillars of twentieth-century art, Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913). Composed of a single wheel without a tire, affixed to the top of a stool, the work is considered the first readymade in history. It was the first of an influential series of pieces that turned the grammar of art on its head. As Duchamp pointed out, it was not a static statue. He regularly turned the wheel in his studio, its comforting movement akin to the undulating flames of a roaring fire. Although the work was always displayed motionless, its true nature was that of an object in motion. It was not only a precursor of conceptual art, but also a forerunner of kinetic art.

With her new edition, Louise Lawler intends to revive this iconic work. She does so by means of photography, firstly, through the interplay of shadows and a positive-negative inversion; through a graphic composition on the sheet of paper that further heightens its dynamism; and through an evolving display in the keijiban vitrine that has four configurations. With its Galilean title, It Spins (inverted and pushed to one side) offers a humorous and pertinent commentary on Duchamp’s work. It also represents a kind of reflection on the core of Lawler’s practice, which has always consisted of electrifying works of the past and present, restoring a movement that has gone lost in the institutions and conventions of the gaze.

The artist

Louise Lawler Portrait ルイーズ・ローラー — Louise Lawler, *Portrait*, 1982

Louise Lawler was born in 1947. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Louise Lawler is a key figure among the artists who emerged in the seventies and eighties, and one of the foremost members of the Pictures Generation. She is mostly known for her photographs of artworks in the setting of museums, galleries, auction houses or collector’s homes, which question the rules and rituals that define the circulation and reception of art.

An essential aspect of Lawler’s reflexive practice consists of re-using her own photographs and presenting them anew though different formats and mediums, transforming them into wallpapers, tracings, or even paperweights. A good example of this contextualizing approach is the “adjusted to fit” series, in which Lawler’s images are expanded to fit the dimensions of the display. She also produced installations that reflect her feminist and anti-war engagement, such as Birdcalls (1972/1981), a six-minute sound piece in which the artist squawks and chirps the names of twenty-eight of the leading male artists of the time.

Louise Lawler is represented by Metro Pictures (New York), Sprüth Magers (Berlin, London, Los Angeles), and Galerie Greta Meert (Brussels).

The exhibition