Pieces: Document, Lisbon

Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Pieces
February 6 – May 23, 2026

DOCUMENT is delighted to present Pieces, Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s fifth solo
exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s first solo show in Portugal. Opening on Friday,
February 6, the exhibition will remain on view through May 23, 2026.

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.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978, Evanston, IL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In her
career she has mounted over twenty solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around
the world. Her most recent institutional solo exhibition, Forum 85, was presented at the
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA in 2021. In 2014 she was included in the Whitney
Biennial, and her first solo exhibition was presented at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2006.
Her work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, NY; the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; the New Britain Museum of
American Art, New Britain, CT; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the University
of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL; the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth,
Hanover, NH and dozens of private collections. She is the inaugural Ruth Stanton Chair of
the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York.