Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Publication Date: 2019
Texts by Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, and J. Patrice Marandel. Introduction by Nicholas Hall
Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art explores the ways in which artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion.
Endless Enigma takes as its point of departure Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s legendary 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which not only introduced these movements to the American public, but also placed them in a historical and cultural context by situating them with artists from earlier centuries.
Presenting works from the twelfth century to the present day, this catalogue is organized into six themes—Monsters & Demons, Dreams & Temptation, Fragmented Body, Unconscious Gesture, Super Nature, and Sense of Place. Works included range from medieval gargoyles to twentieth-century works by Louise Bourgeois, Sigmar Polke, and Pablo Picasso as well as contemporary works by Michaël Borremans, Marcel Dzama, and Raymond Pettibon. Masterworks from the likes of Piero di Cosimo, Francisco de Goya, and Titian are considered alongside those by William Blake and Odilon Redon. Time folds and temporal barriers collapse when Damiano Cappelli meets Edvard Munch, and Salvator Rosa encounters Luc Tuymans and Lisa Yuskavage. Salvador Dalí, Sherrie Levine, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Kerry James Marshall—eight centuries intersect and, as such, this wide-ranging catalogue examines affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time.
Organized in collaboration with Nicholas Hall, a specialist in the field of Old Masters and nineteenth-century art, this fully illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018. It includes new scholarship by Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, and J. Patrice Marandel.
Details
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Artist: Marcel Dzama, Kerry James Marshall, Francis Alÿs, Michaël Borremans, Lisa Yuskavage, Sigmar Polke, Sherrie Levine
Contributors: Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, J. Patrice Marandel, Nicholas Hall
Publication Date: 2019
ISBN: 9781941701881
Retail: $80 | £65
Designer: HvADesign, New York
Printer: Ofset Yapimevi, Istanbul
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 9 × 11 in | 22.9 × 27.9 cm
Pages: 240
Reproductions: 155 color
Artist and Contributors
Marcel Dzama
Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama (b. 1974) has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. Drawing equally from folk vernacular as from art-historical and contemporary influences, Dzama’s work visualizes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales.
Kerry James Marshall
Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) is known for his expansive body of work, which also includes drawings and sculptures. At the center of his oeuvre is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility long ascribed to Black figures in the Western pictorial tradition, and the creation of what he calls a "counter-archive" that brings them back into this narrative.
Francis Alÿs
Belgian-born Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) is known for his in-depth projects in a wide range of media, including film, painting, photography, performance and video. Through his practice, Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life.
Michaël Borremans
Michaël Borremans’s (b. 1963) innovative approach to painting combines technical mastery with subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation. His charged canvases address universal themes that seem to resonate with a specifically contemporary complexity.
Lisa Yuskavage
One of the most original and influential artists of the past three decades, Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962) creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. At once exhibitionist and introspective, her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements, in which color is the primary vehicle of meaning.
Sigmar Polke
German artist Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) is widely recognized as one of the most innovative painters and multidisciplinary artists of the postwar era. Characterized by an experimental and inquisitive attitude, Polke's work engages unconventional and diverse materials and techniques and playfully defies social, political, and aesthetic conventions.
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine’s (b. 1947) work engages many of the core tenets of postmodern art, in particular challenging notions of originality, authenticity, and identity. Since she rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation of artists in the late 1970s and 1980s, Levine has created a singular and complex body of work in a variety of media that often explicitly reproduces artworks and motifs from the Western art-historical canon as well as non-Western cultures.
Dawn Ades
Dawn Ades is professor emerita of the history and theory of art at the University of Essex and professor of the history of art at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2013, she was made CBE for services to higher education.
Olivier Berggruen
Olivier Berggruen is a German art historian who has written on Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, and Cy Twombly, among other artists. He was associate curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from 2001 to 2007. In 2017, he curated a retrospective of Picasso’s neoclassical years at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. He is a board member of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island; Museum Berggruen, Berlin; and the Musée Picasso, Paris.
J. Patrice Marandel
J. Patrice Marandel is a Paris-born curator and writer. He has had curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Detroit Institute of Art. From 1993 to 2017, he was the Robert H. Ahmanson Chief Curator of European Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The author of many catalogues and articles, he also published a book of memoirs, Abecedario: Collecting and Recollecting (2017). He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is a Commander in the Order of the Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
Nicholas Hall
Nicholas Hall is a leading specialist in European Masters. He entered the field in 1979 when he joined Colnaghi on Old Bond Street in London after graduating from Oxford University. In 1983, he moved to New York to work with Colnaghi USA. Hall founded his own gallery, Hall & Knight, with Richard Knight in 1996, establishing a reputation as a preeminent dealer in museum-quality works. In 2004, the gallery was acquired by Christie’s where he became International Chairman of the Old Master and Nineteenth-century Department. He returned to private art dealing in 2016 with the founding of his eponymous gallery on the Upper East Side.
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