Introduction
Jac Leirner, Us Horizon – Online Viewing Room
Esther Schipper is pleased to present Us Horizon, Jac Leirner’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Us Horizon includes a new work from Leirner’s acclaimed series constructed from ensembles of plastic shopping bags, and a new installation made of found numbered markers.
Jac Leirner, who joined the gallery in 2019, is best known for her series of works employing specific everyday materials, such as bank notes, cigarette packaging, airline paraphernalia, business cards, and more recently items purchased in hardware stores. Her conceptually rigorous and formally beautiful works draw on a wide array of art historical and formal influences, as well as embracing the transgressive legacies of Dada, Constructivism, Pop and Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, and Punk, among others.
The exhibition’s central large-scale work, Us Horizon, consists of over 200 vintage shopping bags installed in a double row at eye-level across three walls in the main gallery space. Leirner began collecting the material for this body of work in 1985 and first presented collections of plastic shopping bags at the 1989 São Paulo Biennial and the following year at the 44. Biennale di Venezia. Initially exhibited as vast quilted surfaces covering walls and at times also the floor, or as sculptures made from smaller groups sewn-together, later configurations were exhibited as large orderly grids, most recently at the Museum Ludwig, on the occasion of the artist’s receiving the 2019 Wolfgang Hahn Award. The double line of bags seen in Us Horizon constitutes a new and final format of this body of work. Assembled from individual shopping bags that date from the 1980s to today, Us Horizon’s linear sequence is organized according to their formal properties such as shape, color, and fonts. The bags attest to Leirner’s love of music, of books, refer to exhibitions she took part in or visited, to museums in which she exhibited, or which hold her works in their collections. Others were given to her by family and friends. In this format, as the title suggests, the work forms a horizon, both formally and symbolically: it represents the things that make us.
A new work, Prisms, is composed of small numbered geometric pouches made from multicolored sewn synthetic fabric that are commonly used by São Paolo’s valet parking attendants to identify the cars in their custody. The new collection creates a jumble of numbers, recalling Leirner’s often professed interest in mathematics and the artist’s obvious penchant for creating systems.
Suspended on steel cords in progressive sequences—by shape, color, size—My Unstable Way, 2022, and Expressive Line, 2020, create elegant yet enigmatic ensembles of objects. With its large variety of pens, some with brand names and logos, My Unstable Way draws on Leirner’s history of using found and absconded items. The second ensemble, entitled Expressive Line, assembles a multitude of miniature tires made from rubber or plastic.