Louise Lawler, whose work raises questions about the production, circulation, and presentation of art, emerged in the 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation—a loosely knit group of artists named for an influential exhibition, "Pictures", organized in 1977 by art historian Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York.

These artists, among them Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Jack Goldstein, used photography and image appropriation to examine the functions and codes of representation in movies, television, magazines, and other forms of mass media.

One of Lawler’s early black-and-white photographs, Why Pictures Now (1981), shows a matchbook propped up in an ashtray. The matchbook’s shadowy presence and the cool sensib...