Kubin's eerie, unsettling illustrations reveal his preoccupation with the world's evils
For Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), evil was intrinsic to his life and work. After a traumatic childhood growing up in Zell am See and subsequent mental crises, he began his artistic training in Munich in 1898. He processed his nightmares and obsessions in a large number of fantastical drawings. His subjects, perpetually pessimistic, remain relevant a century later: war, famine, pestilence, death and every horror in between. Kubin had a pronounced fear of the feminine, sexuality, night time and of being at the mercy of fate, all of which visited him in uncanny dreams. For Kubin, the aesthetic of evil proved to be the antithesis of the idyll: the deliberate suppression of a hideous reality.
Drawn from the Albertina Museum's collection of over 1,800 drawings by the artist, The Aesthetic of Evil displays Kubin's grotesque vision as well as his superb draftsmanship. Amid the violent, haunting atmosphere of his graphic works it is easy to see how Kubin became trapped in his dark visions, to the point where the inexhaustible, intangible specter of evil consumed his life. Essays by Elisabeth Dutz, Natalie Lettner and Brigitte Holzinger explore Kubin's cosmos of the sinister: his personal iconography of evil fueled by his nightmares and obsessions.
Fondation Beyeler's invitation to the voyage through the oeuvre of one of the moste famous modernist artists - from his early paintings to his legendary late silhouettes.
Henri Matisse is one of the most celebrated artists of Modernism. His groundbreaking work had a significant influence on his contemporaries and many subsequent artists to this day. The retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler spans all of the artist's creative periods. Beginning with the paintings from around 1900, the show advances through the revolutionary Fauvist paintings, the experimental works of the 1910s, the sensual paintings from the Nice period and the 1930s, and culminates in the legendary cut-outs of his late period. Drawing on Charles Baudelaire's poem Invitation to the Voyage from 1857, the exhibition and catalogue are conceived as a journey through Matisse's work and life.
Piet Mondrian had a decisive influence on the development of painting from figuration to abstraction. On the occasion of his 150th birthday, Mondrian Evolution is dedicated to his multifaceted work and artistic development. Initially working in the tradition of Dutch landscape painting of the late 19th century, Symbolism and Cubism subsequently took on great significance for him. It was not until the early 1920s that the artist focused on a wholly non-representational pictorial vocabulary, limited to the rectangular arrangement of black lines with surfaces in white and the primary colors blue, red and yellow. In separate chapters, this path is traced through motifs such as windmills, dunes, and the sea, farms reflected in the water, and plants in various forms of abstraction.
Ce catalogue d'une exposition à la Hayward Gallery à Londres constitue une rétrospective complète sur cinq décennies de carrière de Hiroshi Sugimoto. Time Machine comprend donc des extraits de toutes ses séries majeures, ainsi que des travaux moins connus qui viennent éclairer son approche expérimentale, conceptuelle et innovante avec laquelle il crée ses images dont la lumière est à la fois l'objet et le sujet.
The exhibition Maison Sonia. Sonia Delaunay and the Atelier Simultane is dedicated to the applied work of Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), with a focus on her textile design work. The accompanying catalogue includes the first scholarly essays on Sonia Delaunay's collaborations with silk industrialist Robert Perrier and couturier Jacques Heim, who were among her most important collaborators and previously unexplored. In addition, the publication provides the first overview of the role of Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous fabrics in the design of modern living and media spaces.
It's All About Freedom presents a comprehensive cross-section through nine decades of Tomi Ungerer's artistic work for the first time-from drawings from the nineteen-thirties to objects from the two thousand-tens. The exhibits selected shed new light on Ungerer's oeuvre by making it possible to comprehend the artistic dimension of the political and stylistic lines and breaks in his oeuvre as a 'freewheeling artist'. His passion for experimenting across genres and the interplay between drawing, collage, and assemblage through which he searched for identity and humanity is thus shown in his work again and again. Developed by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg in cooperation with the Tomi Ungerer Estate and the Musee Tomi Ungerer in Strasbourg, the volume brings together contributions on Tomi Ungerer's life's work by Thomas David, Belinda Grace Gardner, Aria Ungerer, and Therese Willer, with a foreword by Dirk Luckow and Harald Falckenberg.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the fabric works from the last two decades in the career of legendary artist Louise Bourgeois. "I've always had a fascination with the needle," she said, "the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It's a claim to forgiveness." This body of work began when the artist started incorporating clothes from all stages of her life into her art, and later expanded to include a range of other textiles such as bedlinen, handkerchiefs, tapestry, and needlepoint. The fabric works mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation, and serve as metaphors for emotional and psychological states. The catalog - which accompanies the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London and the Gropius Bau, Berlin - features works from numerous series, including the monumental Cell installations, figurative sculptures, and abstract drawings.
Ancient and contemporary Middle Eastern histories fuse in Fattal's sculpture and collage.
Influenced by her experiences of war and migration, Paris-based Syrian-American artist Simone Fattal (born 1942) has transcended boundaries like few other artists of her generation. Born in Damascus, she grew up in Lebanon. After studying philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut and the Sorbonne in Paris, she returned to Beirut in 1969 and began to paint. In 1980 she fled the civil war and settled in California with her lifelong partner, the artist and poet Etel Adnan.
Fattal's collages combine pieces from her private archive with historical events in the Arab world. These works suggest the fragility of an identity shaped by migration. Her more abstract ceramic sculptures reference ancient myths and archaeological finds.
Combining essays by long-time associates and new scholarly contributions from international authors, this first comprehensive monograph focuses on Simone Fattal's role as an artist and as a publisher of Post-Apollo Press.
Inside the interwar British design store that pioneered midcentury modern plywood furniture
In 1931, the English designer Gerald Summers (1899-1967) and his partner, Marjorie Butcher (1909-96), opened their London shop Makers of Simple Furniture. A small company, they produced made-to-order furniture in limited quantities. Until the firm's closing in 1940, Makers of Simple Furniture produced hundreds of ingenious furniture designs in plywood. Conceived, in Summers' words, as "furniture for the concrete age," this singular body of work shaped the notion of the modern interior in Britain.
Makers of Simple Furniture tells for the first time the compelling story of the firm and its dedicated proprietors. Drawing on Butcher's vivid recollections and a wealth of unpublished material--including never-before-seen images, personal correspondence, workshop documents and illustrated specification sheets--the book reveals the magnitude of their achievements and restores a neglected chapter in the history of modern design. This publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
À Nîmes, le Carré d'Art accueille une exposition (07/04/2017-17/09/2017) dans le cadre de la programmation anniversaire du Centre Pompidou. A Different Way to Move propose une histoire des foyers communs où s'entremêlent les arts visuels, la danse et la musique dans les années 1960 et 1970 à New York. Ce livre met sur un pied d'égalité les démarches de Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris et Richard Serra avec ceux des pionnières de la Postmodern Dance comme Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti et Yvonne Rainer.
An alternative history of "environments": how women artists from Lygia Clark to Judy Chicago redefined installation, featuring reconstructions of destroyed works.
"Environments" was a term coined by Lucio Fontana in 1949 to describe installations at the intersection of art and architecture that emphasized audience participation. To date, art history has tended to focus on the works of male artists mostly from the US and Europe. Inside Other Spaces offers a different narrative, highlighting the contributions of women artists to the field. It features 14 pioneering women artists from three generations, spanning Asia, Europe and the Americas, including Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi, Aleksandra Kašuba, Lea Lublin, Marta Minujín, Tania Mouraud, Maria Nordman, Nanda Vigo, Faith Wilding and Tsuruko Yamazaki. Given the experimental nature of these works, many of them were deconstructed or destroyed immediately after being exhibited. This is the first project to reconstruct them with the help of conservators using archival material and heterogeneous sources such as photographs, architectural plans and lists of materials.
A characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production is that casual acquaintances and close intimates, friends, lovers, or sometimes even rivals come together to work collaboratively on the realization of a single work of art. Amitie et creativites collectives is focused on the genesis of these works and explores the conditions that contributed to the concentration and liberation of these creative energies. Beginning with the groundbreaking socio-cultural upheaval of the 19th century, the publication examines for the first time a variety of works of diverse genres and techniques from different time periods. Featuring works by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, Francis Picabia and Rene Clair, Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Jenny Holzer and Lady Pink; and many more, this publication. brings together more than one hundred works.
Pure Painting est le catalogue d'une exposition présentée au Texas puis au Kunstforum à Vienne. Il propose une exploration approfondie de la pratique artistique de Robert Motherwell. Plusieurs spécialistes y examinent le passage de l'artiste américain du surréalisme à l'abstraction et analysent les grandes séries qui se sont développées au cours de ses cinquante ans de carrière. Le catalogue étudie le dialogue entre l'art de Motherwell et la tradition de la peinture française du XIXe siècle, étudie sa relation avec les techniques et procédés espagnols, en mettant l'accent sur leur signification politique sous-jacente, et se penche sur l'utilisation par Motherwell du pigment ocre, avec son évocation profonde du temps géologique et des pratiques d'avant-garde.
As artists, they were self-taught and created a cosmos of images that still captivates us today with its sensual immediacy and has made a lasting mark in art history on the work of non-academically trained artists: Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), Camille Bombois (1883-1970), Andre Bauchant (1873-1958), Louis Vivin (1861-1939) and Seraphine Louis (1864-1942). They are counted among the so-called circle of the "painters of the sacred heart"; their scenarios, often borrowed from nature, especially flowers and fruits, but also people in parks and landscapes, indicate a closeness to nature, a sensitive approach to the things of the immediate environment, with which they apparently sought to escape the coldness of uprising modernism.
These French pioneers of authentic art were discovered by the German art historian Wilhelm Uhde (1874-1947), who organized their first joint exhibition in Paris in 1928
Ce catalogue accompagne la première rétrospective de grande ampleur consacrée à l'artiste française, qui se tiendra en Australie puis en Allemagne. Il revient sur l'ensemble de sa carrière, avec des installations, des images de sa carte blanche au Palais de Tokyo en 2017, Grosse Fatigue, sa vidéo présentée à la biennale deVenise en 2013 ou ses portraits en ikebana.
The legacy of the art and cultural scientist Aby Warburg offers many subjects for reassessment. Almost unknown until now are the artifacts he collected on a journey through the southwest of the US in 1895/96 and donated to the Museum fur Voelkerkunde in Hamburg (today Museum am Rothenbaum). The results first unfolded in Warburg's famous lecture on the "snake ritual" of the Hopi (1923). Following Warburg's transdisciplinary approach, this publication examines his guiding principles in assembling his collection as well as his reading of Pueblo art and culture. It pays tribute to the works and their artistic significance and sheds light on the circumstances of acquisition in the sociopolitical environment of the Pueblo communities of the time. The contemporary fascination with the snake ritual is also a topic. Set against this are the previously neglected perspectives and strategies of Pueblo leaders to regain interpretive sovereignty over culturally sensitive content and imagery.
Using her own body as raw material for her artistic practice, French artist ORLAN deconstructs the traditional iconography of the feminine. In the 1990s, ORLAN caused a sensation with surgical operations performed on her body, but it was as early as 1964, at the age of 17, that she gave birth to her artistic self. Since then, she has continuously recreated herself and keenly explored the concept of identity. In her "carnal art," the body becomes both subject and object. This publication traverses the six decades of ORLAN's oeuvre, revisiting her early performances in particular. One of her most recent creations is the ORLANOIDE robot, and thanks to an augmented reality app, ORLAN avatars come to life and emerge from this richly illustrated volume.
The political status of the body is made evident through all of her works: in 1989 she transformed Gustave Courbet's famous painting L'origine du monde into L'origine de la guerre by replacing the vulva with the phallus. The statement has not lost any of its topicality.
Challenging traditional concepts of art, for the ZERO avant-garde, the atelier became the exhibition space, books were a way to disseminate art; they made friends with the representatives of Concrete Poetry. A diagram visualizes who they thought to be part of the movement: those who were open to experimentation, who were not afraid to work with fire; even in the galleries, few of which were willing to pay homage to the avant-garde.
An updated appraisal of the sculptural oeuvre of Elmgreen & Dragset, famed for their surreal Prada boutique in Texas
Artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset consistently devise new possibilities in the way art is presented and perceived through their subversive and multivalent practice, as seen in works such as their well-known installation Prada Marfa (2005), a permanently closed Prada boutique in the middle of the desert in Texas, and Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 (2012), their sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse for London's Fourth Plinth Commission at Trafalgar Square. Sculptures--the first-ever dedicated study of this facet of their work--covers the artists' sculptural works from the mid-1990s through the present day. Organized according to the aesthetics and conceptual working methods they have employed throughout their career, it includes extensive photographic documentation of 112 of their works and five essays approaching their practice from various art-historical and thematic perspectives. This extended reissue of the 2019 edition includes 16 additional pages and an updated list of artworks.
Catalogue raisonné des multiples de l'artiste allemand, édités entre 1965 et 2013 : sérigraphies, héliogravures, peintures, cibachromes, photographies, collages, livres d'artistes, tapisseries et objets.
Competition is one of the driving forces of our time - everything can suddenly turn into a challenge or a contest. Art, on the other hand - that is outside the art market-can be seen as a free space in which something genuinely unique emerges. That this construct is a historical exception is revealed by a fresh look at the early modern period: Here, the principle of competition was thought to be decisive for artistic work. What is more, the competitive habitus of imitation, competition and surpassing - imitatio, aemulatio and superatio - was supposed to bring about cultural progress as such. Even Leonardo knew that "good envy" spurs high performance. Hence, some of the most famous works of the Renaissance and Baroque periods emerged from the competitive battles that artists in early modern Europe fought among themselves, as well as with long-dead models from antiquity. This splendid catalogue reveals mutual inspiration and cooperation, but also sheds light on the dark side of competition for prestigious commissions - envy, intrigue, and slander.
On the inception of Halley's formal vocabulary of "prisons, cells and conduits" in 1980s New York.
This survey revisits the first decade of Peter Halley's (born 1953) career. Assembling over 30 paintings from public and private collections, it presents iconic works alongside previously unseen drawings, sketches and notes. After studying at Yale and in New Orleans in the late 1970s Halley returned to New York in 1980, taking up residence in the East Village. That same year he painted his first images of confinement, redeploying the language of geometric abstraction in response to bureaucratic environments. Adopting nontraditional materials such as Roll-A-Tex?a paint additive that provides a readymade texture?and Day-Glo fluorescent colors, he evoked a pervasive mechanization of human touch with the former and referenced the presence of technology in the postmodern environment with the latter.
