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Joseph Clark Collection

Jac Leirner

Born 1961, São Paulo · Sculpture and installation from everyday materials

Jac Leirner (born 1961, São Paulo) is a Brazilian artist who makes sculptures and installations from everyday materials such as banknotes, cigarette packets, airline ephemera and hardware-store items. She won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2019 and showed at documenta IX and the Venice Biennale.

In the collection

About the artist

Jacqueline "Jac" Leirner was born in São Paulo in 1961 to the collectors Fulvia and Adolpho Leirner (Wikipedia). She took her degree in fine arts at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo in 1984, and she lives and works in São Paulo (Esther Schipper). Her residencies and awards include the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1991, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2019 (Esther Schipper).

She is best known for series built from one kind of everyday material, among them devalued Brazilian banknotes, cigarette packaging, airline paraphernalia, business cards and, more recently, items bought in hardware stores (Esther Schipper). In the series Lung, cigarette packs are taken apart and compressed into stacks (Wikipedia). Her work took part in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1983 and 1989, the Venice Biennale in 1990 and 1997 and documenta IX in 1992 (Wikipedia).

Her solo exhibitions include shows at the Walker Art Center (1991), the Hirshhorn Museum (1992), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2011), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019) and the Swiss Institute, New York (2023) (Esther Schipper). Add It Up at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh in 2017 was her first solo exhibition in Scotland (Fruitmarket). The Joseph Clark Collection's lithograph Couple dates from that year and, according to the collection, was made with Edinburgh Printmakers for the Fruitmarket show (Joseph Clark Collection).

Sources

  1. Wikipedia: Jac Leirner
  2. Esther Schipper: Jac Leirner, biography
  3. Fruitmarket: Jac Leirner: Add It Up
  4. Wikidata: Jac Leirner (Q1676900)
  5. Joseph Clark Collection

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