Liliana Porter | "El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves"

In its scale and complexity, El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves – Venecia 2017 is one of Liliana Porter’s most ambitious projects to date. The piece serves as a form of retrospective, as it contains many of the characters, groupings, or situations that have appeared repeatedly in Porter’s works over the last three decades. The installation takes its name from the tiny figure of a man with an axe, shown hacking away at an elongated pile of fragmented objects. The viewer’s eye follows this array of broken pieces as they shift dramatically in scale, from dust-size particles, to chips of broken china, to damaged figurines, to larger objects that include plates and chairs, and finally to a full-size broken piano.