Swiss Institute presents the first major institutional solo exhibition in New York of Brazilian artist Jac Leirner. The exhibition encapsulates a wide chronological span of the artist’s experience, with works ranging from the 1980s to today.

In stacks, piles and layers, Leirner’s selective accumulation of everyday objects follows an accretive logic. Leirner’s process, at once controlled and compulsive, leads to partially obscuring the very nature of the materials she gathers as they mutate to the sculptural. The paradoxical performance of erasure through accrual echoes the disappearance of Leirner’s objects of choice over the years: plastic bags, cigarettes, banknotes and business cards, once ubiquitous and seemingly irreplaceable, are increasingly pushed out of circulation.

Anchoring the ground floor gallery at SI is Leirner’s Blue Phase (1992), a looped sculpture made of cruzeiro banknotes, whose stacked form conceals the former identity and function of the now-worthless currency. References to minimalism are also found in several wall-based sculptures throughout the gallery, where collections of everyday objects, including notebook spirals, bubble levels, pencils from art institutions and nail files, among other materials, are methodically turned into lines and rows.

The vault gallery brings together a key piece from Leirner’s Lung series (1987) and the newly produced July 4th (2023). While the new work consists of a mound of antiqued faux parchment replicas of the original, handwritten United States Declaration of Independence, Pulmão/Lung (Vegetal/Mineral) is a pile of hundreds of aluminum-lined papers, painstakingly extracted from cigarette packets. The conflating of histories, from the personal to the political, the diaristic to the systemic, points to the artist’s interest in the materials that underpin daily social interactions.

Crossing the building, Straight with Rounds (2023) brings together a large selection of objects that Leirner chose by virtue of their circularity, lightness and modest size. Like disparate beads on a stretched, seemingly endless tension cable, taken away from their context of use and extracted from what the artist describes as “the infinity of materials,” the wheels and rings invite wonder and examination, as if seen for the first time.

The second-floor gallery features Village Inside I and II (2023), made of printed matter culled from across the East Village. Covering two canvases, the myriad leaflets, menus, napkins, matchboxes and more offer a painterly rendition of the storied neighborhood’s vibrant daily life. Its raucous quality resonates in Hardcore Drummer (Talco) I (2023), a new piece made from broken drumsticks once used in Sao Paulo’s 1980’s punk scene. These objects echo examples of the artist’s early geometric experiments in two watercolors displayed side by side in the same space.

Tethered between an essential urge to amass and incidental forms of serendipity, Leirner’s commitment over more than 40 years to gathering materials, objects and products composes “an idealist lexicon of signs wherein the will to live itself is discernible in an ever-receding materiality,” as Baudrillard wrote of objects of consumption. Her continued formal tribute to expendable materials elevates the ephemeral to the biographical, the collective and the sublime.