Louise Lawler: The Tremaine Pictures 1984-2007

Louise Lawler focuses her camera on high art and its spaces, from the rarefied white cube to the windowless storeroom, from the collector’s luxurious bedroom to the featureless boardroom. Part institutional critique, part social commentary and part wandering gaze, Lawler’s glossy photographs redirect the viewer’s attention from the artworks to their environs, exposing a set of supple relationships surrounding the presentation and marketing of art and its role in conferring and reflecting power. Lawler’s emphasis on context as a defining factor in the assignment of an object’s value throws her own sumptuous photographs into a state of eloquent suspension. In 1984, Lawler was granted access to the homes of visionary collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine, and she has since tracked the works she photographed there as they have wended their way through museums and auction houses. With texts by Stephen Melville and Andrea Miller-Keller, this publication gathers almost all the Tremaine Pictures produced between 1984 and 2007.