A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Sarah Suzuki

Ellen Weinstein

By Sarah Suzuki. Illustrations by Ellen Weinstein. Works of art by Yayoi Kusama

Growing up in the mountains of Japan, Yayoi Kusama dreamed of becoming an artist. One day, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it—the plants, the people, the sky—were covered in polka dots. She began to cover her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and even her body with dots. As she grew up, she traveled all around the world, from Tokyo to Seattle, New York to Venice, and brought her dots with her. Different people saw these dots in different ways—some thought they were tiny, like cells, and others imagined them enormous, like planets. Every year, Kusama sees more of the world, covering it with dots and offering people a way to experience it the way she does.

Written by Sarah Suzuki, a curator at The Museum of Modern Art, and featuring reproductions of Kusama’s instantly recognizable artworks, this colorful book tells the story of an artist whose work will not be complete until her dots cover the world, from here to infinity.

Yayoi Kusama: From Here to Infinity

Laura Hoptman

Udo Kultermann

Catherine Taft

Akira Tatehata

Texts by Akira Tatehata, Laura Hoptman, Udo Kultermann, and Catherine Taft

An updated edition of the acclaimed monograph, celebrating one of the most iconic and revolutionary artists of our time.

"Yayoi Kusama transcended the art world to become a fixture of popular culture, in a league with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Keith Haring." —

Kusama is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on themes such as infinity, self-image, sexuality, and compulsive repetition. A well-known name in the Manhattan scene of the 1960s, Kusama's subsequent work combined Psychedelia and Pop culture with patterning, often resulting in participatory installations and series of paintings. This revised and expanded edition of the 2000 monograph, has been augmented by an essay by Catherine Taft and a collection of new poems by the artist.

Revised and Expanded Edition

Yayoi Kusama

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

Wolfgang Tillmans

According to photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968), “for the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine while to watch it in air, landing or taking off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.” With no text other than the inner-front flap’s description, this fifth printing of Tillmans’s now iconic artist’s book (first published in 1997) consists of 62 color photographs of the Concorde airplane—taking off, landing or in flight, and sometimes as just a tiny, birdlike silhouette in the sky. The photographs speak of both the beauty and the environmental devastation produced by this fabled French airplane, both sides of which Tillmans captures in his casual yet formally elegant signature style.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Concorde

Mark Godfrey

Tom Holert

Since the early 1990s, Wolfgang Tillmans has established himself as one of the most exciting and innovative artists working today. The first photographer to win the Turner Prize (in 2000), his practice is characterized by constant investigation into the boundaries of the photographic medium and a preoccupation with the process of photography itself.

This new publication, accompanying an exhibition at Tate Modern, will examine Tillmans’s evolving practice showcasing his photography but also his video, digital slide projections, publications, and recorded music. Mark Godfrey gives an overarching view of Tillmans’s practice, from the physical materiality of the work, to space and installation, to his use of abstraction. Tom Holert focuses on Tillmans’s relationship with politics and society, with particular emphasis on events of the last 15 years and the way Tillmans uses images and methods of distribution to examine global concerns such as migration and identity politics.

The book is designed by the artist, and has a strong visual identity with a collectible feel. Photography and video stills are beautifully reproduced in full color while, in keeping with the artist’s non-hierarchical approach to media, documentary material will also be highlighted.

Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017

Phong Bui

Jarrett Earnest

Edited by Jarrett Earnest and Lucas Zwirner. Introduction and portraits by Phong Bui

 has been a platform for artists, academics, critics, poets, and writers in New York and abroad. The monthly journal’s continued appeal is due in large part to its diverse contributors, many of whom bring contrasting and often unexpected opinions to conversations about art and aesthetics. No other publication devotes as much space to the artist’s voice, allowing ideas to unfold and idiosyncrasies to emerge through open discussion.

Since its inception, cofounder and artistic director Phong Bui and the 

’s contributors have interviewed over four hundred artists for 

. This volume brings together for the first time a selection of sixty of the most influential and seminal interviews with artists ranging from Richard Serra and Brice Marden, to Alex Da Corte and House of Ladosha. While each interview is important in its own right, offering a perspective on the life and work of a specific artist, collectively they tell the story of a journal that has grown during one of the more diverse and surprising periods in visual art. There is no unified style or perspective; 

’s strength lies in its ability to include and champion difference.

Selected and coedited by Jarrett Earnest, a frequent 

 contributor, with Lucas Zwirner, the book includes an introduction to the project by Phong Bui as well as many of the hand-drawn portraits he has made of those he has interviewed over the years. This combination of verbal and visual profiles offers a rare and personal insight into contemporary visual culture.

 Vito Acconci, Ai Weiwei, Lynda Benglis, James Bishop, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Francesco Clemente, Bruce Conner, Alex Da Corte, Rosalyn Drexler, Keltie Ferris, Simone Forti, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Suzan Frecon, Coco Fusco, Robert Gober, Leon Golub, Ron Gorchov, Michelle Grabner, Josephine Halvorson, Sheila Hicks, David Hockney, Roni Horn, House of Ladosha, Alfredo Jaar, Bill Jensen, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Matvey Levenstein, Nalini Malani, Brice Marden, Chris Martin, Jonas Mekas, Shirin Neshat, Thomas Nozkowski, Lorraine O’Grady, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Ernesto Pujol, Martin Puryear, Walid Raad, Dorothea Rockburne, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Robert Ryman, Dana Schutz, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, James Turrell, Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Kara Walker, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, Yan Pei-Ming, and Lisa Yuskavage

Special thanks to Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, for their support of 

Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail

Tell Me Something Good

Max Henry

Anna Kats

Benedikt Ledebur

Julie Ryan

Texts by Max Henry, Anna Kats, and Julie Ryan. Conversation with the artist by Benedikt Ledebur. Sonnets by Benedikt Ledebur

With a large body of work mainly comprising mixed-media paintings, Tamuna Sirbiladze was known for her distinctive style, which continually forged new terms between dichotomous relationships. Abstract and figurative, playful and serious, energetic and quiet, vibrant and muted, Sirbiladze’s work is characterized by both its intensity and flexibility.

Known for the speed at which she worked, there is a quality of immediacy in her paintings, as if they provide direct access to her imagination. This primacy is perhaps most evident in her gestural, improvisatory paintings made with oil sticks on unstretched, raw canvas, which purposely retain the appearance of being unfinished. “As an artist,” Sirbiladze writes, “I don’t want to control what the representation will be seen as.” This catalogue presents a careful selection of these oil stick works along with her other paintings—including her celebrated 

 (2012), which was made in dialogue with iconic works by Caravaggio, Giotto, Raphael, and Velazquez, as well as her later paintings focused on women’s bodies in intimate, underrepresented scenes, Sirbiladze’s response to male dominance in the art world.

With contributions by Max Henry, Anna Kats, and Julie Ryan, as well as a conversation with the artist and an arrangement of fifteen sonnets by her partner, Benedikt Ledebur, this publication provides a comprehensive survey of Sirbiladze’s works and practice.

Tamuna Sirbiladze

An installation view of the exhibition, Suzan Frecon: recent paintings, oil and water, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2022.

Richard Shiff

The result of a deliberative process guided by careful attention to spatial relationships, Suzan Frecon’s large-scale oil paintings are composed of asymmetrical curves that result in minor and major measured areas of color.

Accompanying the artist’s solo exhibitions at David Zwirner, New York and London, in 2017, this publication features a selection of new monumental paintings carefully reproduced both as individual works and in installation views to best convey the experience of seeing the work. Depending on the viewer’s position and the time of day, the contrasts of matte and sheen, positive and negative, and immediacy and radiance combine to create an ongoing visual experience of always varying subtleties.

In contrast to the paintings, Frecon’s watercolors, also featured here, engage the relationship between paint and paper support. Each predetermined sheet—often from an agate-burnished old Indian ledger page—has its own innate character, properties, and irregular shape; its creases, holes, blemishes, and even faint writings become an integral component of the final watercolor.

“Their truth is the paint,” Frecon says, and in a specially commissioned essay acclaimed art historian Richard Shiff examines the new body of work in relationship to painting and the experience of looking.

Suzan Frecon: painting

Alexander Nemerov

ekphrasis

 is a mesmerizing display of linguistic force that redefines remembering. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past?

In this highly original meditation on the past, renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life. Beginning with the photo album of a former Japanese kamikaze pilot, which is reproduced in this volume, Nemerov transports the reader into a different world through his engagement with the photographs and the construction of a narrative around them.

 expands what we traditionally associate with ekphrastic writing. The kind of writing that can enliven a work of art is also the kind of writing that makes the past appear in vivid color and deep feeling. In the end, this timely piece of writing opens onto fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues to live in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Here, Nemerov’s constant awareness of the power of language to make an experience—seen or remembered—become real reminds us that great ekphrastic writing is at the heart of every effective description.

Summoning Pearl Harbor

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

Texts by K. Heymer, J. Heynen, and M. Kliege

The American artist Sherrie Levine realises in her works the artistic praxis of appropriating, repeating and varying famous earlier artworks. At the same time in doing so she creates her own new oeuvre. Beyond the mere copy she further develops the works conceptually and with historical clichés, presenting it to the viewer for reconsideration.

Sherrie Levine is a photographer, painter, and sculptor and is celebrated above all in the United States. When we first consider her works we think of the imitation and interpretation of the reference works, but our conclusions about the copy soon disappear in favor of a new, autonomous original. The volume shows over 50 works “after” artists like Duchamp, Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh, and Mondrian, from whose masterpieces Sherrie Levine has created something new. In addition art experts place her work in context, for example with regard to her choice of subject or her methods of reproduction.

Sherrie Levine: After All

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Gary Carrion-Murayari

Massimiliano Gioni

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Frances Stark

Lynne Tillman

Texts by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Frances Stark, and Lynne Tillman. Conversation with the artist and Massimiliano Gioni

This thorough, multifaceted assessment of Raymond Pettibon's entire career to date includes nearly 700 images, contributions from important figures in the art-historical and cultural fields, and a recent interview with the artist. Beginning with childhood drawings, the book moves through to his mature work, which embraces both high and low culture.

The book includes ink drawings, paintings, wall drawings, comics, videos, and more, spanning half a century, from the time Pettibon was a child to contemporary work, which takes inspiration from literature, politics, sports, art history, and sexuality. It also features a title on the front cover and spine that was hand lettered by the artist and nearly 200 never-before-published works and items of ephemera.

The book accompanies major survey exhibitions at the New Museum, New York and Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, The Netherlands in 2017.

Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work

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

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

Okwui Enwezor

Emma Enderby

María Belén Sáez de Ibarra

Anna Schneider

Edited by Okwui Enwezor and Anna Schneider. Introduction by Okwui Enwezor. Texts by Emma Enderby and Anna Schneider. Conversation with the artist by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra

With a body of powerful paintings, dynamic installations, and hauntingly poetic video works, Oscar Murillo has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s leading voices. Published on the occasion of Murillo’s 2017 solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, this volume––the first dedicated overview of his astonishing career to date––presents the artist’s multifaceted practice from every angle.

Born in Colombia, Murillo became widely recognized in his early twenties for his large-scale paintings that drew freely on both personal as well as art-historical references and influences. Since then, Murillo has been consistently interested in approaches to art making that are not rooted in the dominant Western value system, while remaining guided by his own aesthetic, rather than political messages or other, more reductive narratives. With numerous exhibitions at major museums and galleries, as well as ambitious projects at lesser-known exhibition spaces in Anyang (South Korea), Baku (Azerbaijan), Marrakech (Morocco), and Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), Murillo puts his politics of inclusivity to work without needing to make the work itself overtly political. In positioning himself between worlds—the art world, his family and community, peripheral spaces he seeks to inhabit—Murillo has made room for a new visual language, one that draws as easily and subversively on his personal narratives and the narratives around the places he has visited, as it does on traditional vocabularies of painting, installation, and sculpture.

With an introduction by Okwui Enwezor and new scholarship by Anna Schneider and Emma Enderby, this publication offers critical insight into Murillo’s complex, vibrant body of work that continually offers enriching, powerful observations of the world around us.

Oscar Murillo

Lucía Casani

Estrella De Diego

Raymond Pettibon

Introduction by Lucía Casani. Texts by Estrella De Diego and Raymond Pettibon.

 is published on the occasion of Marcel Dzama's eponymous exhibition at La Casa Encendida, Madrid. The exhibition proposes a tour of the artistic universe of Marcel Dzama while presenting for the first time much of his most recent production, in which the artist encourages activism through "revolution".

Through the Canadian artist's imagination, figures drawn from folk tales, the world of comics, and television coexist with twentieth-century terrorists, fictional animals, ballet dancers, and opera singers. The social and political questioning is therefore intertwined with a world of fables and complex narratives where carnival, war, mythological, and ironic make up an artistic vision that incites multiple readings.

Marcel Dzama: Drawing on a Revolution

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rachel Corbett

Damion Searls

By Rainer Maria Rilke. Introduction by Rachel Corbett. Translated by Damion Searls

Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating 

, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his infamous 

, earlier correspondence from 1902 to 1908. While the latter has become a global phenomenon, with millions of copies sold in many different languages, the present volume has been largely overlooked.

In these eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke describes the challenges he faced, while opening the door for the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Rilke’s constant warmth, his ability to sense in advance his correspondent’s difficulties and propose solutions to them, and his sensitivity as a person and an artist come across in these charming and honest letters.

Writing during his aged years, this volume paints a picture of the venerable poet as he faced his mortality, through the perspective of hindsight, and continued to embrace his openness towards other creative individuals. With an introduction by Rachel Corbett, author of 

You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin

 (2016), this book is a must-have for Rilke’s admirers, young and old, and all aspiring artists.

Letters to a Young Painter

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

Charles Gaines

Laurence Rassel

Greg Tate

Texts by Charles Gaines, Laurence Rassel, and Greg Tate

Alabama-born, Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall is one of the most exciting artists working today. Critically and commercially acclaimed, the painter is known for his representation of the history of African-American identity in Western art. Conversant with a wide typology of styles, subjects, and techniques, from abstraction to realism and comics, Marshall synthesizes different traditions and genres in his work while seeking to counter stereotypical depictions of black people in society. This is the most comprehensive overview available of his remarkable career.

Kerry James Marshall

Elaine de Kooning

Colm Toibin

Introduction by Nicholas Fox Weber. Texts by Josef Albers, Elaine de Kooning, and Colm Tóibín

Using minimal means—paint straight from the tube, applied meticulously with a palette knife—and a focused selection of colors, Josef Albers’s sustained, serial investigation into rhythm, mood, and spatial movement is explored in this lavishly produced catalogue that looks solely at his respective grey and yellow paintings, exploring two distinct color palettes pervasive to his oeuvre.

Highlighting the rich diversity of effects Albers drew from a narrow range of colors, this publication centers around the groundbreaking 

 (1950), the inaugural painting in the series that would occupy the artist until his death in 1976. The pairing of two palettes—black, white, and grey and an array of yellows—stems in part from Albers’s 1964 series of lithographs, 

, which brought together these two opposing color sets in a single portfolio. Together they address the limitless possibilities the artist found in color and form in relation to light. The impossible simultaneity of “midnight” and “noon” moreover speaks to Albers’s transcending of what he called “factual facts” in favor of the play of perception and illusion possible in art.

Opening with an introduction by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, that contextualizes these works and their color palettes, this volume also includes Albers’s own writing on 

. Additionally, Elaine de Kooning’s historic text and Colm Tóibín’s recent writing explore this body of work from different perspectives and time periods. Published on the occasion of exhibitions at David Zwirner’s New York and London galleries in 2016 and 2017, this beautifully illustrated publication looks at one of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century.

Josef Albers: Midnight and Noon

Texts by Joaquin Barríendos and Lauren Hinkson

“Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art,” Josef Albers wrote to his former Bauhaus colleague Vasily Kandinsky in 1936. 

 reveals the profound link between the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica and Albers’s abstract works on canvas and paper. With his wife, the artist Anni Albers, Albers toured pre-Columbian archeological sites and monuments during his twelve or more trips to Mexico and other Latin American countries between 1935 and 1968. On each visit, Albers took black-and-white photographs of pyramids, shrines, sanctuaries, and landscapes, which he later assembled into rarely seen photo collages. The resulting works demonstrate Albers’s continued formal experimentation with geometry, this time accentuating a pre-Columbian aesthetic.

 brings together photographs, photo collages, prints, and significant paintings from the 

 (1950–1976) series from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Two scholarly essays, an illustrated map, and vivid color reproductions of paintings and works on paper illuminate this little-known period in the influential artist’s practice.

Josef Albers in Mexico

Ingried Brugger

Heike Eipeldauer

Hal Foster

Martin Germann

Foreword by Ingried Brugger and Philippe Van Cauteren. Edited with texts by Heike Eipeldauer and Martin Germann. Conversation with the artist by Hal Foster

Marking the influential photographer’s first major European survey, this book features highlights from four decades of James Welling’s oeuvre.

Emerging out of the “Picture Generation”—a group of artists focused on a critique of photographic media—James Welling has gone on to experiment successfully in nearly every photographic genre. This monograph, designed by Joseph Logan in close collaboration with the artist, presents a selection of works from the early 1970s to today, demonstrating the artist’s conceptual foundations. Welling’s series are dialogues between image and matter, process and result, representation and abstraction. This volume includes, amongst other series, selections from 

, in which Welling matched the writing of his ancestors’ letters with Connecticut winter landscapes; 

 a meditation on Philip Johnson’s 1949 residence, shot using colored filters; 

, pure color photograms created in the darkroom; and 

, which track his early interest in painting and dance. The generous and vividly reproduced illustrations are accompanied by an extensive interview with the artist and critical essays that discuss Welling’s work in connection with American painting, post-modernism, and authorship, and the artist’s eloquently emotional photographic language.

James Welling: Metamorphosis

Lisa Lee

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In her first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.

Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, 

 is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.

Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver

Antonio Sergio Bessa

Jessamyn Fiore

Texts by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore

"Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing." — Gordon Matta-Clark

This revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York. There he employed the term “anarchitecture,” combining “anarchy” and “architecture,” to describe the site-specific works he initially realized in the South Bronx.

The borough’s many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark’s raw material. His series 

 dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of the ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with 

, a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of seventeenth-century row houses slated for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou’s construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark’s practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect

A painting by Giorgio Morandi titled Natura morta (Still Life), dated 1956.

John Baldessari

Lawrence Carroll

Vija Celmins

Mark Greenwold

David Leiber

Liu Ye

Laura Mattioli

Wayne Thiebaud

Alexi Worth

Zeng Fanzhi

Text by Laura Mattioli. Contributions by John Baldessari, Lawrence Carroll, Vija Celmins, Mark Greenwold, Liu Ye, Wayne Thiebaud, Alexi Worth, and Zeng Fanzhi. Foreword by David Leiber

One of the most beloved painters of the twentieth century, Giorgio Morandi created works that continue to exert their mysterious power on viewers worldwide.

This publication focuses on the period from 1948 to 1964, during which Morandi developed and refined his investigations of serial, reductive, and permutational forms and compositions, a body of work that has had a profound influence on twentieth-century art and painting. Included here are five of the ten iconic “yellow cloth” paintings from 1952, a series featured prominently in the historic 1998 exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and numerous late paintings by the Italian master. Lavishly reproduced, these immersive plates draw attention to the idiosyncratic perspectival and color-driven decisions that give the work its abstract power. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2015 exhibition of Morandi’s paintings from this period at David Zwirner, New York—which, according to 

, represent “lucid perfection, at once cerebral and impassioned.” It marked the first major presentation of the artist’s late work in America since the acclaimed 2008 retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In addition to an essay by Laura Mattioli and a foreword by David Leiber, who organized the exhibition, this catalogue includes a fantastic array of contributions by contemporary artists: John Baldessari, Lawrence Carroll, Vija Celmins, Mark Greenwold, Liu Ye, Wayne Thiebaud, Alexi Worth, and Zeng Fanzhi. They offer their personal responses to Morandi’s work and to the Zwirner exhibition in particular. Working in different media across many disciplines, this diverse list of contributors is a testament to the reach of Morandi’s paintings and their influence on contemporary art.

Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings

Yve-Alain Bois

David Gray

Lisa Le Feuvre

Texts by Yve-Alain Bois, David Gray, and Lisa Le Feuvre

This new publication marks the first comprehensive survey of a seminal body of work that helped make Fred Sandback into the internationally celebrated artist he has become known as today.

This catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in the fall of 2016, takes its lead from a 1987 mid-career presentation of Sandback’s work at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, also called 

. With a mixture of archival imagery of the sculptures in situ in Münster, and new photography of these works installed at Zwirner, this publication is both a historical document and a source of renewed attention to this body of work. It also features an expanded selection of sculpture, going beyond what was presented in the 1987 and 2016 exhibitions, to include key examples of vertical constructions spanning Sandback’s career.

New scholarship by Yve-Alain Bois revisits his leading argument that was put forth in his essay for the 2005 Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein catalogue about the power of Sandback’s immateriality—its ability to linger in our memories—in the context of the vertical constructions. Lisa Le Feuvre, a longtime scholar of sculpture, offers a more historical treatment of the show in relation to the artist’s writings and other works. Also included is a text by David Gray, who responds to Marianne Stockebrand’s original essay about the Münster installation; he reveals the dialogues around Sandback’s practice at the time and helps us reconstruct the way the influence of his vertical works has continued to grow in the thirty years since.

Fred Sandback: Vertical Constructions

Max Wechsler

A tribute to the long collaboration between Franz West and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, this volume offers a comprehensive yet singular overview of the artist\s oeuvre. Gathering together extensive documentation and rare archive material on the numerous exhibitions they organized together since 1995, the book is designed by NORM (Zurich) and introduced by art theoretician and friend of the artist Max Wechsler, who followed the work of Franz West closely for many years. His illuminating foreword starts: "Without doubt, he was an odd bird, a gifted idler, a Vienna man sui generis and eccentric par excellence."

The relationship between Franz West and Eva Presenhuber began 20 years ago in Zurich. In 1995 West exhibited at the Galerie Walcheturm—"Franz West mit eine Geste von Raymond Hains. Telefonskulpturen. Sitz– und Liegegelegenheiten"—of which Eva Presenhuber was the owner from 1989 to 1997. This first collaboration was followed by many others, including 

 in 2002, and after the foundation of Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2002, 

 (2011). After West’s death in 2012 Galerie Eva Presenhuber presented the shows 

 (2015–2016) in cooperation with the Franz West Privatstiftung. This publication underlines the importance of the gallery space as an artistic laboratory, and highlights this particular relationship between an artist and his gallerist, especially when this one is a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue.

95–15

Franz West: Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Alice Michel

Jeff Nagy

There are many myths about the artist Edgar Degas—from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant, to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire than 

, a short memoir published by Alice Michel, who purportedly modeled for Degas.

Never before translated into English, the text’s original publication in 

 in 1919, shortly after the artist’s death, has been treated as an important account of the master sculptor at work. We know that Alice was writing under a pseudonym, but who the real person behind this account was remains a mystery—to this day nothing is known about her. Yet, the descriptions seem too accurate to be ignored, the anecdotes too spot-on to discount; even the dialogue captures the artist’s tone and mannerisms.

What is found in these pages is at times a woman’s flirtatious recollection of a bizarre “artistic type” and at others a moving attempt to connect with a great, often tragic man. The descriptions are limpid, unburdened; the dialogue is lively and intimate, not unlike reading the very best kind of gossip, with world-historical significance. Here in these dusty studios, Degas is alive, running hands over clay, complaining about his eyes, denigrating the other artists around him, and whispering salaciously to his model. And during his mood swings, we see reflected the model’s innocence and confusion, her pain at being misunderstood and finally rejected. It is an intimate portrait of a moment in a great artist’s life, a sort of 

All Books