Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Canada
Liz Magor is one of the most influential Canadian artists of her generation. This non-chronological survey is the most ambitious ever presented, and centres on her sculptures and installations produced over the last forty years.
The exhibition emphasizes the thematic and emotional range of Magor’s practice. From the mental and physical contexts of retail consumerism to the spaces of the museum to the private, interior worlds of addiction and desire, Magor’s oeuvre has consistently combined a high level of conceptual and procedural rigour with the intense investigation of materials. The exhibition alternates in terms of scale, shifting between displays that are monumental and sprawling on the one hand, to intimate and personal on the other. It focuses on the richly layered nature of Magor’s practice—extraordinary in its tendency to meld multiple references to cultures of display, compulsion, and consumption, making the case that this visual and emotional richness is one of the reasons why Magor is one of the most intriguing conceptual artists of her generation.
There is a tension in Magor’s work between the classic concerns of minimal art —working in series, employing non-traditional materials and abstract shapes, while exploring notions of repetition, variation and sameness—and her visual vocabulary, which she opens up to ideas of difference, social identity and psychological conditions.
Liz Magor. Habitude is co-curated by Lesley Johnstone, Head of Exhibitions and Education at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and art historian Dan Adler. The exhibition is a collaboration between the MAC, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg.
