Книги про современное искусство

Au Courant with the Art Scene

The history of the VanhaerentsArtCollection began in the 1970s, when a young Walter Vanhaerents laid the foundation of his now famous collection with works by Andy Warhol. Much has happened since then, but the focus on new and provocative art, often considered radical at the time, remained. From Bruce Nauman, Yoshitomo Nara, and Bill Viola to Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Katharina Fritsch, or Tom Sachs—across different genres and media, the Brussel-based collection reflects a keen sense of the latest developments in current art practices as well as a prescient intuition for emerging artists. The publication Looking Ahead celebrates the 50th anniversary of this unique collection and provides an overview of the exhibitions of the past 15 years.

This landmark monograph is the first comprehensive survey of Walter De Maria’s exceptionally diverse and visionary art practice, providing an in-depth look at more than 200 works and presenting the first detailed chronology ever published.

Although best known as a creator of seminal works of Land art, Walter De Maria also maintained an extensive and highly original practice as a sculptor, painter, draftsman, writer, filmmaker, and composer. This expansive publication presents more than 200 works created or envisioned by the artist from 1960 until his death in 2013. Each work is fully illustrated and accompanied by detailed text entries written by Elizabeth and Michael Childress, supplemented by archival images, many of which have never been published before.

Essays by Michael Govan, Christine Mehring, and Lars Nittve provide detailed overviews and analyses of the early, middle, and later periods of De Maria’s production. The monograph also includes an introduction by Donna De Salvo; the first detailed, thoroughly documented, and illustrated chronology of De Maria’s life and work, written by Dagny Corcoran; and an exhibition history and bibliography.

About the Authors:

Elizabeth Childress is the director of the Walter De Maria Archives. Michael Childress is the archivist at the Walter De Maria Archives. Dagny Corcoran was the founding proprietor of Art Catalogues, an art bookstore in Culver City, California. She also served as director of books and multiples at Marian Goodman Gallery. Donna De Salvo is the senior adjunct curator of special projects at Dia Art Foundation in New York. Michael Govan is the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Christine Mehring is the Mary L. Block Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, as well as associate faculty in the Department of Visual Arts at the University. She also serves as an adjunct curator at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art. Lars Nittve is the director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Between Afrofuturism, fantasy and postcolonialism: the most comprehensive monograph to date on the fantastical worlds of Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu takes viewers on journeys of material, psychological and sociopolitical transformation; this volume explores her most recent groundbreaking work. Over the past two decades, Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the need for powerful new mythologies beyond simple binaries and stereotypes, Mutu breaches common distinctions between human, animal, plant and machine. An artist who calls both Nairobi and New York City home, Mutu moves voraciously between cultural traditions to challenge colonialist, racist and sexist worldviews with her visionary projection of an alternate universe informed by Afrofuturism, posthumanism and feminism.

This dazzling book accompanies a presentation of Mutu’s new work on view at the Legion, along with a greater selection from her landmark oeuvre. It is the most comprehensive book on the artist to date.

A comprehensive survey of the work of the influential Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu’s multidisciplinary practice grapples with contemporary realities while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis. Her work addresses some of today's most critical questions concerning historical violence and its impact on women, together with our inextricable ties toward one another, our ecosystems, and other life forms.

Accompanying a major solo exhibition at the New Museum opening in February 2023, this expansive survey will trace the entirety of Mutu’s influential career chronologically, from early sculptural works of the late 1990s to her collage works of the early 2000s and more recent video works, large-scale sculptures, and site-specific interventions.

This monograph provides the opportunity to see thematic through-lines and progressions across the entire arc of Mutu's career to date. Her sculptures inaugurated the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Façade Project, and her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London, among other major institutions. 

About the Authors:

Margot Norton is Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum.

Vivian Crockett is Curator at the New Museum.

FriendsWithYou is a contemporary fine art collective that has been spreading their unifying message of Magic, Luck, and Friendship worldwide since their founding in 2002. Expanding their mission of connectivity and reawakening via their interactive artworks, the artists Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III call on the viewer to reinvent and reinterpret the lost meaning of spirituality. Using ideas like animism, healing arts, the modern ritual and celebrated symbols, FriendsWithYou addresses the human need to relate to one another. Together, the artists have constructed their own brand of post pop visual language a la Murakami, Arturo Herrera and Yayoi Kusama and have instilled in their work the powerful ability to trigger thoughts of happiness, curiosity, and meaningful interaction.

We Are FriendsWithYou is a brightly colored and comprehensive monograph that explores the journey of Sam & Tury, from their early handcrafted art objects to their recent works experimenting with animation, paintings, sculpture, public playgrounds, and published works. Originating at the crossroads of art, design, and popular culture, FriendsWithYou's output is quite unique. By presenting a “superflat” standpoint on their creations and allowing all types of influences­­­ –– film directors, writers, anime artists, as well as contemporary artists –– they are revolutionizing the art world and widening the straightforward definitions of these disciplines. With contributions by Pharrell Williams, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Peter Doroshenko, this book reveals never-before-seen insight into the complete body of work from the art duo responsible for spreading the self-proclaimed “happy-virus.”

About the Author:

FriendsWithYou is a globally renowned fine art collective that originated in Miami and is currently based in Los Angeles. Pharrell Williams is a designer, recording artist, and producer based in Miami. Alejandro Jodorowsky is a playwright, filmmaker, composer, actor, mime, comic book writer, tarot reader, psychotherapist, and author. Peter Doroshenko is the Director of the Dallas Contemporary Museum and has contributed writing to several contemporary artist books.

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A Clarion Call for Cultural Resistance in a Digital Age 

Welcome to an extraordinary journey into underground culture from visionary publisher Jefferson Hack. Featuring contributions from cultural provocateurs Tilda Swinton, Rankin, Douglas Coupland, Björk, Aimee Mullins, and many more, We Can’t Do This Alone: Jefferson Hack the System re-defines the purpose of alternative media in the 21st century — drawing on a wealth of innovative projects to artfully map out a bright future for radical publishing. In the spirit of progressive individualism at its core every single copy is unique, emblazoned with an individuated, numbered cover displaying a one-off fresco of the provocative material between its pages. If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.

100% INDIVIDUAL 
This book is completely unique, containing a cover made just for you.
Made with Kodak

About the Authors:

Jefferson Hack is the editorial director and cofounder of Dazed Media. Hans Ulrich Obrist is codirector of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects at Serpentine Galleries. Björk is an Icelandic composer, musician, and singer. Tilda Swinton is a British actress and fashion icon known for both arthouse and mainstream films.

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A definitive and long-overdue monograph revealing the extraordinarily prolific career of the American artist Wes Lang, whose frenetic and manic paintings bring together ideas and icons mined from a post-pop American landscape. 

In the Wes Lang universe, recurring figures and symbols — horses, reapers, skulls, Native American chiefs, even nods to his favorite painters, country and jazz musicians — serve as emblems in one way or another for freedom and inspiration. References to the Tao Te Ching and the lectures of Ram Dass are scattered throughout the work, revealing a central ethos that underlies the artist’s complex iconography. The repetition of these sometimes paradoxical images and phrases, motifs and mantras, gives Lang’s work a ritualistic aspect seemingly at odds with his eclectic and spontaneous style.

Introduced with an exploratory essay by the critic Arty Nelson, the book draws on more than 25 years’ worth of material, from stark paintings on wood that formed the artist's first exhibition to richly layered oil paintings exhibited in Paris in 2020, and from unpublished pencil drawings to imagery made iconic by his enigmatic commercial collaborations. Oversized and with pull-out gatefold pages, the book is testament to the scope and richness of Lang's work: expansive in its iconography, deceptively intimate in its detail, and juxtaposing a textured, painterly style with a playful acceptance of the diversity of his own influences.

About the Authors:

Wes Lang is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles. Arty Nelson is a novelist and essayist who has published writing on contemporary artists from Chris Johanson to Ed Templeton.

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The most comprehensive survey to date of the contemporary artist Whitfield Lovell, whose poetic and intricately crafted tableaux and installations document and pay tribute to the history and cultural memory of the African American experience.

Whitfield Lovell: Passages accompanies a major traveling exhibition of the artist’s powerful Conté crayon drawings combined with objects to create assemblages and multisensory installations that focus on aspects of Black history, raising questions about identity, memory, and America’s collective heritage. Whitfield Lovell (b. 1959, Bronx), a 2007 MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient and conceptual artist, creates exquisite drawings inspired by his own collection of vintage photographs of unidentified African Americans taken between the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights movement. He pairs his meticulously rendered drawings done on paper or salvaged wooden boards with found objects, creating enigmatic assemblages and stand-alone tableaux that are rich with symbolism and ambiguity and evoke personal memories, ancestral connections, and the collective American past.

This richly illustrated volume features essays by leading scholars that contextualize Lovell’s work through the exploration of compelling elements such as sound and card playing, contemplating memory as method.

About the Author:

Michèle Wije is curator at the American Federation of Arts. Bridget Cooks is associate professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Art History, University of California, Irvine. Cheryl Finley is inaugural director of the Atlanta University Center Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective; a distinguished visiting professor at Spelman College; and associate professor of art history at Cornell University.

In this enjoyable and thought-provoking book Susie Hodge explains, thoroughly and conclusively, why modern art is not, and never has been, child’s play

The book examines 100 works of modern art that have attracted critical hostility – from Cy Twombly’s scribbled Olympia (1957), Jean-Michel Basquiat’s crude but spontaneous LNAPRK (1982), to the apparently careless mess of Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) – and explains how, far from being negligible novelties, they are extensions of the artistic ideas of their time.

In the past, estimation of artists' stature took great account of their ability to produce a likeness of the real world. A portrait was expected to be a faithful likeness, and landscapes had to be recognizable in all their details. However, especially after the arrival of photography, many artists ceased to make such ‘true’ likenesses in favour of more immediate images that sought to express feelings about their subjects. From the beginning of this sea change, critics have mistaken an apparent lack of technique for a lack of sophistication, often deriding works as nothing more than the untutored efforts of children.

Susie Hodge explains how ‘notorious’ works such as Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966) – a rectangular arrangement of fire-bricks that is admittedly easily copied by a child – occupy unique niches in the history of ideas, both showing influences of past artists and themselves influencing subsequent artists. A five-year-old might succeed in executing a spin painting such as those of Damien Hirst without understanding the ideas that lay behind it or its place in the history of artistic endeavour, but it does not follow that this work would be of significance to artists and historians.

With illustrations of works from Hans Arp to Adolf Wölfli, Hodge places each work in its cultural context to present an unforgettable vision of modern art. This book will give you an understanding of the ways in which modern art differs from the realistic works of earlier centuries, transforming as well as informing your gallery visits for years to come.

Polish painter and filmmaker Wilhelm Sasnal has emerged over the last two decades as one of Europe's preeminent contemporary artists. This major monograph offers a comprehensive assessment of his practice.

Renowned for his powerful portrayals of our collective culture and history, Wilhelm Sasnal draws on found images from his surroundings, newspapers and magazines, billboards, and the Internet, creating works of art that act as an archive to the mass of sprawling images that flood contemporary life. His work addresses weighty historical themes such as the Holocaust, or familiar pop-cultural icons, as well as the people, places, and quotidian objects he encounters, constituting an artistic document of postcommunist Poland at a time of sociopolitical transformation. With a concise approach to his subject matter, Sasnal captures stolen moments in time. His graphic treatment of light and color suggests a camera's gaze, imbuing the canvases with a filmic quality.

This major volume is completed by a series of essays addressing significant themes in the artist's work: alienation, portraiture, the personal versus the public, and history as a prism of reflection.

About the Authors:

Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972) is a Polish painter, illustrator, and filmmaker. Brian Dillon is U.K. editor of Cabinet magazine and teaches at the Royal College of Art, London. Pavel Pys is Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. Adrian Searle has been Art Critic for the Guardian since 1996. Kasia Redzisz is Senior Curator at Tate Liverpool. Andrzej Przywara is a curator, art critic, and art historian. He is Director of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw.

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." —The New York Times

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, which is arguably still one of the most comprehensive studies on her work to date, has been augmented by an essay by Catherine Taft and a collection of new poems by the artist.

About the authors:

Akira Tatehata is a poet and art critic who has been awarded the 2005 Takami Jun Award for Literature.
Laura Hoptman is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Udo Kultermann was a curator and art historian who taught at Washington University in St. Louis.
Catherine Taft is deputy director of LAXART in Lo

Louis Vuitton, the global luxury fashion house, and world-famous artist Yayoi Kusama partner again, and in the storied history of the brand’s epic collaborations with artists, this is the most ambitious to date.

In this important volume about this powerhouse collaboration, artwork by trailblazing artist Yayoi Kusama is featured alongside the groundbreaking fashion collection she designed with Louis Vuitton, and is organized around the seminal artistic themes that inspired the project.

Edited by Ferdinando Verdi and Isabel Venero, the volume includes contributions from renowned experts in both fashion and art, including writer Jo-Ann Furniss who explores the collaboration, designer Marc Jacobs who initiated the house’s relationship with Kusama, and curators Mika Yoshitake and Philip Larratt-Smith, both of whom have organized important exhibitions on the artist’s work. And Hans Ulrich Obrist, the renowned curator and Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, London, Hans Ulrich Obrist talks with longtime Kusama expert Akira Tatehata.  

In the spirit of this iconic partnership and with a nod to the popular fascination with Kusama, the book includes musings from some of the most important contemporary artists and musicians working today — including Arca, Katherine Bradford, Anne Imhoff, Ryan McNamara, Raúl de Nieves, Ryan Trecartin, Nora Turato, and Jacolby Satterwhite — talking about Kusama’s impact and her extraordinary ability to build fantastical worlds through her signature polka dots and mirror balls, which are joyful representations of her deeply thoughtful philosophy about art and the universe.

About the Authors:

Jo-Ann Furniss is an editor, creative director, and writer. She was the editor-in-chief of Arena Homme+ from 2004 to 2011, and writes regularly for I-D, The Face, and AnOther Magazine, as well as the New York Times. Mika Yoshitake, PhD, is an independent curator with expertise in postwar Japanese art. She received her MA and PhD in Art History from UCLA.

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Experience the brilliant artist's lifelong obsession with nature and immersion in gardens, a bedrock of her hugely influential work.

Yayoi Kusama’s work is the product of an infinite curiosity and obsessive drive to create. Throughout the artist’s long and varied career, there is one persistent yet little-studied through line — her deep engagement with nature. From early sketches depicting flowers at her family’s plant nursery in Japan, to her most recent monumental sculptures of botanical forms poised to take flight, Kusama consistently calls our attention to the patterns, connections, and cycles of living things that are not always visible.

Yayoi Kusama: Cosmic Nature is the accompanying catalogue to the first comprehensive exploration of the artist’s enduring fascination with the natural world, exhibited across the 250-acre landscape of The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition examines her lifelong awareness and attunement to nature, which serves not merely as a source of inspiration, but is an integral source of power for her artistic language. This profound life force pervades all of Kusama’s work, from studies of the molecular to contemplations of the universal, resulting in a transcendent, cosmic nature.

Exhibition guest curator Mika Yoshitake, an independent scholar specializing in postwar Japanese art, and Joanna L. Groarke, NYBG exhibitions curator, catalogue co-editors, bring together essays by art historians, curators, and a scientist, who each present unique interpretations of Kusama’s engagement with the natural world. Featuring more than 120 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and archival photographs, including stunning views of the works displayed in NYBG’s gardens and galleries, Yayoi Kusama: Cosmic Nature offers a new perspective on one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.

About the Authors:

Mika Yoshitake is an independent curator, and most recently Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Alexandra Munroe is Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Karen Daubmann is Associate Vice President for Exhibitions and Public Engagement at NYBG. Joanna L. Groarke is Director of Public Engagement and Library Exhibitions Curator, NYBG.

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This playful, colorful, and glamorous volume celebrates the South Korean handmade women's shoe brand by Yuul Yie, the founder and pioneering woman behind the scenes.

To celebrate ten years of Yuul Yie's unstoppable rise, this is the first illustrated monograph dedicated to the Korean women's shoe brand founded by Sunyuul Yie in 2010. The footwear line combines cultured artistic, architectural, and pictorial references with the skillful use of Italian leather and a single goal for its couture: simple and high-quality design and workmanship accompanied by a sober and sophisticated style. The label prides itself on its unique and unexpectedly elegant designs. From its color-blocked mules to its pearl-heeled boots, Yuul Yie's distinct aesthetic is trendy yet timeless, thoughtful, daring, and undeniably chic.

It's no secret that Asian footwear brands are taking the Western fashion world by storm, and Yuul Yie's designs continue to dominate among fashion tastemakers across the globe.

About the Author:

Sunyuul Yie studied women's fashion design at the Esmod Seoul fashion school and won the grand prize while there. Afterward, she worked in a couple of fashion houses in Seoul and got involved in the shoe industry thanks to her shoe-designer friend's offer. Yie created her own shoe brand, Ma Vie En Rose, in 2010, but renamed the brand YUUL YIE a few years later. Alessandra Bruni Lopez y Royo is currently a Research Associate of the School of Arts, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and an Associate Fellow of the Critical Institute.

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A look at the remarkable Chinese performance artist, sculptor and painter.

Zhang Huan has emerged as one of the most important artists of his time, a fearless explorer of the limits of the human body and a key figure in the flourishing Chinese art scene. His earliest performances, including 12m2, 65 kg and To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, subjected his body to gruelling tests of endurance while addressing the relationship between physical endurance and spiritual tranquillity.

Zhang’s move to New York in 1998 contributed to his emergence as one of the most widely recognized figures in international contemporary art and led to performances in cities around the globe, including Sydney, Rome, Shanghai and Hamburg. In 2006 he established a studio in Shanghai, where he began to seek a greater connection to Chinese heritage and history. This marked a new direction in his work, as he turned from performance to sculpture, painting, and installation. Through creating large-scale sculpture, often using found objects such as doors from rural Chinese homes, he continues to explore new ways to render his interest in the human body and its unique language.

Buddhist themes, which figured indirectly into his early work, took on a more prominent role after a visit to Tibet in 2005. There, he began collecting fragments of Buddhist sculptures, which he then used as models for massive copper figures. Upon his return to Shanghai, he began to use incense ash from local Buddhist temples in his sculptures and paintings. The ash, a product of religious offerings, strengthens the link between his art and his Buddhist spiritual practice.

In the Interview, RoseLee Goldberg discusses with Zhang his life and motivations, his childhood in the rural province of Tangyin and his realization that his body could be the best vehicle to express himself. Yilmaz Dziewior’s Survey analyses the evolution of Zhang’s work from his early, controversial performances in Beijing through to his interest in Buddhism and his recent development of monumental sculptures and paintings, some requiring over a hundred assistants. Robert Storr focuses on Canal Building (2007), an epic ash painting that serves as a testament to the tremendous power of collective labour. For Artist’s Choice, Zhang has selected an extract from the teachings of the ancient monk tiguang compiled by his disciple Miaoji. Artist’s Writings include Zhang’s own illuminating thoughts on his art and his life, including a previously unpublished artist’s statement.

About the Authors:

Interview: RoseLee Goldberg is an art historian, critic and curator who pioneered the study of performance art. Author of several seminal books, including Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979) and Performance: Live Art from the 1960s (1998), she is the Founding Director of ‘Performa’, a non-profit organization for the development, commission and presentation of performance art.

Survey: Yilmaz Dziewior is a critic and curator based in Hamburg, where he is a professor in art theory at the Hochschule für bildende Künste. Formerly Curator at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and Director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, where he organized an exhibition of Zhang Huan’s work in 2002, he is currently Co-Curator of the 7th Biennial Exhibition of Visual Arts in Limerick (2009). His writing has been published in Artforum, Camera Austria and Texte zur Kunst, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues.

Focus: Robert Storr is Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. Formerly Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he directed the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in 2004 and the Venice Biennale in 2007. He was a contributing author to Phaidon’s Alex Katz (2005), Louise Bourgeois (2003) and Raymond Pettibon (2001), and writes regularly for numerous journals and magazines, including Art in America, Frieze and Parkett.