Jac Leirner

Jacqueline "Jac" Leirner (born 1961) is a Brazilian artist. Leirner is best known for the sculptures and installations she creates from mundane objects and ephemera, including devalued bank notes, used envelopes, promotional tickets, empty packs of cigarettes and plastic shopping bags.

Leirner studied visual arts at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo, Brazil, where she graduated in 1984 and taught between 1987 and 1989. She is often compared to Cildo Meireles, Tunga, and Marcel Duchamp.

Leirner organizes and presents her material in unusually complex ways, highlighting the banality of each object, enabling a refocus of its form, colour and beauty. Her work evolved from drawing and painting around 1981, as a reaction to tonal values of objects in space and the narrative that creates. In her show Junkie at White Cube, she showed prints of sculptures she made by carving cocaine crystals juxtaposed with household items. She said that the sculptures were made during four drug binges with three to five grams of cocaine.

She created Untitled (Corpus Delicti) in 1993 with a combination of air-sickness bags, cardboard, and polyurethane cord.

Her cigarette pack series Lung was described by Guy Brett as "a startling metaphor" where "the units of mass production" become "the cells of the bodily organ".

Other work She was a bassist in the punk band UKCT which sparked her to notice the repeating symbols of culture. 2014: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderna, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 2015: Bem Pensado, Galerie Fortes Vilaca 2017: The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Group exhibitions 1983: Bienal de São Paulo 1989: Bienal de São Paulo 1990: 44th Venice Biennale 1991: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1992: dOCUMENTA (IX), Kassel 1993: Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century 1997: 47th Venice Biennale

Residencies University of Oxford, Visiting Fellow Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Artist-in-Residence 1991: Walker Art Center, Artist-in-Residence