Dwyer and her contemporaries approached the image-saturated pop cultural landscape with a sense of suspicion and irony, even black comedy.
Dwyer's own early series Cardz (1980), for example, was created from an archive the artist had assembled of magazine clippings, advertisements and news stories purporting to depict “everyday life.” Dwyer distilled from these images a set of twenty-six line drawings that at once defamiliarizes them from their original, often commercial, publishing context and at the same time transforms them into an impersonal catalog of expressive gesture, universal and yet unmistakably the artist's own.
These line drawings were screen printed onto a set of twenty-six “cards” on laminated leatherette paper, returning the images as objects into circulation, albeit one profoundly transformed.
[5] An earlier example of this type of work is Dwyer's KILLER (1991), which consists of a large, lacquered aluminum table, that seen from above, spells out the title of the piece in a violent-looking sans serif font.
[10] In 2013, the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, New York, hosted a major solo retrospective of Dwyer's work titled “Painting & Sculpture, 1982-2012.” New York Times critic Ken Johnson suggested that Dwyer's Desk of Envy, a mahogany desk-shaped word sculpture that, when viewed from above spells out “envy” in large, aggressive letters, be added to “a short list of artworks emblematic of the 1980s, including Jeff Koons’s ‘Rabbit’ and Barbara Kruger's montage ‘I Shop Therefore I Am.”[11] Critic Robert Pincus-Witten reviewed the exhibition in the pages of Artforum, writing that while “Dwyer never became as well known as some of her peers,” the retrospective of her work at the Fisher Landau center “must be regarded as a vivifying corrective to the unwarranted quiet surrounding works so conspicuous by their wit, craft, and serious import.”[12]