Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago - Böcker

"To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled." -Don DeLillo These are the artists who put the load-bearing post in po...

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Graffiti is generally dismissed as a form of urban vandalism, but in the late 1970s art collectors and museums began to look on graffiti as a genre worthy of serious aesthetic consideration. This survey discusses the graffiti work of artists inclu...

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Chicago-based painter Phyllis Bramson articulates a rich fabric of dreams, desire, fears and pleasures in vibrant visual poetry, constructing a libidinal, aestheticized world where temperaments, colors, and collars all run hot. Bramson is a foremo...

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Catalog of an exhibition held at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois, May 12-July 7, 1989 and the Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles, California, July 18-Aug. 20, 1989.

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"The dwelling, the walls, the windows, the roof, the furniture, the pictures, the ornaments, the dress, the fence or hedge-all act constantly upon the imagination and determine its contents." -- Charles Henderson In 1990, Asher, armed wi...

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Four Chicago-based artists, Judy Ledgerwood, Jim Lutes, Kay Rosen and Kevin Wolff, propose a variety of answers, exits and witty retorts to the often asked, and purportedly existential, question: why paint? Why not? Between the large-scale romanti...

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This catalogue was produced in conjunction with the Renaissance Society's 1993 mid-career survey of this influential painter and teacher, who has worked primarily in Chicago since 1973. The sensuous surfaces and revealing construction methods of C...

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"What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed?" Georg Christoph Lichtenberg This major book commemorates ...

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"A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began." -Marguerite Duras In th...

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The exhibition of Gerber's work at The Renaissance Society in 1992 marked the culmination of a ten-year period in which Gerber persistently painted the same opaque, monochromatic still-life over and over, in a bold artistic assertion that seeing i...

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Austrian Heimo Zobernig's work intervenes, rearranges, recontextualizes, and down-right makes fun of the architecture of museum/gallery spaces so as to demystify its illusory potential and reinscribe it with self-referentiality. Zobernig is among ...

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"The eyes are what the fingers claw Knowing now what might have been Will the lips tell what the eyes saw?" -Paul Bowles, Love Song With highly visceral, map-like drawings, hypnotic video work, and voluptuous ceramic vessels, New York ar...

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This publication coincides with the debut museum exhibition of this Venezuelan-born, New York-based artist, whose work explores our psychological relationship to visual narrative tropes. In his collages, photographs, sculptures and site-specific m...

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There is a growing consensus in the art world that the painter Kerry James Marshall (b.1955 in Alabama, raised in L.A.) is among the most individual and important artists around. Marshall's ability to create complex portraits of the African Americ...

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This catalogue is the first English-language monograph on the work of this French sculptor, who gained critical recognition as a member of the French movement Supports-Surfaces, founded in 1970. This group viewed the formal relationships between t...

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"Is a non-remote horizon always a concealment? If a portion of sky has been carved and set loose to rest upon land, is it the result of an illegal language spoken in the town?" Ben Marcus, from A Horizon Grammar A hybrid of artist's book...

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"Many things have happened to me, around me, and away from me. I do not remember them sequentially. I remember some of them. I am supposed to have a memory. I recollect certain things. But I have no memory, at least not in the conventional se...

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"Willie Doherty's concern as an artist has never been to establish historical truth, but rather has always had more to do with who gets to make it up--and why, and how." -Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith When asked to produce a work for The Soc...

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If the closure of Modernist painting is taken as the closure of painting itself, then under the aegis of postmodernism, painting's history is a finite collection of fully legible styles up for being quoted. In this circumstance, the question arise...

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This catalogue contains full-page reproductions of the entire body of work presented in Gest's 2006 Renaissance Society exhibition. In this series, Gest captured his lone sitters at the chance interstices of deep reflection, when the self dwells i...

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Avery Preesman's work makes the term "organic" relative. His paintings and sculptures naturalize our relationship to what can only be called a forest of signs, confirming the extent to which what we see and how we see it are in fact alre...

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Katharina Grosse's painting practice is a phoenix from the ashes of late Modernism, appending themselves to the Greenbergian cul de sac in an uncanny manner. Since 1998 Grosse has been using a compressed-air spray gun to apply garish swaths and sp...

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This catalogue accompanies the first solo museum exhibition of painter Scott Short. In Short's work notions of color and abstraction are boldly reinterpreted. His method of generating compositions is to make a black and white photocopy of a sheet ...

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Since 1975, photographer Dawoud Bey has developed a body of work distinguished for its commitment to portraiture as a means for reflecting social circumstances. Ranging from street encounters to studio portraits, Bey has investigated numerous phot...

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