ASHER LIFTIN: CAT´S CRADLE
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Cat’s Cradle, Asher Liftin’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, opening at our Tribeca location.
January 9 - February 14, 2026
When Asher Liftin first sent me some jpegs from his Cat’s Cradle project, my response was that I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. I needed to see these things in person.
Little did I realize that I wasn’t just articulating a common problem, one that’s existed at least since the rise of color photography but which became really pervasive with the advent of the internet, email, and social media: Images of artworks give us information about them but not the experience of them that would allow for a proper understanding of that information. I was also unwittingly pinpointing the philosophical crux of Cat’s Cradle, which is that an artwork may convey an image, but is not in itself only an image: On the one hand, it is also a thing, and on the other, it is a node in a system of meaning.
Art is both more material and less material than an image. But images of the work tend to produce the illussion that the work is an image above all.
This is a new, art-specific variant of an ancient conundrum: the incongruence between appearance and reality. In art, this conundrum has often manifested itself through trompe l’œil, that is, the creation of an illusion of three-dimensionality.
Cat’s Cradle is not exactly a work of trompe l’œil. Rather, it’s a work that turns trompe l’œil inside out by making the artwork itself the occasion of deception and doubt and not just its instrument.
These twenty drawings are displayed facing a seemingly identical grid of twenty prints of the same drawings. That’s in the project’s first phase. In its second phase, the work consists of an edition of twenty sets of twenty sheets, each set containing just one of the original drawings and nineteen reproductions of its companions. Thus, the twenty editioned copies will appear identical, but each will have a different handmade image among its printed brethren.
- Barry Schwabsky, New York, 2025