Liz Deschenes
Liz Deschenes
Liz Deschenes' works are guided by her experimentation with the technical conditions of the medium, the construction of new perspectives on reality, and a deep interest in architecture as well as its influence on our perception.
Described as the "quiet giant of post-conceptual photography" in the New York Times in 2014, Liz Deschenes liberates her photographic-sculptural works from any representational task historically assigned to photography. Her minimalist works focus on the conditions of perception and the technical coordinates of “image making”: material, place, time, and architecture. The "how we see our reality" thus is always intertwined with a political component in Liz Deschenes' work. According to Eva Respini, "At the core, Deschenes' work embodies resistance: the resistance to one definition of photography, the resistance to time, and the resistance to representation, a deeply personal and political act. The resistance to representation in many forms also includes the representation of identity, gender, and the body. The closer we look, the more the work reveals its numerous layers. Depending on the day, the weather, the architecture, and if somebody else is in the gallery with a viewer, each encounter with Deschenes' work is a profoundly unique experience that speaks to our fundamental desire for art to transform us."
Liz Deschenes (1966) lives and works in New York. Her works are part of museum collections such as Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and Pinault Collection.
Her work was recently featured in the exhibitions "Expanded Visions" at CaixaForum, Madrid (2023); “Une seconde d’éternité”, Pinault Collection - Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2022); "Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection", Washington D.C (2022); “Shifting the Silence”, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2022) and in the Biennale de Genève: “Sculpture Garden” (2022). In 2021, Liz Deschenes was featured in the exhibitions “True Pictures?” at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, "Off the Wall" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and “The Inconstant World” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2020, her work was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in the exhibition “Photography + Fine Art: Material Meanings - Selections from the Contance R. Caplan Collection”. Deschenes was presented in a group exhibition at Punta Della Dogana / Pinault Collection, Venice (2019). Past solo exhibitions include the ICA, Boston (2016); MASSMoCA, North Adams (2015); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014) and Secession, Vienna (2012-2013). Deschenes' work was included in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner at the Whitney Museum, New York (2015) traveling to the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016).
