A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Preface by Bridget Oetker and Isabel Podeschwa. Introduction by Wolfgang Tillmans. Contributions by Philipp Hübl, Jonas Kaplan, Joe Keohane, and Michael Seemann. Interviews with Lionel Barber, Carolin Emcke, Sigmar Gabriel, Bianca Klose, Stephan Lewandowsky, Brendan Nyhan, and Wolfgang Schäuble by Wolfgang Tillmans


 is the title of this year’s edition of Sternberg Press's Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 2000s Tillmans has been working on 

, a series of works concerned with absolute claims of truth in social and political contexts.

Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and psychological findings such as the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?

Tillmans interviewed scientists, politicians, journalists, and social workers, highlighting the issues at stake from various angles. The publication also contains analytic texts and studies that shed further light on what happens in our brain, ethics, and online behavior when we are confronted with statements that oppose our political beliefs. Tillmans associated these texts with his own images as well as visual material found in print and online. While designing this year’s Jahresring, he has created photocopy works using the four-color scan process on a machine from the 1990s—an early digital collage technique that resonates with the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in today.

Jahresring 64

Wolfgang Tillmans: What Is Different?

Allie Biswas

Spotlight Series

Interview with the artist by Allie Biswas

Presenting recent developments in Wolfgang Tillmans’s portraiture and still lifes, 

 features a broad selection of new and recent works that respond to their surroundings while at the same time embodying a self-contained environment.

Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced a younger generation more than Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium, and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.

Published on the occasion of Tillmans’s exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong in 2018, this fully bilingual catalogue juxtaposes pictures of intimacy and friendship with views and angles of the world at large. An aerial view of the Sahara desert displays almost infinite detail while being monochromatic and near-abstract in appearance. In line with Tillmans’s interest in exhibitions as amplifiers of a particular, underlying perspective, each of the works engages in an intricate system of relationships between its aesthetic elements, subject, and institutional setting. Seen together, they implicate the viewer as an active part of the dialogue. The 2016 interview with author Allie Biswas of 

 has been edited and expanded by the artist for this catalogue.

Wolfgang Tillmans: DZHK Book 2018

James Rondeau

Kate Nesin

Juliane Rebentisch

Texts by James Rondeau, Kate Nesin, and Juliane Rebentisch.

This publication examines both the art-historical framework of Tomma Abts’s painting as well as its deep philosophical and psychological dimensions.

With a rigorous approach and self-imposed limitations to both scale and composition, Tomma Abts (b. 1967) has reinvigorated painterly abstraction and its relevance within contemporary art. Using a fixed canvas size and a vertical format, Abts deploys basic formal elements such as arcs, circles, planes, and stripes to create powerful works that are at once subtle and eccentric. This extraordinary book, designed in collaboration with the artist herself, is a substantial and deeply insightful treatment of her career to date and features sixty works made over the past decade. Essays not only contextualize Abts’s work within an art-historical framework of methods, process, and style, but also examine her paintings’ philosophical and psychological dimensions and their embodiment of a creative process that transcends the specifics of any particular work.

Tomma Abts

Vernon Lee

Dylan Kenny

ekphrasis

An openly lesbian, feminist writer, Vernon Lee—a pseudonym of Violet Paget—is the most important female aesthetician to come out of nineteenth century England.

Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy, and art criticism. An early follower of Walter Pater, her work is characterized by extreme attention to her own responses to artworks, and a level of psychological sensitivity rarely seen in any aesthetic writing. Today, she is largely overlooked in curriculums, her aesthetic works long out of print.

David Zwirner Books is reintroducing Lee’s writing through the first-ever English publication of "Psychology of an Art Writer" (1903) along with selections from her groundbreaking "Gallery Diaries" (1901–1904), breathtaking accounts of Lee’s own experiences with the great paintings and sculptures she traveled to see. Ranging from deeply felt assessments of the way mood affects our ability to appreciate art, to detailed descriptions of some of the most powerful personal experiences with artworks, these writings provide profound insights into the fields of psychology and aesthetics. Her philosophical inquiries in 

leave no stone unturned, combining fine-grained ekphrases with high fancy and dense abstraction. The diaries, in turn, establish Lee as one of the most sensitive writers about art in any language.

With a foreword by Berkeley classicist Dylan Kenny, which guides the reader through these writings and contextualizes these texts within Lee’s other work, this is the quintessential introduction to her astonishing and complex oeuvre.

The Psychology of an Art Writer

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

Diaries and journals have a long, complex history within visual culture. American artist Sherrie Levine continues the tradition with 

Inspired by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s 

 and its famed opening entries, written in 1953— “Monday: Me. Tuesday: Me. Wednesday: Me. Thursday: Me.”—Levine prints the word “ME.” on each calendar page in 

. Levine’s diary is a playful riff on autobiography amidst our narcissistic culture.

Sherrie Levine: Diary 2019

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Tiffany Bell

Robert Storr

Known for her extensive body of intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency.

Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Josef Albers’s legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground.

Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist’s work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper, and more. Together the body of work demonstrates the centrality of Asawa’s innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the twentieth century. In addition to an incredible group of photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham, a selection of rare archival materials will illustrate a chronology of the artist’s life and work. Featuring an extensive text by Tiffany Bell which explores the artist’s influences, history, and, most importantly, the work itself, as well as a significant essay by Robert Storr discussing Asawa’s work in relation to mid-twentieth century art history, culture, and scientific theory.

Ruth Asawa

Marilyn Monroe, Ronaldinho, and now Lolita—the layers of newspaper that line Rose Wylie’s studio floor are a frequent source of material for the artist. Drawing from such wide-ranging cultural areas as film, literature, mythology, news images, sports, and individuals she meets in her day-to-day life, Wylie paints colorful and exuberant compositions that are uniquely recognizable. This new limited-edition zine, titled 

, puts these larger-than-life works front and center, Wylie’s animated, vivacious strokes now canvassing the page.

Bold, wild, and continually humorous, Rose Wylie creates paintings and drawings that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any recognizable style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated mediations on the nature of visual representation itself. These works make use of an idiosyncratic visual lexicon, the directness of cartoonish figures, and a flattened perspective, but simultaneously betray a deep awareness of art history and painterly conventions.

, this zine presents a new series of paintings and works on paper made specifically for Wylie’s second solo exhibition at David Zwirner, London in 2018. Loosely referencing a house that was constructed across the street from Wylie’s residence in Kent, England, 

 continues the artist’s ongoing fascination with the shifting nature of memory and the multi-layered external associations that become attached to it over time.

Rose Wylie: Lolita's House

Clarrie Wallis

Rose Wylie trained as an artist in the 1950s, but it was her re-engagement with painting in the early 1980s, after a period spent raising a family, that marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to evolve and impress. This monograph, the first of its kind, follows Wylie\s fascinating artistic journey, celebrating her achievements while also examining her current practice.

Rose Wylie\s large-scale paintings are inspired by a wide range of visual culture. Her subject-matter ranges from contemporary Egyptian Hajj wall paintings and Persian miniatures to films, news stories, celebrity gossip and her observation of daily life. Often working from memory, she distills her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections. In weaving together imagery from different sources with personal elements, Wylie's paintings offer a direct and wry commentary on contemporary culture. Her pictures refuse judgment but reveal a concern with the everyday that makes visible its enigmatic core.

Drawing on a series of extended interviews with the artist, Clarrie Wallis unpicks the complexities of Wylie's visual language, so providing an important contribution to our understanding and appreciation of a significant and increasingly celebrated figure in contemporary British art.

Rose Wylie

Hal Foster

Richard Serra

“The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work.”—Richard Serra

Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. 

 is both an intimate look at Serra’s life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist’s work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration—from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu—revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium’s most brilliant figures.

Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

Richard Serra: Conversations about Sculpture

Edited with text by Anna Szech. Text by Fabienne Eggelhöfer

 examines a previously little-explored aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Among the nearly 10,000 works Klee created in the course of his career are some of the most pioneering and influential examples of modernist abstraction—works that continue to resonate today.

Starting in 1913, this book presents around 100 works from all periods of Klee’s career, reproducing paintings and drawings from numerous renowned institutions and private collections in Europe and overseas. The works are grouped under four themes—nature, architecture, painting, and graphic characters—that show how Klee constantly oscillated between the semi-representational and the absolute abstract.

Paul Klee: The Abstract Dimension

Boris Friedewald

This beautiful volume offers high-quality reproductions and the latest biographical information on Paul Klee, who helped pave the way for Modernism.

Readers of this book will find much to discover and relish in Paul Klee's art. Reproductions of his iconic works as well as those that are more rarely exhibited are featured alongside in-depth biographical information that looks beyond his many artistic achievements to explore the life and times of the artist. Photographs of Klee and his circle, as well as entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, offer a multifaceted perspective on a groundbreaking artist and the events that helped shape his colorful and imaginative work.

Paul Klee: Life and Work

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Victor Wang

The Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo is known for an inventive practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled.

In recent years, Murillo has traveled extensively throughout the world to research and prepare exhibitions and other projects, making works both in the studio and in unexpected locations. As a result, airplanes, which are able to move more or less freely and without regard for borders, and the contemplative isolation afforded by these long journeys, have become an important site of production for the artist. His large-scale canvases, in turn, are a synthesis in both form and content of his experiences. By combining personal allusions with more universally recognizable references, Murillo aligns these paintings with preceding art-historical movements that conceptualized art not as a hermetic language but rather as a critical tool for interpreting a world outside of itself—comprising, as he notes, “an accumulation of thought, gesture, discourse, action, and motion.”

Through his command of gesture, form, and spatial organization, Murillo is able to convey a complex and nuanced understanding of the specific conditions of globalization and its attendant state of flux, while nevertheless maintaining the universality of human experience within this milieu. Published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition of paintings and works on paper at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2018, 

 is accompanied by an essay by curator and writer Victor Wang, who attests to Murillo’s work as being guided by mobility. This publication is available in both English only and 

Oscar Murillo: the build-up of content and information

César Aira

Katherine Silver

By César Aira. Translated by Katherine Silver. Foreword by Will Chancellor. Afterword by Alexandra Kleeman

Translated into English for the first time, 

, a speech by the renowned novelist César Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts.

On Aira’s dizzying and dazzling path, everything comes under question—from reproducibility of artworks to the value of the written word itself. In the end, Aira leaves us stranded on the bridge between writing and art that he set out to construct in the first place, flailing as we try to make sense of where we stand. Aira’s 

 series is dedicated to doing—exploring the space in which words give meaning to objects, and objects shape our words.

Like the great writers Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch before him, Aira operates in the space between fiction and essay writing, art and analysis. Pursuing questions about reproducibility, art making, and limits of language, Aira’s unique voice adds new insights to the essential conversations that continue to inform our understanding of art.

On Contemporary Art

The rich, revealing, and thrilling story of five women whose lives and painting propelled a revolution in modern art, from the 

Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, 

 is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting—not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.

Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting.

These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In 

acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.

Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, And Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters And The Movement That Changed Modern Art

Ninth Street Women

Portrait of Neo Rauch, 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter.

Ralph Keuning

Harald Kunde

Ulf Küster

Norman Rosenthal

Klaus Werner

Texts by Ralph Keuning, Harald Kunde, Ulf Küster, Norman Rosenthal, and Klaus Werner

 is a survey of the painting of Neo Rauch. It begins with his first solo show in 1993 at the renowned Galerie Eigen + Art in Leipzig and traces in detail the developments in his oeuvre up to the present day, using paintings from prominent international collections as examples. Accompanying essays by well-known curators and art historians provide fundamental insights into Rauch’s complex body of work.

When Rauch was a student of Arno Rink at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany was still a divided country. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when his large, cryptic paintings first debuted in the art world, Rauch became the trailblazer for the New Leipzig School, and its most famous representative, with paintings combining elements of Pop art, comics, and advertising graphics.

Paintings 1993–2017

Neo Rauch: Dromos

Texts by by Brett Littman and Jeff Fleming. Interview with the artist by Ena Swansea

Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden / From the Floor

 reproduces the first exhibition entirely devoted to his drawings in the United States. Neo Rauch is one of the best-known artists from the Leipzig school in Germany. His psychologically complex paintings have been widely collected and written about for more than twenty years. Featuring more than one hundred fifty never or rarely seen works that span over thirty years of Rauch’s career, this catalogue presents drawing as an essential but often overlooked aspect of his oeuvre. A collaboration between The Drawing Center and the Des Moines Art Center, the show was presented first in Des Moines in 2018.

The drawings, which Rauch describes as “dreams on paper,” are made during periods of intense painting activity and are left on the floor of the studio for his assistant to pick up and place in flat files for storage. Rauch, who never makes preparatory sketches or drawings before he begins painting, uses the medium instead to mine his own subconscious and to visualize characters and scenarios for the works in progress. His drawings range from thumbnail compositional sketches for paintings, to phone doodles, figure and landscape studies, and to more formal and completed works.

Kevin Moore

Painters often draw from existing visual materials, such as photographs and reproductions of past works of art, to inspire and construct their work. Swedish artist Mamma Andersson (born 1962)—known for her dreamlike, faintly narrative compositions inspired by Nordic painting, folk art and cinema—is no exception.

But Andersson takes this process a step or two further, importing images of stacks of books and stray photographs, clipped from various sources, directly into her painted compositions. With careful observation, Andersson's dreamy landscapes and interiors slowly come to reveal common imagery and accumulated biblio-ephemera filtered through, and sharing space with, the artist's muted palette, melancholic scenery and textural paint. 

focuses on this aspect of Andersson's painting practice, exploring how her use of appropriation and collage charges her paintings with an eerie, uncanny sense of familiarity.

Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks

Lucas Arruda at the print shop René Tazé, Paris, 2023. Photo by Matthew Avignone

Fernanda Brenner

Chris Sharp

Texts by Fernanda Brenner and Chris Sharp

Cahiers d’Art in Paris presents a solo show by Lucas Arruda and a new monograph on the artist. While all of Arruda’s works are untitled, this exhibition, like each of his solo presentations to date, is named 

. Drawn from private collections, on view are intimately sized paintings of landscapes and seascapes characterized by their subtle rendition of light as well as new prints edited by Cahiers d’Art, a historic publisher that works directly with artists on limited-edition books, prints, and catalogues raisonnés. Made in the Paris workshop of American printer Michael Woolworth, Arruda’s print works are an extension of his painting practice, which focuses on near-abstract, atmospheric compositions created from memory.

Published by Cahiers d’Art with three different cover images, the monograph explores Arruda’s pursuit of light in his paintings. The book includes seventy-five illustrations and texts by Fernanda Brenner, curator and director of Pivô, an independent art center in São Paulo, and Mexico-based curator and writer Chris Sharp, as well as excerpts from a conversation between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Lucas Arruda

Anni Albers

Michael Beggs

Brenda Danilowitz

Charles Darwent

Ulrike Growe

Donald Judd

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

Jeannette Redensek

Jerry Zeniuk

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was one of the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism: he was an extraordinary teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist, who is best known for the 

, published by Yale University Press in 1963.

This generously illustrated overview of Albers’s work, accompanying the first major exhibition on the artist in more than thirty years, features all aspects of his long, creative career. Beginning with Albers\s time at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, the publication follows the artist to America and describes major themes of his work there as well as the importance of his frequent travels to Mexico. Paintings, prints, furniture, household objects, works in glass, photographs, and pre-Columbian sculptures are beautifully reproduced and discussed by a team of experts. The juxtaposition of Renaissance sculptures and icons with paintings by Albers underlines the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of his art, and Albers’s influence on 1960s Minimalist art is also explored.

Including a comprehensive biography, the book convincingly demonstrates how this great artist transformed modern design by using line, color, surface, and space to challenge the perception of the viewer.

Josef Albers: Interaction

Introduction by Beatrix Ruf and Martijn van Vieuwenhuyzen. Texts by Alison M. Gingeras and Jamieson Webster, Jack Bankowsky, and Mark Godfrey.

Exploring new works by the provocative and irreverent American multimedia artist Jordan Wolfson.

Jordan Wolfson is known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance.

Produced in partnership with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, this book focuses on two major new works, 

(2014). Operating somewhere between sculpture and interactive installation, these pieces rely on Wolfson’s contradictory relationship with technology to create an unsettling tension between the figure and the spectacle. Like 

, Wolfson’s virtual-reality piece shown at the Whitney Biennial, and indeed much of his work in other media, the perspective becomes more complex once the works engage with viewers through movement and sound.

With original texts by Jack Bankowsky, Alison Gingeras, and Joey Frank illustrated with details of Wolfson’s other major works and installations—including his critically acclaimed films 

(2012)—this is the most important book on Wolfson’s work to date.

Jordan Wolfson: Manic / Love / Truth / Love

John Ruskin

Robert Hewison

By John Ruskin. Introduction by Robert Hewison

The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history, birth, life, and death of Christ, ranks among the greatest artworks ever created.

John Ruskin helped redefine art criticism in the nineteenth century through his attention to detail, his playful and engaging prose, and the conviction with which he discussed the subjects that mattered most to him. Ruskin’s ekphrastic writing became a way for readers to approach the experience of looking at great art without actually seeing it in person. Despite having written about Giotto on numerous occasions in 

, he never treated the Arena Chapel in its own right. Here Ruskin examines the panels and brings them life, describing their many hidden details, all the result of Giotto’s unrivaled genius. As Ruskin says, “Giotto was…one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

Long out of print, the Arundel Society first published 

between 1853 and 1860. It stands as Ruskin’s most compelling set of reflections on Giotto’s masterpiece—an artwork that, in Ruskin’s estimation, changed the very course of art history. Originally accompanied by a set of black and white woodcuts of the panels in the Chapel, this new edition presents each panel in vivid color photography, adding a useful visual aid to Ruskin’s lyrical descriptions. The result is a book that serves not only as an introduction for students of art history, but also as a discussion of what it means to be a great artist, by one of most influential writers ever to tackle visual art.

Giotto and His Works in Padua

Portrait of Kerry James Marshall, 2018. Photo by Jason Bell

Texts by Jacqueline Francis, Catharina Manchanda, and Lowery Stokes Sims

Contemporary artists Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) are distinguished by their attention to a history of representation, which they re-visit and revise to reflect on individual and collective Black experience. Equally engaged with social and political histories, and the history of art, Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas have created works that at times poignantly and satirically critique dominant narratives and posit alternatives. By considering these artists together, this thought-provoking book expands our understanding of contemporary history painting, a genre first defined during the 17th century and known for didactic paintings that often depicted Biblical or mythological subjects, and expressed the tastes and narratives of a ruling class. Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas marry appreciation of these traditional forms of representation to a deep understanding of contemporary American culture to create insightful works that disrupt historic narratives and read canonic art history against the grain.

Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas

Figuring History

David Breslin

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political.

Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist's career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017. The interplay with the specific architecture of the gallery and the way works are installed is highlighted throughout the catalogue, with images that explore the poetics of how space and work influence each other. Together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, the works on view challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself. Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his work, Gonzalez-Torres worked with familiar materials, from his iconic candy spill works and his evocative light string pieces, but also including mirrors, clocks, and curtains. His work activates the architecture of the various spaces, the physicality of the viewer, the past and present, continuously maintaining its relevance.

Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece. New text by David Breslin explores the variety of works included here while contextualizing Gonzalez-Torres's contribution to art history.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Donald Shambroom

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, 

 offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.

Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.

Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades?

A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, 

 is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Duchamp's Last Day

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