Jacqueline "Jac" Leirner, (born 1961) is a Brazilian artist. Leirner is best known for the sculptures and installations she creates from mundane objects and ephemera, including devalued bank notes, used envelopes, promotional tickets, empty packs of cigarettes and plastic shopping bags.

Early life and education

Leirner was born in

São Paulo São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the GaWC a ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

to Fulvia (née Bornstein) Leirner and Adolpho Leirner, modern and contemporary art collectors. Leirner studied visual arts at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo, Brazil, where she graduated in 1984 and taught between 1987 and 1989.

Career

Leirner's work references the history of Brazilian

Constructivism Constructivism may refer to: Art and architecture * Constructivism (art), an early 20th-century artistic movement that extols art as a practice for social purposes * Constructivist architecture, an architectural movement in Russia in the 1920s a ...

and the legacy of Arte Povera and

Minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

. Place and duration related to personal experience are important to her practice. She is often compared to

Cildo Meireles Cildo Meireles (born 1948) is a Brazilian conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor. He is noted especially for his installations, many of which express resistance to political oppression in Brazil. These works, often large and dense, en ...

, Tunga, and

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...

. Leirner organizes and presents her material in unusually complex ways, highlighting the banality of each object, enabling a refocus of its form, colour and beauty. Her work evolved from drawing and painting around 1981, as a reaction to tonal values of objects in space and the narrative that creates.

Works

Leirner created a work titled ''To and From (Walker)'' with the participation of the staff at the

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, t ...

. It is a collection of various sized envelopes connected by polyurethane cord and

plexiglass Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) belongs to a group of materials called engineering plastics. It is a transparent thermoplastic. PMMA is also known as acrylic, acrylic glass, as well as by the trade names and brands Crylux, Plexiglas, Acrylite, ...

. It was shown at the center from November 3, 1991 - January 26, 1992. In her show ''Junkie'' at

White Cube White Cube is a contemporary art gallery founded by Jay Jopling in London in 1993. The gallery has two branches in London: White Cube Mason's Yard in central London and White Cube Bermondsey in South East London; White Cube Hong Kong, in Centra ...

, she showed prints of sculptures she made by carving cocaine crystals juxtaposed with household items. She said that the sculptures were made during four drug binges with three to five grams of

cocaine Cocaine (from , from , ultimately from Quechuan languages, Quechua: ''kúka'') is a central nervous system (CNS) stimulant mainly recreational drug use, used recreationally for its euphoria, euphoric effects. It is primarily obtained from t ...

. She created ''Untitled (Corpus Delicti'') in 1993 with a combination of air-sickness bags, cardboard, and polyurethane cord. The bags come from airlines of different nations. One of her well known areas of work is her sculptures with cruzeiros, the devalued Brazilian currency. She created a collage of 100 and 100,000 bills painted over and put together into a square titled ''All the One-Hundreds''. Her cigarette pack series ''Lung'' was described by

Guy Brett Guy Anthony Baliol Brett (1942–2021) was an English art critic, writer and curator. He was noted for a personal vision, particularly of cultural production of an experimental character. He is known for the promotion of Latin American artists, and ...

as "a startling metaphor" where "the units of mass production" become "the cells of the bodily organ". The packs are deconstructed and compressed into stacks.

Other work

She was a bassist in the punk band UKCT which sparked her to notice the repeating symbols of culture.

Personal life

Leirner currently lives and works in

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

* 1993: Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva * 1999: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo * 2004: Miami Art Museum * 2011: Centre d’Art de Saint Nazaire, France and the Estação Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo * 2012: Yale School of Art (2012) * 2014: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderna, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria * 2015: Bem Pensado, Galerie Fortes Vilaca * 2017: The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Group exhibitions

* 1983: Bienal de São Paulo * 1989: Bienal de São Paulo * 1990: 44th Venice Biennale * 1991: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford * 1992: dOCUMENTA (IX), Kassel * 1993: Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century * 1997: 47th Venice Biennale

Residencies

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, Visiting Fellow *

Museum of Modern Art, Oxford Modern Art Oxford is an art gallery established in 1965 in Oxford, England. From 1965 to 2002, it was called The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. The gallery presents exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. It has a national and internationa ...

, Artist-in-Residence * 1991:

, Artist-in-Residence

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Leirner, Jac Brazilian artists Brazilian women artists 1961 births People from São Paulo Living people