Liz Magor
"I started making things as a child simply as a way to make up for the deficiency of what was offered. I found most things around me to be practical, unbeautiful and meaningless. I needed things to be emotionally charged and personal, almost equivalent to me in terms of subjectivity (...) From one point of view, making art is a way of testing the positions one might take relative to the world, and the people and things found in the world. The materials, the images, the operations, the forms of address, they all come from an inventory of possibilities and I'm conscious of my choices. By now I have an enhanced ability to make things, but a diminished need for those things to speak symbolically or profoundly. Now I'm spending hours making the things I used to find unbeautiful and meaningless--a pile of towels, a stack of trays, a discarded jacket, a cardboard box--and setting them up in relationship to found things. My interest is how the studio part affects the found part. Through some mysterious operation the found things become really alive when set against the sculptural representation of something ordinary."
[Source: "A conversion with Liz Magor", Liz Magor, monographic publication, ed. MAC Montréal, Migros Museum & Kunstverein im Hamburg, 2016]
Liz Magor was born in 1948. She lives in Vancouver (Canada). An important artist of the Canadian scene, she participated to a number of group shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Art Gallery in Ottawa, Seattle Art Museum, Wattis Institute, to Documenta 8 and to the Venice Biennale. Triangle Marseille reintroduced her work to Europe in 2013 (cur. Céline Kopp) and it was subsequently shown at Crédac-contemporary art center in Ivry-sur-Seine (cur. Claire Le Restif). In 2017, her retrospective which was initiated by Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal toured at Migros Museum Zurich, Kunstverein in Hamburg and MAMAC in Nice. She was a resident at DAAD in Berlin in 2017-2018. Her solo show, BLOWOUT, was presented at The Renaissance Society, Chicago and at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridgein 2019.