Louise Lawler is best known for her photographs of the homes of art collectors. These works grapple with and highlight the conventions of display within a domestic setting. One such image is of collector Erika Hoffman’s home in Berlin, photographed in 2000, which features two Lucio Fontana paintings and a portion of a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair on the right. Berlin (traced) is based on this image.
Lawler’s series of tracings began in 2013 when she asked her friend the draftsman Jon Buller to render a selection of her works as black-and-white line drawings. These were then converted to vector graphics. Each edition exists as an adaptable digital file that can be printed on vinyl at any size and then adhered directly to the wall.
It is significant that an important artist primarily known as a photographer has turned to the medium of drawing at a somewhat late stage of her career, suggesting that the medium of drawing questions how collectors and institutions shape art and its context in ways photography does not.
