Introduction

Swiss Institute presents the first major institutional solo exhibition in New York of Jac Leirner. The exhibition encapsulates a wide chronological span of the artist’s experience, with works ranging from the 1980s to today.

In stacks, piles and layers, Leirner’s selective accumulation of everyday objects follows an accretive logic. Leirner’s process, at once controlled and compulsive, leads to partially obscuring the very nature of the materials she gathers as they mutate to the sculptural. The paradoxical performance of erasure through accrual echoes the disappearance of Leirner’s objects of choice over the years: plastic bags, cigarettes, banknotes and business cards, once ubiquitous and seemingly irreplaceable, are increasingly pushed out of circulation.

Tethered between an essential urge to amass and incidental forms of serendipity, Leirner’s commitment over more than 40 years to gathering materials, objects and products composes “an idealist lexicon of signs wherein the will to live itself is discernible in an ever-receding materiality,” as Baudrillard wrote of objects of consumption. Her continued formal tribute to expendable materials elevates the ephemeral to the biographical, the collective and the sublime.

Jac Leirner
Swiss Institute
38 St Marks Pl
New York, NY 10003
May 10 – August 27, 2023
www.swissinstitute.net