Louise Lawler has worked for several years on the concepts of exhibition, presentation, hanging, and the social use of art.

Reviving an issue inherited from the historical avant-gardes, the artist draws our attention to the exhibition “framework”: the wall, the framing, the fragment, the label, the title, the name of the donor, the curator, or the testamentary clauses imposed by certain institutions, as well as the auction rooms.

Through a sometimes humorous interplay of image and text, Lawler questions the way we look and contemplate. What is the difference between a so-called “neutral” hanging in certain museums and the more affective display constructed by a private collector?

The artwork, the so called masterpiece, becomes the image of a poetic or financial power, or the mirror of a social class’s “taste.” At a time when many new museums are flourishing with the function of establishing a history, the New York artist confronts our vision with the staging of art. Among others: the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where Louise Lawler was invited in 1986 to take part in the exhibition The Work and Its Hanging, for which she presented photographs of various well-known versions of Fernand Léger’s La Lecture in their current environments; the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1987; or in Boston; the Maison de la Culture et de la Communication in Saint-Étienne in 1988. Different places are targeted, examined in detail through her camera.

Through this new mode of inscription, her research offers a different, more critical view of the art object as product, and of the deconstruction of pre-existing presentation systems.

The precision and intelligence of her framing, the beauty of the glossy Cibachrome prints, the painted frames that sometimes play with the dominant tones of the photograph, and the titles in the form of questions all give the work an “art atmosphere” that stimulates the viewer, placed in the active position of voyeur and reader.

This is Louise Lawler’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Meert Rihoux; the first, titled Les Objects, took place in September 1988.