Isa Genzken

Publisher: October Files

Publication Date: 2015

Texts by Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hal Foster, Isa Genzken, Isabelle Graw, Lisa Lee, Pamela M. Lee, Birgit Pelzer, Juliane Rebentisch, Josef Strau, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lawrence Weiner

Since the late 1970s, the Berlin-based contemporary artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948) has produced a body of work that is remarkable for its formal and material inventiveness. In her sculptural practice, Genzken has developed an expanded material repertoire that includes plaster, concrete, epoxy resin, and mass-produced objects that range from action figures to discarded pizza boxes. Her heterogeneous assemblages, a New York Times critic observes, are “brash, improvisational, full of searing color and attitude.” Genzken, the recent subject of a major retrospective at MoMA, offers a highly original interpretation of modernist, avant-garde, and postminimalist practices even as she engages pressing sociopolitics and economic issues of the present.

These illustrated essays address the full span of Genzken’s work, from the elegant floor sculptures with which she began her career to the assemblages, bursting with color and bristling with bric-a-brac, that she has produced since the beginning of the millennium. The texts, by writers including Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and the artist herself, consider her formation in the West German milieu; her critique of conventions of architecture, reconstruction, and memorialization; her sympathy with mass culture; and her ongoing interrogation of public and private spheres. Two texts appear in English for the first time, including a quasi-autobiographical screenplay written by Genzken in 1993.

Details

Publisher: October Files

Artist: Isa Genzken

Contributors: Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hal Foster, Isa Genzken, Isabelle Graw, Lisa Lee, Pamela Lee, Birgit Pelzer, Juliane Rebentisch, Josef Strau, Wolfgang Tillmans, Lawrence Weiner

Publication Date: 2015

ISBN: 9780262527118

Retail: $18.95 US & Canada | £13.95

Status: Not Available

Binding: Softcover

Dimensions: 6 x 9 in (15.2 x 22.9 cm)

Pages: 216

Reproductions: 53 b&w

Artist and Contributors

Isa Genzken

Over more than four decades, Isa Genzken (b. 1948) has incessantly probed the shifting boundaries between art, design, architecture, technology, and the individual. Her prodigious oeuvre frequently incorporates seemingly disparate materials and imagery to create complex, enigmatic works that interrogate the impact of our increasingly commodified and interconnected culture on our everyday lives.

Yve-Alain Bois

Yve-Alain Bois is a professor of art history at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Bois has written widely on modern and contemporary art, and his 2005 essay on Sandback’s work has remained one of the most influential pieces of scholarship on the artist to date.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University since 2006. He is internationally recognized as one of the most important scholars of twentieth century art. Buchloh received his PhD from the City University of New York in 1994, and has since published widely on European and American artists including Gerhard Richter, Hans Haacke, and Andy Warhol. He is the co-editor of the art journal October, and he was awarded the Golden Lion Award for Contemporary Art History and Criticism at the Venice Biennale in 2007. He is also the recipient of numerous other grants, including Getty, CASVA, and Lehman Foundation fellowships, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Diedrich Diederichsen

Born in Hamburg in 1957, Diedrich Diederichsen has worked since 2006 as a Professor of Contemporary Art Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a music editor for the German magazine Spex, and he has written art criticism and essays in renowned art magazines from Artforum to Texte zur Kunst, as well as numerous books including On (Surplus) Value in Art (2008) and, most recently, U¨ber Pop-Musik (On Pop Music) (2014).

Hal Foster

Hal Foster has been a force in American art criticism since the late 1970s, bringing psychoanalytic and poststructural theory to bear on contemporary art and its historical precedents. In 1983 he edited the anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which helped frame postmodernism within the arts. Foster began to write for Artforum in 1978 and was a senior editor at Art in America (1981–1987) before becoming a coeditor of the journal October in 1991, and contributes frequently to Artforum, October, and the London Review of Books. His books include Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real (1996), Design and Crime (2002), The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), The First Pop Age (2012), and Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015). He is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

Isa Genzken

Isabelle Graw

Lisa Lee

Pamela Lee

Birgit Pelzer

Juliane Rebentisch

Josef Strau

Wolfgang Tillmans

Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced younger generations more than Wolfgang Tillmans. In a career spanning almost four decades, he has consistently redefined the medium of photography through a seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies. His inventive practice pairs intimacy and playfulness with a commitment to social awareness and a persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies.

Lawrence Weiner

$18.95