Wrinkle

Born in Buenos Aires and trained in Mexico City, Liliana Porter relocated to New York City in 1964. Soon upon her arrival, she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop (1965–73) along with fellow émigrés José Guillermo Castillo from Venezuela and Luis Camnitzer from Uruguay. During this period, Porter began a series of experiments based on the wrinkling of paper, where her actions served to transform a blank sheet of paper or to cause it to nearly disappear. She extended these investigations to a grand scale, creating room-sized installations of wrinkled paper, as well as to more intimate endeavors.

Wrinkle derives from a related portfolio of ten photo-etchings produced by Porter at the Graphic Workshop in 1968. As the series progresses, a blank sheet of paper is increasingly crumpled up into a small ball at the edge of the page. This work, an artist’s proof of the seventh image in the series, is rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise from the published edition, which is presented in a horizontal format. Wrinkle’s deadpan images function both as formal studies of the paper as well as records of the artist’s repeated manipulations.