Story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth. Story-truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts.
-Tim O'Brien

Liliana Porter, The Riddle / Charada, 2019, still from digital video, duration: 8:40 minutes

Opening Saturday

Liliana Porter: The Riddle / Charada
Ben McLaughlin: Ex Libris

Liliana Porter
The Riddle / Charada

Hosfelt Gallery presents the world premiere of Liliana Porter's most recent video, The Riddle/Charada, featuring an idiosyncratic cast of characters culled from her ever-evolving collection of toys and figurines that she finds in flea markets, antique stores, and souvenir shops. The narrative is constructed from a sequence of vignettes wherein these characters interact in unexpected and darkly humorous ways, to a poignant soundtrack by Sylvia Meyer.

Liliana Porter, The Riddle / Charada, 2019, still from digital video, duration: 8:40 minutes

Porter’s quirky objects have a double existence. On the one hand they appear as banal or kitschy curios; at the same time, they possess a gaze that evokes a certain pathos, provoking the viewer to endow them with an interiority and identity. Each theatrical vignette in the video presents a pointed visual commentary that speaks to the human condition. Leaving the narrative intentionally ambiguous and open to a variety of interpretations, Porter entices the viewer to unravel the riddle.

Liliana Porter, The Riddle / Charada, 2019, still from digital video, duration: 8:40 minutes

Seminal Conceptual Prints

In 1965, at the age of 22, Liliana Porter moved from Argentina to New York, where she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo. Together they radically re-defined the meaning and purpose of printmaking by putting technique at the service of ideas.

Liliana Porter, Untitled (with geometric shapes), 1975, photo etching and collage on paper, 26 x 23 inches

To elucidate the conceptual and philosophical foundations of Porter’s work, accompanying the film are a group of seminal prints made in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Liliana Porter, Untitled (hook and string), 1973, silkscreen and string on paper, 20 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches

In Conversation: Liliana Porter & Aimé Iglesias Lukin

Liliana Porter will be in conversation with Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Director and Chief Curator of Visual Arts at the Americas Society. Watch the event live on Instagram Wednesday, March 10 at 2pm PT.

A recording will be posted to Youtube post conversation.

Ben McLaughlin
Ex Libris

The tiny and evocative oil-on-panel paintings in Ben McLaughlin's third solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery were mostly made in 2019 and 2020, and they mark a time of global uncertainty, tension and precariousness. Yet the London-based painter’s intimate, often dream-like tableaus are a reflection of the slower, more interior-focused lives many of us have found to be the flip-side of pandemic shelter-in-place.

Ben McLaughlin, John Cheever, Collected Stories, 2021, oil on panel, 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches

Ben McLaughlin, The Colossus, 2021, oil on panel, 8 x 11 3/4 inches

With the technical facility of a Dutch master and a muted palette, McLaughlin creates eccentrically cropped, ambiguous scenes that are drawn from childhood memories of growing up in a home he describes as more "like a collage, with books and papers everywhere” than a flat in London. He considers them “chronicles of the last century.” And though they do not romanticize or pine for a “better time,” they are unquestionably about memory: both its persistence and its instability.

Ben McLaughlin, The Life of Our Lord, 2021, oil on panel, 4 x 6 inches

Recognizing that books summon memories, McLaughlin titles the paintings in this exhibition after books in his parents’ extensive library. But the pairing of book title and painting is randomly assigned and intentionally unrelated to subject matter. This disconnect between title and image allows the work to hover in a zone of continually shifting meaning. Often simultaneously bucolic and slightly ominous, McLaughlin’s imagery, in conjunction with his appropriated titles, conjures an open-ended, multivalent narrative that is particular to the viewer.

Ben McLaughlin, The Fairy Queen, 2021, oil on panel, 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches

Ben McLaughlin, Lands and Peoples IV, 2021, oil on panel, 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches

Ben McLaughlin, The Young Alfred The Great, oil on panel, 6 x 4 inches

Todd Revisits His Favorite 50 Novels From the Last 50 Years

50. The Border Trilogy — Cormack McCarthy
– All the Pretty Horses
– The Crossing
– Cities of the Plain
49. English, August: An Indian Story — Upanamyu Chatterjee
48. Neuromancer — William Gibson
47. Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy — Olivia Manning
– The Danger Tree
– The Battle Lost and Won
– The Sum of Things
46. Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy — Olivia Manning
– The Great Fortune
– The Spoilt City
– Friends and Heroes
45. The Conservationist — Nadine Gordimer
44. Gate of the Sun — Elias Khoury
43. Grendel — John Gardner
42. The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov
41. Housekeeping — Marilyn Robinson
40. The Hakawati — Rabih Alameddine
39. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet — David Mitchell
38. Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut
37. The Tea Lords— Hella S. Haasse
36. A Fine Balance — Rohinton Mistry
35. In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
34. Dictionary of the Khazars — Milorad Pavić
33. Cat’s Eye — Margaret Atwood
32. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler — Italo Calvino
31. The Aubrey-Maturin Series — 20 novels — Patrick O’Brian
30. An Artist of the Floating World — Kazuo Ishiguro
29. A Suitable Boy — Vikram Seth
28. Moth Smoke — Mohsin Hamid
27. The Lost Daughter — Elena Ferrante
26. Play It as It Lays — Joan Didion
25. History (A Novel) – Elsa Morante
24. The Great Fire — Shirley Hazzard
23. Canopus in Argos: Archives — Doris Lessing
– Shikasta
– The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
– The Sirian Experiments
–The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
–The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
22. The Sea, The Sea — Iris Murdoch
21. The Pick Up — Nadine Gordimer
20. The Overstory —Richard Powers
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
18. My Name is Red — Orham Pamuk
17. The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera
16. The Obscene Bird of Night — José Donoso
15. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis — José Saramago
14. Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders
13. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ — José Saramago
12. Lavinia — Ursula K. Le Guin
11. Death with Interruptions — José Saramago
10. The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien
9. A Book of Common Prayer — Joan Didion
8. Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie
7. The Regeneration Trilogy — Pat Barker
– Regeneration
– The Eye in the Door
– The Ghost Road
6. Neapolitan Novels — Elena Ferrante
– My Brilliant Friend
– The Story of a New Name
– Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
– The Story of the Lost Child
5. The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
4. The Raj Quartet — Paul Scott
– The Jewel in the Crown
– The Day of the Scorpion
–The Towers of Silence
– A Division of the Spoils
3. Blindness — José Saramago
2. The Transit of Venus — Shirley Hazzard
1. Augustus — John Williams

"We enter into books as if into a conspiracy; for company, of course, and narrative, and romance; for advice on how to be decent and brave; for a slice of the strange, the shock of the Other, the witness not yet heard from, archaeologies forgotten, ignored, or despised; and also for radiance and transcendence, that radioactive glow of genius in the dark."
–Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle

Alan Rath at Art Basel

Art Basel OVR: Pioneers
March 24-27

As a pioneer in the realm of electronic, robotic, and computer-generated art, Alan Rath has been selected for inclusion in Art Basel's upcoming online fair.

Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms will open with a VIP Preview starting at 6am PT on March 24, followed by public days from 6am PT March 25 through 4pm PT March 27.

You will be able to access our Online Viewing Room here.

Oatmeal, Dark Chocolate, Pecan, and Flaked Sea Salt Cookies

1 cup flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
14 tablespoons butter
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 cup chopped pecans
68.75 g Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate (70% cacao) or 1/2 275 g baking bar, cut into small-medium pieces
Flaky sea salt (such as Maldon sea salt flakes), to taste

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Separately, beat the butter and sugar together until fluffy, then add the egg and vanilla and mix well. Gently add the flour mixture, then the oats. Once they’re well combined, add the pecans and chocolate chunks; stir them in to distribute evenly. Roll the dough into ping pong sized balls and gently press flat onto a parchment-covered cookie sheet. These will spread out as they cook -- so give them space. Finally, sprinkle liberally with flaky sea salt and bake about 13 minutes. Take them out when the edges just begin to brown. If you like them crispy all the way through, leave them on the cookie sheet a couple of minutes longer. If you like them chewy in the middle, immediately put them on a rack to cool.

Hosfelt Gallery is located at 260 Utah St, between 15th & 16th streets. Wheelchair accessible entrance at 255A Potrero Avenue. For more information call 415.495.5454 or visit hosfeltgallery.com.

Open Tuesday through Saturday
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Hours: Tu, W, F, Sa 10-5:30, Th 11-7

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