Jac Leirner

Jac Leirner (born Jacqueline Leirner) was born in 1961 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she still lives and works. She studied at the Fundacao Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in Sao Paulo from 1979 to 1984, earning a Licenciatura Plena, the Brazilian equivalent of a bachelor's degree, in fine arts. She later taught at FAAP from 1987 to 1989.

Her practice, associated with Brazilian conceptual art, is built from methodical accumulations of ordinary and consumer objects, gathered, sorted, and arranged into serial forms that turn everyday material into structured visual records. Her international profile grew through a series of residencies and visiting-artist positions in the 1990s and 2000s, including University College and the Ruskin School at Oxford, the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (all 1991), the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1998), and Yale University School of Art (2012). She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001.

Leirner has participated in major international exhibitions including Documenta IX in Kassel (1992) and the Venice Biennale in 1990 and 1997. A 2011 retrospective at Estacao Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo won the APCA award for best exhibition of the year in 2012. In 2019 she received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which paired the honor with a solo exhibition and an acquisition of her work for the museum's collection. Recent solo exhibitions include Institutional Ghost at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2017), Add It Up at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh (2016 to 2017), and a 2023 solo show at the Swiss Institute in New York.

Leirner is widely described as a central figure in Brazilian conceptual art. In a 2023 Newcity Brazil profile tied to her Swiss Institute exhibition, Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo director Jochen Volz and critic Guy Brett both discussed her practice, characterizing her method as the disciplined gathering of ordinary, often discarded material into rigorous serial form. That reading runs through the institutional response to her work, from her early biennial appearances in the 1990s through the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2019.

Leirner's auction record is USD 221,000, paid for Nomes (Names) at Phillips in November 2014, according to Phillips' own artist page, which describes it as her world auction record. The exact sale date and sale location for that transaction are not confirmed in available sources. Public auction activity for her work has otherwise been sparse and lower in value, for example Big 38 (2013), which sold for USD 33,000, about 10 percent above its USD 30,000 low estimate, at a Christie's Latin American Art online auction in New York in December 2025, and no confirmed sale since 2014 has approached the Nomes record. Her market activity runs primarily through her galleries, Frente+Faria in Brazil and Esther Schipper in Berlin, rather than through the secondary market.

No published catalogue raisonne has been identified for Leirner, so provenance and authentication questions are generally resolved through her representing galleries rather than an independent scholarly body. Her auction history is thin relative to her institutional standing, with very few tracked public sales and a record set more than a decade ago, which means any single result should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable benchmark. The strongest signal of durability is her presence in major museum collections across the Americas and Europe and her continuing gallery program, rather than auction volume.