Diana Thater in Chernobyl. Photo by Volodymyr Palylyk, 2010

Giuliana Bruno

Michael Govan

Christine Y. Kim

Lisa Gabrielle Mark

Patti Podesta

Jason E. Smith

Texts by Giuliana Bruno, Lynne Cooke, Michael Govan, Christine Y. Kim, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Patti Podesta, and Jason E. Smith

This book offers a mid-career retrospective of the work of Diana Thater, one of the most important and innovative artists working today.

For more than two decades, Diana Thater has been creating ground-breaking installations that build upon the basic visual language of film and video by integrating architecture, applied color, and artificial and natural light. Depicting a range of natural phenomena, her work is largely organized around an exploration of the subjectivity of animals. This lavishly illustrated overview shows how Thater has radically reenvisioned both the ways in which film and video are deployed in site-related installations and the relationship between subject and object. Luminous images of eighteen projects such as 

 are accompanied by quotes and fictional writings that have long served as Thater’s touchstones. Also included are an interview with the artist and essays on a wide range of topics that Thater addresses in her work—from the history and politics of the Chernobyl disaster to beauty and Baroque architecture. This publication also gives readers exclusive access to a moving image supplement, featuring a film conceived and created by Thater in collaboration with production designer Patti Podesta, as well as an illustrated checklist with short video clips.

Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination

Mark Godfrey

Roxana Marcoci

Text by Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, Christopher Williams, and Matthew S. Witkovsky

Representing Christopher Williams’s first publication with a major American museum, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Williams (b. 1956) has crafted photographs that engage—often through uncanny mimicry—the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, as well as their sociopolitical contexts and implications. The book includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, which explore Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with the methods and modes of display and publicity in the art world, in addition to a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain. These more conventional contributions are “interrupted” by additional historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself and are occasionally presented in facsimile form. An exhibition history, bibliography, and illustrated list of works round out the publication.

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Katherine Brinson

Massimiliano Gioni

Karen Marta

Edited by Karen Marta and Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Katherine Brinson.

Since the mid-1990s, Chris Ofili's painstakingly crafted paintings and sculptures have dazzled—and often distressed—viewers with a fusion of opposing forces: sacred meets profane, formal bows to demotic, and exalted bleeds into vulgar. Paintings of rare beauty are propped on elephant dung; deities squat to defecate; and lovers embrace and yet are forcibly bound.

 series is authored by Katherine Brinson, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she curated the museum's 2013 Christopher Wool retrospective and also organizes the Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial award honoring significant achievement in contemporary art.

Chris Ofili: 2000 Words

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Robert Kudielka

Natalia Naish

Alexandra Tommasini

Text by Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini. Interview by Robert Kudielka

Tracking a transitional period of Bridget Riley’s career, the works on paper in this volume move from the vertical stripe to increasingly complex diagonal compositions. During the mid-1980s, Riley introduced a new pictorial device – the rhomboid – to the then predominantly vertical stripes, developing her exploration of interplaying tones of green, yellow and orange. Riley constructs new visual relationships between divergent colors and forms within these works, creating what the artist terms a ‘harmony of contrasts’ that animates the entire visual field. Illustrated in full color, the works are accompanied by a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka and a text by Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini, which situate these studies with major paintings during this period.

Bridget Riley: Studies 1984-95

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Jeremy Lewison

Claire Messud

Texts by Jeremy Lewison and Claire Messud

Drawing was a fundamental, stand-alone component of Alice Neel’s practice, persistently pursued alongside painting, for which she is primarily known. As a medium, it enabled her to capture the immediacy of her visual experience—whether in front of her sitters or on the city streets—while also affording her a greater sense of experimentation and informality. Neel chose the subjects for both her paintings and drawings from her family, friends, and a broad variety of fellow New Yorkers: writers, poets, artists, students, textile salesmen, cabaret singers, and homeless bohemians. Through her penetrative, forthright, and at times humorous touch, her work subtly engaged with political and social issues, including gender, racial inequality, and labor struggles. Not initially intended for public view, her drawings reveal a more private and intimate nature than her paintings and as such reflect her deep sensitivity to these subjects. Yet they are far from sentimental and she readily stripped her sitters of their masks, foregrounding rather the incongruous, the awkward, and, at times, the comical.

Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors 1927-1978 

presents an illuminating overview of the variety of themes and styles employed by the artist across five decades. Published to coincide with an 

 at David Zwirner in New York, the book contains over sixty color plates organized thematically and includes works selected from throughout her career. In addition, it features essays by the independent curator and writer Jeremy Lewison and the award-winning novelist Claire Messud, as well as a selected chronological biography and illustrated list of works.

Although Neel’s influences and style changed from decade to decade, her profound commitment to her subjects and to her art remained consistent over the course of her career, and although the appearance of many of her sitters changed over the years, there is a timeless quality to the works. As Claire Messud notes in her reflections on the artist in the exhibition catalogue, “The complex emotions Neel evokes in her art are nothing less than the contradictions of life itself.”

Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors 1927-1978

A painting by On Kawara, titled MAY 11, 1967, dated 1967.

On Kawara, One Million Years (Past), 1970-1971, Page 2001.

Text by Jeffrey Weiss, Daniel Buren, Whitney Davis, Maria Gough, Ben Highmore, Tom McCarthy, Susan Stewart, and Anne Wheeler

Because of his recourse to language, photography, and systems of information, On Kawara is often described as a key figure in the history of Conceptual art. Yet his work stands apart in its devotion to painting and its existential reach. 

 is published in conjunction with a major 

 of Kawara’s post-1964 work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Like the exhibition itself, the structure of the book was devised in close collaboration with the late artist. The exhibition catalogue contains essays on Kawara’s work by leading scholars and critics in various fields, including art history, literary studies, and cultural anthropology. It also includes substantial, authoritative descriptions of every category of his production—the first time such comprehensive information has appeared in print. Richly illustrated,

) that comprised the artist’s practice beginning in the mid-1960s. Among other groups of works, the book includes images of the 97 

(accompanied by their newspaper-lined storage boxes) that Kawara produced during a three-month run of daily painting in 1970. The catalogue also contains reproductions of paintings and drawings produced in Paris and New York in the years that precede the works for which Kawara is best known, as well as rare images of materials related to his working process. The volume is published in four differently colored covers.

On Kawara—Silence

Kara Carmack

Diedrich Diederichsen

Bob Nickas

Foreword by David Zwirner. Texts by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas. Illustrated chronology by Kara Carmack

In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing in 

 at David Zwirner in New York, “the show’s cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era.” With an eye to canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of international art scenes that were based in Cologne—arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time—and New York.

While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner, and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler, and Monika Spru¨th showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. The works of these German artists were exhibited along with the latest contemporary art from the US by artists like Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the works of German artists were presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring, Augustine & Hodes, and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work being produced and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this ongoing dialogue, among them 

A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland

Big, bold, and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color over one hundred immensely varied artworks by the twenty-two international artists included in this massive exhibition—one of the largest in David Zwirner’s history. Beyond its stunning visual components, the book features crucial new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, and an illustrated chronology of the decade by Kara Carmack. The book also includes an arsenal of compelling archival material, from documentary photographs from the period to reproductions of Cologne’s culture magazine Spex. Taken as a whole, this ambitious exhibition catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart, and “dissonance of styles”—in the words of Schjeldahl—embodied by this fascinating and fecund moment in global art history.

Artists featured in the book include Werner Büttner, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Günther Förg, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Albert Oehlen, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, and Christopher Wool.

Als Gott den Rock erschuf muß er heil gewesen sein (Rockmusik III) (When God Created Rock, He Must Have Been Horny [Rock Music III])

No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984–1989

A detail of an artwork by Michaël Borremans titled The Commuter II dated 2022

Portrait of Michaël Borremans. Photo by Alex Salinas

Martin Germann

, on view at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2015.

Michaël Borremans: Fixture

Mimi Thompson

Having begun his studio practice as a painter and draftsman, in 1985 Al Taylor (1948-1999) devised a uniquely innovative approach to process and materials that seamlessly enveloped drawings and three-dimensional objects as he created compositions that were grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Taylor ultimately sought to expand the possibilities of vision in his search for new ways of experiencing and imagining space, and his multi-layered investigations of perception across variant dimensions provide the viewer with an insight into the artist\s idiosyncratic thinking, his methodology, and his playful sense of humor.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2015 exhibition at the gallery, this catalogue presents a comprehensive examination of Taylor’s 

, which encompass a large grouping of interconnected series that were created between 1989 and 1992; as well as works from Taylor’s later series 

 (sic) that the artist made in Denmark for his 1997 solo exhibition at Galleri Tommy Lund. The objects and drawings that comprise these series demonstrate Taylor’s relentless curiosity about the process of seeing—that is, how we see and what we see, which he systematically explored by applying a multitude of constantly shifting points of view. The artist’s investigations combined metaphor with seemingly incongruous materials and concepts in order to find new relationships between subject matter, space, and meaning. This fully illustrated publication will feature new scholarship on Taylor’s work by Mimi Thompson.

Al Taylor: Pet Stains, Puddles, and Full Gospel Neckless

 as “the most original, controversial, and expensive American artist of the past three and a half decades,” Jeff Koons has come to reign as a master of the market, a wry puppeteer with a “formidable aesthetic intelligence.” His elaborate, exquisitely produced sculptures draw from a contemporary lexicon of consumerism—often featuring large-scale reproductions of toys, household items, or luxury goods—while simultaneously holding up a mirror to the very culture from which they are extracted.

These references to popular media are evidenced not merely in his choice of subject matter but also in his visual techniques: his sculptures frequently comprise smooth, mirrored surfaces, and his paintings employ bright and saturated colors.



—the first catalogue on the artist’s work to be published by David Zwirner—was produced on the occasion of the major 2013 exhibition at the gallery in New York, which marked the world debut of his 

 series, a brand new body of work that occupies an important place in the trajectory of his practice. Conceptually derived from the mirrored ornaments encountered on many suburban lawns, including those of Koons’s childhood hometown in rural Pennsylvania, every sculpture is anchored by a blue “gazing ball” of hand-blown glass. These are situated atop large, white-plaster sculptures that have been alternately modeled after iconic works from the Greco-Roman era, including the Farnese Hercules and the Esquiline Venus, or after such quotidian objects from the contemporary residential landscape as a rustic mailbox, a birdbath, and an inflatable garden snowman.

Created in close collaboration with Koons, this elegant publication echoes the classic design of a 1970 Picasso catalogue that the artist admires. Inside, vivid color plates of the sculptures in situ capture the stark contrast between the pristine whiteness of the plaster and the highly reflective spheres. In their perfect contours and smooth, glistening surfaces, the gazing balls implicate audience as well as context—mirroring both and offering playful yet powerful meditations on the dialogue between gaze and reflection. “While all of the sculptures are grounded in their own distinct narratives, derived from Art History and suburban towns,” writes Francesco Bonami in his catalogue essay, “the seemingly fragile and delicate gazing ball establishes that sense of uncertain equilibrium that exists between history and fantasy, magic and materiality, mass culture and exclusive beauty.”

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball

Edited by Jeffrey Grove. Text by Michael Amy, Hans Christ, David Coggins, Martin Germann, Jeffrey Grove, Jan Hoet, Jeffrey Kastner, David Lynch, Charlotte Mullins et al.

Since the late 1990s, when he first began to produce drawings and paintings, Michaël Borremans has created an extraordinarily mature body of work that has captured international attention. The disparate spaces he imagines in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and films are unified by an uncanny sense of dislocation and an often unsettling beauty. Rendered in complex palettes and exquisite techniques, Borremans’s works in all media embrace a rich legacy of artistic progenitors, but remain firmly anchored in the present. Presenting over 100 works created by the artist over a 14-year period in all media, this publication includes many works not previously reproduced in books or catalogues, offering the most complete overview of Borremans’s oeuvre to date. Contributions include a concise and incisive overview of Borremans’s practice; a revealing, in-depth interview between the main author of the book, Jeffrey Grove, and the artist, addressing process, influence and philosophical and critical issues; as well as more than 50 individual entries and mini-essays on individual works in the artist’s oeuvre by notable writers, curators, filmmakers, and musicians. Described by the artist as “the mother of all Borremans books,” 

 is published on the occasion of a major mid-career retrospective.

Michaël Borremans: As Sweet As it Gets

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

 brings together Kusama’s vivid imagery and haunting words with photos of the artist at work and at various stages in her life. The pieces are mostly from recent years (2000-2012), although there are some that go back as far as the 1950s. Here are Kusama’s large-scale canvases, environmental sculptures, multi-media installations, and numerous self-portraits. Here, too, are photos of the artist at ten years old, and as a young woman in Tokyo, and then New York, often wearing outrageous clothes of her own design. And we see Yayoi Kusama in recent years, working in her studio in Tokyo – minus the garish make-up and red wig. The book is a chronicle of her creative endeavors and of her life, offering a glimpse into the fevered imagination of this very complicated and fascinating woman.

Yayoi Kusama: Hi Konnichiwa

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

Johanna Burton

Peter Halley

Midori Matsui

Wolfgang Tillmans

Jan Verwoert

Texts by Johanna Burton, Peter Halley, Midori Matsui, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Jan Verwoert

Known since the early 1990s for his photographs of young people in their social environment – clubs, gay pride parades, warehouse parties – Wolfgang Tillmans created an enigmatic, sexy and highly innovative photography while inventing new icons of beauty and style for gallery goers and magazine readers alike. This book is an updated and expanded edition of his 2002 monograph, featuring a new survey on his work from the past ten years and new artist’s writings.

At the end of the 1950s William Eggleston began to photograph around his home in Memphis using black-and-white 35mm film. Fascinated by the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston declared at the time: "I couldn't imagine doing anything more than making a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson. " Eventually Eggleston developed his own style which later shaped his seminal work in color—an original vision of the American everyday with its icons of banality: supermarkets, diners, service stations, automobiles, and ghostly figures lost in space. 

includes some exceptional as-yet-unpublished photographs, and displays the evolution, ruptures and above all the radicalness of Eggleston's work when he began photographing in color at the end of the 1960s. Here we discover similar obsessions and recurrent themes as present in his early black-and-white work including ceilings, food, and scenes of waiting, as well as Eggleston\s unconventional croppings-all definitive traits of the photographer who famously proclaimed, "I am at war with the obvious."

William Eggleston: From Black and White to Color

Best known for his oversized, dead-pan portraits, his unmediated shots of commonplace interiors, and his seemingly straightforward photographs of architecture, Thomas Ruff has quietly approached many familiar genres, and proceeded to discreetly reinvent them. For his 

 series, Ruff found images in newspapers, and then re-photographed and enlarged them to isolate the photographs from the text, allowing Ruff’s viewer, now no longer a reader, to make assumptions about the photograph without any information to support the viewer’s inferences. The book consists of 400 reproductions from German newspapers that Ruff collected over the span of 10 years (1981–1991).

Thomas Ruff: Zeitungsfotos / Newspaper Photographs

Ruff has always had a fascination with astronomy. His attempt at photographing night sky failed due to the lack of detail captured in the pictures he had taken. Ruff’s equipment could not render the detail he wanted as well as air and light pollution added to the difficulties of capturing the beautiful constellations. His solution was to take observation shots from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) based in the Andes in Chile.

Thomas Ruff: Sterne

Philippe Van Cauteren

Robert Fleck

Gregor Jansen

Valeria Liebermann

Texts by Philippe Van Cauteren, Robert Fleck, Gregor Jansen, Martin Germann, and Valeria Liebermann

Coinciding with museum exhibitions by Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K in Ghent and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Düsseldorf, this book comprises five series of photographs ranging from the start of Ruffs’s artistic career in the late 1970s to recent work in 2014. This selection, being shown under the title 

, takes as its philosophical and scientific thread the spectrum between natural and virtual light – a fundamental shift that has taken place in the medium of photography over the last thirty years.

 (1992-1996), as well as parts of Ruffs’s most recent series called 

 (2012-2014) – a digitally generated simulation of this historical genre. In each of the series, Ruff subjects the photographic medium to systematic analysis: social, political, and aesthetic aspects of image production are laid bare, and thereby the history of Modernity as it was initiated by the emergence of photography in the 19th century. As a conceptual photographer, Ruff is not so much interested in photographing reality; he focuses more on portraying the realities of photography.

Thomas Ruff: Lichten

Robert Bean

Edward Burtynsky

Jane E. Nokes

Dieter Roelstraete

Introduction by Edward Burtynsky and Jane E. Nokes. Texts by Robert Bean and Dieter Roelstraete

 is the third annual publication celebrating the winner of the 

, Canada’s largest contemporary photography award for an established Canadian artist.

During the celebrated career of this year’s award winner Stan Douglas (starting in 1983), photography has played a vital role in his artistic development. This publication highlights the significance of the photographic image in the critical and historical reception of Stan Douglas’s approach to art and media. The stories, sites, and events that Douglas explores are populist, literate and timely. Frequently, his photographs describe the overlooked histories of cultural identity, displacement, and injustice that reveal an uncanny resemblance to present-day events. This is achieved through an insightful attention to photography as both medium and subject. Folding the spectator into the visual culture of memory and oblivion that photographs evoke initiates profound observations about the ubiquity of photography in contemporary culture. The photographs of Stan Douglas affirm the validity and volatility of the photographic medium at this decisive moment in the history of art and photography.

Stan Douglas: Scotiabank Photography Award

Hal Foster

Published to celebrate the critically acclaimed 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, a show that 

 art critic Ken Johnson called “near perfect,” 

 devotes over three hundred pages to a key five-year period of the artist’s earliest work. Anchored by exquisite black-and-white plates, from installation views of works in situ to documentary photographs, this “impressively realized” publication offers “a blow-by-blow account of Serra’s rapidly expanding art-world presence,” as described in a 

 review. Focusing specifically on work the artist produced during the period between 1966 and 1971, this classic tome documents the significance of his early work, with archival texts and reviews, alongside new scholarship by American art critic and historian Hal Foster.

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this monograph aims to reconsider the groundbreaking practices and ideas that so firmly situate Serra in the history of twentieth-century art. Its stunning selection of seminal works illuminates the debut of the artist’s innovative, process-oriented experiments with nontraditional materials, such as vulcanized rubber, neon, and lead, and introduces the interplay of gravity and material—of "verticality and horizontality,” writes Foster—that would remain a fundamental aspect of Serra’s production over the subsequent decades. Also featured in the publication are key early examples of the artist’s work in steel, as well as stills from some of his most important early films.

Richard Serra: Early Work

Lucas Zwirner

Kim Gordon

Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Text by Lucas Zwirner. Interview with the artist by Kim Gordon. Photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath

In the summer of 2013, Raymond Pettibon took over one of David Zwirner’s gallery spaces in New York, transforming the high-ceilinged, garage-like white cube into his studio in order to prepare a show of drawings and collages within—and sometimes directly on—its walls. Titled 

, evoking the Middle English expression that has come to express a certain formality today and is defined as “namely,” or “that is to say,” the exhibition gave new meaning to the term “site specific,” featuring vibrant, gestural works Pettibon created in conversation with his surroundings that operated as a sort of archive, both product and record of his relationship to that space and time. Unified by their bold, vivid lines and unconventional framing, they feature allusions to a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from violence, humor, and sex to literature, youth, art history, and sports—embodying the artist’s signature mix of social and political commentary, diary entry, and automatic drawing.

This publication, presenting large color plates of the works created over that summer by Pettibon, who also produced an original drawing for its sturdy cardboard cover, explores the intricate relationship between image and language that has long fascinated the artist. Just as the works in the exhibition existed at once as art and document, so too does the book itself have the hefty, physical presence of a work of art. Extensive installation views capture the dynamic combination of visual imagery and text that has come to characterize Pettibon’s practice, and a selection of gritty black-and-white photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s working process. Context is provided by Lucas Zwirner, who accompanied the artist throughout this period and contributed the book’s essay, “A Month with Raymond.” As Zwirner describes it, the show functioned “as an essayistic whole held together by imaginative leaps and subtle connections which Raymond has left unexplained and uninterpreted.” That perspective is rounded out in an interview with the artist by Kim Gordon, a visual artist and musician, who first encountered Pettibon’s work in the early 1980s in Los Angeles.

Raymond Pettibon: To Wit

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Kasper König

Jef Van Eynde

Barbara Weiss

Afterword by Barbara Weiss, Kasper König. Photographs by Jef Van Eynde.

In the summer of 2012, the acclaimed Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) was preparing a show with David Zwirner, planned for March 2013. His friend, the photographer Jef Van Eynde, visited him that summer. “We were allowed to take a look at a new series of small paintings in his studio,” Van Eynde recalls in his postscript to this volume. “In their startling simplicity, these had been reduced right down to the essential. Some of them just had an oversized hook for a hanger, with the canvas simply wrapped around a wooden board.” De Keyser died in October 2012, and Van Eynde’s photographs of the paintings and the titular wall upon which they were arranged are the only documentation of his intentions for the Zwirner show. This intimate volume gathers these alongside portraits of De Keyser at home and in his studio.

Raoul De Keyser: The Last Wall

Christine Mehring

Christoph Schreier

Texts by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier

 art critic Roberta Smith as a “precocious art star,” German artist (Blinky) Palermo (1943–1977) has been associated with distinct twentieth-century art practices, from abstraction to Minimalism and Conceptual art. But his diverse body of work in fact defies easy classification. Throughout his brief and influential career—leading all the way up to his untimely death at the age of 33—Palermo executed paintings, objects, installations, and works on paper that mined various contextual and semantic issues at stake in the construction, exhibition, and reception of works of art, eternally “stretching and questioning” the boundaries of every medium he touched.

This fully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier and documents the 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. It is the first publication to tackle Palermo’s late work, which is characterized by explorations of the tensions between material and color, surface and depth, and figuration and abstraction—focusing in particular on the paper works he produced between 1976 and 1977, the last year of his life. “Less a system builder than an analyst working on intuition,” writes Schreier in his catalogue essay, Palermo “explored surface, shape, and color—the constituent elements of the image—with the aim of turning them into actors with a lively and delicately balanced play of forces.” The simplicity of the artist’s vision is beautifully evinced by the catalogue’s vibrant color plates, which reveal every stroke and each grain of paper shining through from behind the pigment.

1976-1977

Palermo: Works on Paper

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

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

 is a retrospective look at two of Oscar Murillo’s earliest and rarest publishing projects, 

, both of which are newsprint publications. Rather than reprinting these small-run, zine-like papers, this photographic archive documents them as objects with three-dimensional physicality — photographed by Blommers and Schumm, the publication’s main content is devoted to high-gloss, still-life shots which record each folded page as a bona fide artwork.

To tie in with the haptic associations of a broadsheet paper, the artist’s newest painted works — from which the title of the publication is taken — are included as a series of fold-out posters at equivalent scale. The result is a new approach to archive and compilation.

Also included are 5 loose, fold-out posters of Murillo’s paintings.

Oscar Murillo: La era de la sinceridad

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

Norman Rosenthal

This publication is currently backordered.

The richly textured, seductive paintings of German artist Neo Rauch are marked by a “distinctive Pop-Surrealist-Social Realist style,” as described by 

 art critic Roberta Smith in 2002. Incorporating disjunctive references to disparate eras, techniques, and aesthetics, they evoke “avant-garde theater stage sets from an earlier time ... both buoyant and tamped down, comic and earnest.” In many of his compositions, human figures engaged in manual labor or indeterminable tasks work against backdrops of mundane architecture, industrial settings, or bizarre and often barren landscapes. Scale is frequently arbitrary and non-perspectival, which adds to an overall dreamlike atmosphere; spatial relationships seem to construct an imaginary realm all of its own, one which both defies logic and feels somehow familiar.

, produced to coincide with the 2014 exhibition of Rauch’s new works at David Zwirner in New York, brings together small and large format paintings that expand the artist’s unique iconography of eccentric figures, animals, and hybrids within vaguely familiar but imaginary settings. This oversized catalogue—designed in close collaboration with the artist—is anchored by sixteen stunning plates and numerous 1:1 details that bring to life, and give viewers intimate access to, these compelling compositions. Themes of rebirth and new beginnings abound: Rauch consistently creates characters who appear to be in the process of transformation, literally on the brink of renaissance. These figures, though squarely centered in his paintings, often have the appearance of being part of still lifes: collaged, anachronistic elements belonging to different time zones and eras offer a contemporary take on the storied tradition of visual and psychological pastiche.

 features an illuminating essay by art historian and curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, who presents a careful reading of Rauch’s new work, including its relationship to fairy tales; the influence of the German Democratic Republic on his development as an artist in the 1980s; and the overarching sense of alienation that is present within his narratives. The book also includes a reprint of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Young Giant,” specifically chosen by Rosenthal to further expand his analysis.

Neo Rauch: At the Well

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