Aria Dean – författare

Figurative painting of the past five years, represented here by an exciting young generation of artists and vital practitioners, addresses the challenge of contemporary representation through expressionistic compositions and new techniques reflecting digital fluency.Figuration is one of the oldest art forms, but it continually evolves, along with our changing understanding of human identity. The artists featured here often source imagery from the Internet, and draw on aesthetics developed in Internet-first channels. Digital techniques and affordances are incorporated into rendering processes with traditional media: brushstrokes are more precise, lines are sharper, and color is more highly keyed. In these works, expressionism is located more in the composition than in the paint handling.This richly illustrated collection of figurative works is accompanied by texts that connect the present moment in painting to the early 1980s, when the emergence of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel revitalized the art dialogue after the extended dissolution of Minimalism, and to its roots in the practice of painters like Picabia.

A companion to Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!Aria Dean’s moving image work Abattoir, U.S.A.!, presented in the eponymous exhibition at the Renaissance Society between February and April 2023, surveys the interior of an empty slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse was built and animated using Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics tool for creating virtual environments. The viewer follows a linear path through an impossible architecture—a seamless combination of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century design elements and non-Euclidean spaces. Dean was initially inspired by philosophers Georges Bataille and Frank Wilderson, each of whom address the slaughterhouse in their writings –whether as a metaphor or paradigm—as crucial to the construction of civil society.  Abattoir, U.S.A.! also builds on Dean’s own research into the slaughterhouse and industrial architecture and the ways they reveal modernism’s intimacy with death on conceptual, political, and material levels.This book documents the exhibition as well as selected material from Dean’s process and research. It includes essays by film scholar Erika Balsom, who writes on the history of abattoirs and their relation to modernism, Afropessimist theory, and the dehumanizing rationality of capitalism.  Architect and writer Keller Easterling contributes a quasi-fictional text from her ongoing series of Draft Teenage Essays, which are part of her collection of experimental writings titled No One Thing. This volume also includes transcripts of two conversations: one between Dean and film historian Bruce Jenkins in which they discuss Dean’s work in relation to historical avant-garde films; and another with Dean and co-director of Rhizome Michael Connor, media artist Filip Kostik, and composer Evan Zierk, who created the soundtrack for Abattoir, U.S.A.! Together they discuss the technical process of using Unreal Engine and the nature of virtuality.

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is the most extensive publication on the artist to date, celebrating half a century of his work. It reveals the complex ways in which he has transformed histories of Western painting, centering Black bodies in ambitious compositions set in barber shops, public housing projects, parks, and beauty salons. It charts his use of portraiture to memorialise individuals such as Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Olaudah Equiano. A new series, illustrated here for the first time, looks at under-acknowledged aspects of the history of Africa. With lavish illustrations of all the works in the accompanying exhibition, it also includes chapters on Marshall’s Rythm Mastr project and his various public commissions including his stained glass windows for the cathedral in Washington D.C.. A survey by Mark Godfrey is accompanied by shorter essays by Aria Dean, Darby English, Madeleine Grynsztejn, Cathérine Hug, Nikita Sena Quarshie, Rebecca Zorach, and an interview between Kerry James Marshall and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.