Nazraeli Press 2003
112 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1590050495
17 x 24.5 cm English text. Hardcover
This beautifully produced book is published to coincide with a ground-breaking exhibition that opened at the CCA in Glasgow on 24 January 2003, and travels to the Architectural Association, London on 1 May. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, The Space Between will surely confirm Matta-Clark as one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Despite his tragically short career, the influence of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) is ever more pervasive. Central to the explosion of creativity in New York's SoHo in the 1970s, Matta-Clark turned his focus on the city itself, slicing through abandoned buildings to create works that were at once large-scale sculptural environments, social commentary and urban performance pieces. His stated aim was to unravel the grammar of architecture and "turn a building into a state of mind".
The 'building cuts' remain the best-known of the artist's works, despite the fact that they exist today only through film and photographic documentation. However, Matta-Clark's engagement with the urban landscape and challenge to conventional art practice also led him to set up an artist-run restaurant, Food. Armed with a movie camera, he embarked on journeys of discovery inside the hidden spaces beneath Paris and London. He handed out free food and 'fresh air' on the streets, created architecture from refuse, and planned visionary architectural projects that would transform the City. Price: £20.00
OUT OF STOCK
Juliane Otterbach 2003
72 Pages B&W reproductions
10.5 x 7.5 cm Softcover
PORNOGRAPHICS is a series of flickbooks that depicts graphic scenes from sexual or violent internet films in a new format. Films with often extreme visual content were chosen and downloaded from websites accessible to everyone, and successive stills of the main action were then traced on a white background. The result is a series of stark, simple and striking black outlines, which, viewed in sequence, create vivid moving images, whether of a girl stripping, a woman masturbating, or a sado-masochist scene. The challenge in creating these flickbooks was to transform scenes that would have been deemed by many as vulgar in their internet format into a more acceptable, designed and sensual form a precious object in its own right. The project illustrates just how vastly the translation of visual content from one medium to another can alter a viewer's perception.
Due to their success in the bookshops number 1 and 8 of the series have been reprinted in an edition of 500. They are available separately whilst the series is only being sold as a complete set of which each copy is handcrafted and signed by the artist. Price: £9.25
Hatje Cantz 2003
112 pages Colour reproduction. ISBN 3775712208
21 x 28 cm English/German text. Softcover
Zhang Huan, born in 1965 in the Chinese province Honan, was among the first artists in China who at the beginning of the nineties turned to performance art. Although its underground-based protagonists were rarely permitted to appear publicly in Beijing, the "Beijing East Village" artist colony was amazingly fast to draw the attention of the Western world. Since the middle of the nineties, Huan´s works could be viewed in Europe, Japan and the U.S., at first chiefly on video or photographs. In 1998, he showed his first performance to a larger public in New York, where he currently lives and works as an artist. At the centre of Huan´s early works were psychological and physical extreme situations to which he submitted his naked body. For his formally stringent work "To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond", Huan had a group of farm workers climb into a fish pond near Beijing in 1997, thus creating an image for the drift to the cities, the flooding of cities with vast numbers of people, the assimilation of individuals in an underprivileged mass without vote. Here, he for the first time used choreographic means in his work. On the whole, theatrical concepts and narrative structures have started to play a larger role in Huan's work since the end of the nineties.
Texts by Yilmaz Dziewior, Hans Günter Golinski, Yu Yeon Kim Price: £12.95
De Pont Stichting 2003
104 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9074529186
22 x 27 cm English/Dutch text. Softcover
Exhibition catalogue accompanying Tan's recent exibition at De Pont Stichting, Villa Arson, Nice and the DAAD gallery in Berlin. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive. Akte 1 includes more than ten film and video works from the past five years. The exhibition constituted a sequel to the video installation Roll I & II. Essays by Beatrice von Bismarck and Els Hoek as well as a text by the artist herself. Price: £33.00
Richard Artschwager is an artist whose works do not fit into the established categories of contemporary art. At he beginning of the sixties he made his first furniture sculptures out of laminate and painted hardboard. The amorphous structure of paint applied to imitate the grain of wood testifies to his criticism of illusionism and the rejection of any kind of symbolic meaning. This publication includes for the first time a large selection of drawings from the years 1960-2002. The medium of drawing gave Artschwager the opportunity to play around with thoughts in an almost essayist fashion, similar to the way he wrote his notes and articles. Some of the newer paintings are actually portraits, a first astonishing theme for an artist whose medium was always thought to be the object. The intensity of our gaze on the portrayed person and the aesthetic distance created by Artschwager's way of painting both contribute to an irritation of the viewer. Price: £35.00
134 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3883757179
15 x 22 cm Softcover
Richard Prince's latest book, American English, based around the artist's collection of English and American First Editions. Price: £23.50
Haunch of Venison 2003
56 pages Colour and B&W reproductions ISBN 0954067134
22 x 27 cm English text. Hardcover
For over 35 years, with the emphasis on both personal experience and ideas, Richard Long has made art in many places around the world by making walks in rural and wilderness landscapes. His simple and direct engagement is realised by leaving and recording traces of his journeys, creating works concerned with time, movement and locality. This book accompanies an exhibition of new works by Long that span the variety of media he employs, including photographs, sculptures, and mud and text works made directly on the gallery walls. The landscapes walked to create the work include Galicia, Brittany and his recent travels to India, where he spent time among the Warli tribe with the artist Jivya Soma Mashe. The catalogue illustrations consist of Long’s recent works both in the gallery and in landscapes, and the text explores Long’s relationship to landscape as well his art historical significance, focussing on the works featured in this exhibition. Price: £20.00
Steidl 2003
128 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3882439114
15 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
To enter Roni Horn's realm requires courage. Actually requires courage. But you only become aware of this after the fact, when it's already too late. Attracted by the bright white or the stringency of the installation, seduced by the many faces and pairs of eyes, fascinated by the labyrinthine and yet clear rooms, you enter her realm somewhat unsuspectingly. And then the lock clicks behind you, almost silently, and you are standing all alone in front of a work that upon closer inspection suddenly seems rather dry and reserved, seemingly repetitive. In this volume Elisabeth Lebovici, Bell Hooks, Thierry de Duve, Urs Stahel, Paulo Herkenhoff and Barbara Kruger through their essays begin a dialogue with a work that seems eloquent because of its sequential polyphony, but that breaks many evolving narratives right away. The flow of its visual language impels the viewer to think, to circle around something that ultimately defies language and precise definition... around central aspects of existence: place, time, and identity. Price: £14.50
Tate 2003
216 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1854374559
22 x 27.5 cm English text. Softcover
‘No painter, dead or alive, has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.’ – Robert Melville, The New Statesman, 1970.
Bridget Riley is one of Britain’s most respected artists, with an international reputation. Her distinguished and singular career encompasses forty years of uncompromising and remarkable innovation.
Riley first attracted critical attention with the dazzling black-and-white paintings she began to make in 1961 under the ‘Op Art’ banner.
Disseminated through the mass media and widely plagiarised by the fashion industry, these came to epitomize an era. Since then she as remained at the forefront of developments in contemporary painting, making highly distinctive works which seek to articulate an abstract language in which relations of colour and form generate visual sensations.
Riley occupies an unusual position as a senior artist whose work generates fresh interest with each new development. This comprehensive survey includes key examples of all phrases of Riley’s work to date. It offers the opportunity to re-view many early, celebrated paintings and to see these afresh in the context of works produced up to the present day. Paul Moorhouse, Richard Shiff and Robert Kudielka provide an overview of her art and career, and fresh analyses of the relation of Riley’s work to theories of aesthetic perception. Price: £24.99
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 2003
120 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0810991888
22 x 29 cm English text. Hardcover
One of the most important artists to emerge in the last decade and one of several figurative painters to receive attention in the 1990s, John Currin fuses historical and contemporary styles and source materials to create strange and challenging images that examine the tradition of painting and the meaning of representational painting today. His influences range from Italian and Northern Renaissance painters and the genre scenes of Courbet to popular illustrations from the first half of the 20th century and the pages of current fashion magazines. Difficult to pin down, Currin’s ambiguous works are as compelling as they are frustrating. His detached yet somewhat-sympathetic individual portrayals as well as his unsettling scenarios foster a psychological investigation of representation and desire. Price: £25.00
Taschen 2003
240 Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3822826863
18.5 x 24.5 cm English/French/German text. Softcover
"I am rather like a travelling salesman. I deal in ideas. I am far more to people than just someone who paints pictures."
Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) was one of the most complex artists of the 80s and 90s. His practice could not be reduced to any one medium, sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, catalogues, invitation cards and posters were all equally valid forms of artistic expression. He constantly played off one against another in an output so prolific that it verged on the inflationary. His maxim was that "good artists are never on holiday" and he demanded the same total commitment from those who viewed his works.
This book documents two decades of Martin Kippenberger’s work in 400 illustrations, from the early days of his Berlin office to his works for documenta X in Kassel and for the exhibition of sculpture in Münster, both of which were completed after his death. Price: £9.99
216 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3775713018
24. 5 x 34.5 cm English/German text. Softcover
This publication is the first to focus solely on the famous portraits Julian Opie has produced during the last six years. Composed of his characteristically simplified lines and shapes, Opie's portraits are rendered through computer technology. Beginning with a photo, he then uses computers and software to edit the images down to their graphic essentials. The fascinating results become icons that serve to identify the individuals with the least information possible. Whereas most of Opie's portraits are of rather unknown persons from his personal background, in some commissioned works he features public figures like Kate Moss or Jacques Villeneuve, but by titling the pictures only with their first name the celebrities lose their iconic fame and are reduced to the everyday shape of their face. Price: £29.95
