Alex Gartenfeld – författare

The first monograph on the powerful painting of Janiva Ellis, exploring abstraction, figuration, race and social accelerationPublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.This volume introduces the work of American painter Janiva Ellis, who participated in the New Museum Triennial 2018 and the Whitney Biennial 2019. Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is published on the occasion of the first solo museum exhibition for Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works produce abundant imagery, invented as well as appropriated. She draws from a broad array of material, including art history and pop culture, to comment on the insidious nature of white supremacist mythology and its denial of itself as a brutal social and structural force. The humor in her work aims to create space for release as well as renewal. Ellis uses figuration to paint Blackness expansively, communicating the complexity of navigating such a lopsided and violent landscape.

The official catalogue for the 2018 New Museum Triennial, a global survey of today’s up-and-coming artistsIn 2018, the New Museum in New York presents its fourth Triennial, the museum’s signature survey of emerging artists from around the world. Curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld, this edition of the much-anticipated exhibition - and the fully illustrated catalogue that accompanies it - features work by 26 artists and collectives from 19 countries, exploring a range of artistic practices. Though distinct in their approaches, these artists are connected by their deep engagement with their local context and a critical examination - and embrace - of the sense of internationalism that defines our time.

A thematic introduction to the thriving Miami museum’s permanent collectionPublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.Since its founding in 2014, ICA Miami has established itself as a singular voice in artistic stewardship with a collection that champions leading emerging and established artists. Fire Figure Fantasy revolves around important focal points of ICA Miami’s collection. Artists working in a wide range of mediums, including McArthur Binion, Lauren Halsey, Rashid Johnson and Martine Syms, draw on conceptualist strategies to critically explore structures that perpetuate injustice. In works by Andra Ursuta, Louise Bonnet, Christina Quarles and Avery Singer, themes of identity, community, and technology are drawn out through explorations of the body, materiality and form. Works by Vivian Caccuri, Tau Lewis, Vaughn Spann and Henry Taylor contend with some of the most pressing issues of our time, while works by Hernan Bas, Tomm El-Saieh and Jared McGriff, among others, reflect the artistic production of Miami artists that the museum has long championed.

A new narrative series of digital paintings set against the backdrop of New York City in 2001Published with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.Reflecting the innovative tools employed in their production, the iconic paintings of New York–based Avery Singer (born 1987) are complex interpretations of contemporary social realities and technologies. The large-scale paintings portray worlds that emerge from digital renderings and take shape through manual and digital airbrush techniques, liquid and solid masking, and complex layering processes.Unity Bachelor presents a striking series of narrative paintings featuring a trio of digital characters. Singer sets the story of the main characters Unity Bachelor and Priya Prasad in New York in 2001, a coming-of-age period and place for the artist. Their fictionalized love story is marked by the collective trauma of September 11, 2001, when Priya goes missing, while a third figure, an inebriated art student, who has doubled as a self-portrait of sorts throughout Singer’s career, roams Lower Manhattan.

Combining representation and abstraction, Abney's vibrant works reference gender, sexuality and pop culturePublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.Committed to sharing social realities through fantastic, expansive forms, Nina Chanel Abney is an artist possessed of an iconic style and wit. Through stylized, cubistic and highly charged painterly symbols, she references radical traditions of graphic design and street art to communicate urgent political and cultural realities with immediacy to the largest possible audience. Abney’s paintings and collages use dynamic color and form to draw viewers into complex narratives.Big Butch Energy/Synergy features Abney’s recent exhibitions at ICA Miami and moCa Cleveland. In these works, Abney mines cinematic and media representations of student Greek life to explore how gender perception and performance is inspired by the legacies of social ritual and visual culture. The complex compositions reference scenes from popular slapstick comedy films such as National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Porky’s (1981), while citing traditions of Baroque portraiture and fraternity composites. Inspired by her experience as a masculine-of-center woman, with this body of work Abney asks how viewers gender a figure in a work of art.Nina Chanel Abney was born in 1982 in Harvey, Illinois, and is based in New York, where she attended Parsons School of Design. Abney’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Bronx Museum, New York; the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among others.

Early works, regional projects and acclaimed series from Allan McCollum, whose work often blurs boundaries between unique artifacts and mass productionPublished with Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.Since the late 1960s, the American artist Allan McCollum (born 1944) has created works that examine the art object’s relationship to uniqueness, context and value, as well as to the museum that collects, values and preserves it. Allan McCollum: Works since 1969, which accompanies a major survey of the artist's work, brings together new scholarship, documentary material and in-depth information on McCollum’s decades-long career, adding to the broader historical and theoretical interpretation of the artist’s important practice.McCollum’s celebrated works can be interpreted in infinite ways and have significant impact on the understanding of the role of art and material culture in society. Throughout his career the artist has explored various economies and contexts that structure collections and presentations of objects. Interested in how material artifacts become charged with meaning, McCollum understands these objects as vehicles of self-assurance and self-representation within communities.This book traces the artist’s career through numerous illustrations, supplementary material and texts, focusing on three key components—early work, “regional projects” and the artist’s most iconic series.

Chakaia Booker: The Observance accompanies the first comprehensive museum survey of the American artist. The publication explores the artist’s signature form—monumental works made of rubber—while showcasing her innovations across mediums. Featuring an expansive range of Booker’s sculptures, including totemic and anthropomorphic assemblages fabricated from cast-off tires, the volume highlights Booker’s ongoing expression of ecological and technological concerns, examinations of racial and economic disparities, and her interest in the symbolism of the automobile in American culture.The exhibition and accompanying publication Chakaia Booker: The Observance include some of Booker’s most topical works, including Chu Ching (2012), which depicts a cross on a wheelbarrow resembling Jesus being dismounted from the cross, as well as two rarely seen series of paintings that explore landscape and language. The artist’s photographic series, Foundling Warrior Quest (2010) and Graveyard Series (1995), are also featured to explore the importance of performance and mythology in her practice. Anchoring the presentation is The Observance (1995), an immersive installation made of deconstructed rubber tires and tubes—Booker’s first work in this signature material, chosen by the artist for its associations with riots.