Pieces in Portugal
Studio Visit 13
Hello from the beginning of 2026.
At the end of 2025, I was offered an exhibition at DOCUMENT gallery’s outpost in Lisbon. The original intention was to show mostly extant/older works, but since this is my first solo show in two years, I decided to tinker in the studio and create a somewhat new show, approaching it as a project or extension of the studio.
2006
Exactly 20 years ago, in January 2005, a similar thing happened when I was offered a project room show at P.S.1. The first email I have about that project was 1/19/06 and the show opened 2/26/06. Ostensibly curated by Alana Heiss herself, I worked with Chris Lew in his capacity as Curatorial Assistant. The show was last minute, and, at least in retrospect, it wasn’t my best, but it was very important to the development of my work. And it had at least two [1, 2] works of mine I now consider iconic.
In my manuscript for ICONOGRAPHY, I wrote about these two iconic works, some excerpts:
CREAM PIE
Cream pie is an assault, but funny.
A cream pie in the face is at the intersection of comedy, photography, and violence. A staple of early filmed comedy / cartoon logic / low stakes assault. The still photograph money shot is the post-”throw” pie-on-the-face, drippy, spoogie, white-face, clowny, surprise re-action googly eyes possible licking-tongue aftermath.
Of course I’ve been chasing cream pie works since the beginning. The cream pie is my paradigm. The cream pie is my ur-prop. The cream pie is the assault which began it all.
PANCAKE STACK
In 2003, I made an image of a stack of pancakes. I had already been working a lot with food, specifically cream pies, and I would make regular trips to the NYPL Picture Collection – the now widely-known proto google image search repository of clipped images from printed sources such as books and magazines – to find reference images.
As a photograph, rendered in extreme large-format detail, a pancake stack became another kind of cylinder, became doughy flesh, became a mask, became a hiding place, became a challenge (to possibly eat all those pancakes and dig out from behind them).
Pieces
Sometimes the last minute, ‘play freely’ show is an incredible gift. It’s the kind of gift that I had this early winter working in my studio. Some of those works are in the show that will open in Lisbon today, some are still with me in Brooklyn. It’s somewhat rare I guess twenty-years into a career.
I don’t yet have words for this work, and there is no imagery, but somehow they feel of a piece, and at a moment when images are failing me/us.
As we wrote in the press release:
Over the past two decades, Rafferty has created a vast body of wall works, sculptures, and installations that humorously and aggressively grapple with images and iconography in contemporary culture. While some of the works in her exhibition at DOCUMENT Lisbon were made or initiated as early as 2019, Pieces marks a change in Rafferty’s approach to making and exhibiting artwork. After a year of writing and revising a forthcoming book on imagery, Pieces comprises bodies of work entirely devoid of photographic image.
Produced in a small kiln in her Brooklyn studio, the glass pieces in the exhibition are color studies, compositions made from scraps, and other studio experiments made during a time of challenge and change. Themes that emerge in the work include reflection, as in the suite of black glass collages with broken, mirror-like, bubbly surfaces; a possible return to portraiture, as in the translucent, polychrome, rounded, head-sized forms; or, finally, play, as in the assemblages of multicellular, bubble-like shapes. Mainstays of her work, such as formal invention, elliptical logic, specific and culture-bound color, and the breaking of the rectangle on the wall, remain present. Continuing her work in the opaque, translucent, and reflective medium of glass, these collected pieces can be seen individually as humble sketches—often pieced together from slivers, powders, and shards—or taken together as a statement. Pieces.
Av. António Augusto de Aguiar 11
3º Esquerdo, Lisboa, 1050-212.
LISBON | Pieces
Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Can’t wait to see where the germ of this work takes me. If you’re in Lisbon in the next few months, please do check it out, and send your pals.
January 2026 Recommended Reading:
Kate Crawford Atlas of AI
Rachel Eisendrath Gallery of Clouds
Gene Pressman They All Came to Barneys [objectively not a great book but an interesting history of 20th century merchants]
Sally Mann Art Work