Jac Leirner: Selected Works

Overview

Jac Leirner's obsessive accumulations of cigarette packaging, shopping bags, hardware and, at Sharjah Biennial 12, banknotes, rulers and Sudoku puzzles entangle her conceptual practice with Arte Povera and Dadaist and Pop movements, while formally recalling Concrete art, Minimalism and Constructivism.
For SB12, the artist presents a selection of existing and new works from three series. The first is constructed from cruzeiro banknotes and dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, an inflationary decade for Brazil that saw the rapid devaluation and eventual collapse of the currency. In Os cem (roda) [The one hundreds (wheel)] (1985–86), thousands of now-worthless hundred-cruzeiro notes are strung together to form a circle, which obscures their function and identity. Two new works, both titled métrica minima [metric minimum] (2015) are made from hundreds of completed Sudoku puzzles, grids of numbers and handwritten mathematical solutions that reveal the artist’s subjectivity. The works Big Transparency, Small Transparency and Yellow Rules (all 2015) make up the third and final series presented here. A continuation of her three-decades-long practice of assembling large quantities of the same materials, often small units of everyday objects, to create a new whole, these works employ common rulers in simple yet rigorous installations of pure mathematics and form.