Liz Deschenes

Liz Deschenes (Boston, 1966) lives and works in New York.
Since the early 1990’s, Liz Deschenes has produced a body of work that emancipates photography from its conventional definition as a document and explores the material condition of the medium and its processes. Making use of the medium’s most elemental aspects, namely paper, light, and chemicals, Deschenes creates shifting surfaces that function as sculptural or architectural rather than photographic objects. The artist’s carefully calibrated installations probe disparate histories of image production, abstraction and exhibition making while collapsing the attributed roles of the viewer and the artwork.

She has had several group shows including Persistence of Vision at Gopius Bau, Berlin (2026), Frames Per Second (SILENT) at Eastman Museum, New-York (2025); Nineteenth-Century Photography Now at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2024); PRINT MATTERS, YEAH! , curated by Christophe Boutin, Serralves Foundation, Porto (2024); Expanded Visions : Photography and Experimentation at CaixaForum, Madrid (2023); Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirschhorn Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.(2023); For the People of Paris at Campoli Presti, Paris (2022); Une seconde d’éternité, Pinault Collection at Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2022); Plages at Campoli Presti, London (2017).


Her work is included in the permanent public collections of MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; ICA Boston.