Painting on Laufener Verputz

LOUISE LAWLER, born in New York, USA, in 1947, investigates the institutional framework of art, using montage, performativity and appropriation as strategies to question, from a feminist perspective, the notion of authorship and the social circumstances that make artistic production possible. By considering the structures of spectatorship and other modes of addressing through which art seeks a relationship with its audiences, the artist bases her practice on the idea that the meaning of a work is constituted in the process of its reception. In Painting on Laufener Verputz (2003 - 2004), Lawler presents a photograph that captures a detail of Gerhard Richter's Motorboot in an exhibition at the Kuns tmuseum Basel. The title used by the artist highlights yet another layer of her complex proposal and refers to the plaster on the wall on which Richter's painting hangs, thus promoting inflections in perception by directing the gaze not only to Richter's painting, but to its relationship to the museum's architecture. Consequently, Lawler emphasizes different modes of production and reception, making art more permeable.