Barry Schwabsky - Böcker

The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist's studio. Examples are abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a 'factory', artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices. "The Studio Reader" pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist's practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually - at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines.A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, "The Studio Reader" reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit.

In this collection of critical essays, Barry Schwabsky re-examines the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the achievements of 'high modernism' remain consequential to it, through tensions between representation, abstraction, and pictorial language. Offering close readings of works produced by several generations of European and American artists, he begins with an analysis of the late period of two Abstract Expressionists, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, who saw their own success as a failure of reception and who came to question radically their own work. With the core of the book focused on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mel Bochner, major figures of arte povera and conceptual art whose works in a variety of media demonstrate a continuing critical engagement with modernism, Schwabsky also studies the work of artists, such as L. C. Armstrong and Rainer Ganahl, who also continued to examine modernism's legacies.

Alex Katz is a towering figure in contemporary painting, a key New York-based artist since the early 1960s. Katz is best known for his distinct portraits of sophisticated, irresistible women, masterfully painted using precise, broad areas of colourAlex Katz first emerged on the New York art scene during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and before the birth of Pop art, but always worked independently of these movements. Katz is best known for his distinctive portraits of sophisticated, irresistible women, masterfully painted using precise, broad areas of colour. Alongside these unmistakably ‘Katzian’ female portraits are pictures of men, groups, landscapes and interiors, rendered in paint on canvas or metal cut-outs as well as drawing and collage. All attest to the artist’s attention to detail, economy of means and consummate technique.Larger-than-life paintings such as The Black Dress (1960), Blue Umbrella (1972), Red Coat (1982) and White Visor (2003) have entered the collective consciousness as the epitome of a particular, late twentieth-century feminine ideal. A major touring retrospective was organized by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986, and Katz has exhibited widely all over the world. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, among many others.A leading world expert on Katz, distinguished New York art critic Carter Ratcliff writes the definitive, comprehensive Survey, following Katz’s work from the 1950s to the present. In the Interview New York-based curator and critic Robert Storr discusses in detail with the artist his practice and technique in the context of a changing art world. Curator Iwona Blazwick enters in her Focus the silent world of Sylvia (1962-63), a classic Katz portrait that resonates with the urban landscape occupied by both artist and sitter. For Artist’s Choice Katz has selected nine works by New York School Poets, all of whom share a particular, often personal connection to his work. Artist’s Writings range from an early text from 1959 on Katz’s dislike of the term ‘academy’ to a recent text that reflects on his beginnings as an artist. Key interviews with some of the of the twentieth century’s most prestigious art figures – including critic David Sylvester and artists Francesco Clemente, Jane Freilicher and Richard Prince – are also included.

The definitive book on a creative force who continues to influence sculpture and installation artJessica Stockholder has long broken down the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore the body in social and cultural space - using found objects intertwined with profusions of vivid colours. This revised, updated edition spotlights the extraordinary evolution of her career, and examines the pivotal role she has played in shaping some of the most fundamental ideas around which contemporary sculpture and painting revolve today.

The first true monograph on the work of celebrated French conceptual artist and sculptor Bernar VenetBernar Venet is one of France's most celebrated living artists. Having emerged from the late 1960s avant-garde scene in New York, Venet developed a personal aesthetic based on an innovative use of mathematics and science, where control, chance, and chaos converge to form a fine equilibrium while investigating their relationship with the environment. Conversant in many media, Venet is mostly known for his monumental outdoor sculptures in major cities worldwide and, in fall 19, his Arc Majeur is due for completion at a site in Belgium - at almost 200 feet in height (60 meters), Venet's sculpture will be taller than New York's Statue of Liberty.

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Varda Caivano's exhibition The Density of the Actions, February 22–April 19, 2015 at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.The book features texts by Barry Schwabsky, Paula van den Bosch, Terry R. Myers, Peter St John, Georges Perec, and Solveig Øvstebø, as well as 43 color and 6 black and white images of Caivano’s paintings and the Renaissance Society installation.

Mark Hadjipateras’s remarkable range of works, including monotypes, prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, photosculpture, and numerous installations throughout the yearsMark Hadjipateras, Homeward presents the richly varied, fifty-year-long career of an international artist who has a deep understanding of our common roots in nature and the universal human need for belonging. His work explores nature as our shared “home” in a transhistorical exploration of prehistoric, modern, and futuristic habitats and their inhabitants. Mark Hadjipateras revisits major 20th -century movements such as surrealism, modernism, minimalism, and pop art, honoring them through his own distinct style to produce new, thought-provoking interpretations. Rendered in a remarkable range of media such as paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and site-specific installations, his forms harmoniously blend opposite qualities: movement with static form, weightlessness with volume, abstraction with figuration.

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda elucidates the artist’s intricate, meditative compositions.Arruda has gained critical acclaim for atmospheric paintings that fluctuate between abstraction and figuration, imagination and reality. This monograph presents three groups of works loosely characterized as seascapes, jungles, and monochromes. Collectively titled Deserto-Modelo, they have an ephemeral, transient quality.Arruda’s intimately sized paintings of seascapes and junglescapes are characterized by their subtle rendition of light. Painted from memory, they are devoid of specific reference points, instead achieving their variety through the depiction of atmospheric conditions. Verging on abstraction, the compositions are grounded by an ever-present, if sometimes faint, horizon line that offers a perception of distance. They appear at once familiar and imaginary. Through his often evocative and textured brushstrokes, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling his genres’ historical associations with the notion of the romantic sublime.Alongside meticulous color plates and powerful details, author Will Chancellor offers a close reading of the work, raising questions about artifice, thresholds, and perception. Critic Barry Schwabsky unpacks the challenges posed by Arruda’s mysterious painted surfaces. As a whole, this book provides a detailed introduction to the work of a uniquely thoughtful and inventive artist.

The definitive monograph on innovative American painter Lisa YuskavageLisa Yuskavage is one of the most acclaimed living painters. Known for her highly original approach to figurative painting, Yuskavage challenges conventional understandings of the genre. At times playful and at other times rueful, her bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters inhabit fantastical and vivid compositions, assuming the dual role of subject and object.Although inspired by popular culture, the artist’s technique is deeply rooted in the history of painting, establishing an underlying tension between polar opposites such as high and low, sacred and profane, harmony and dissonance.Yuskavage’s first proper monograph features more than 150 color images, including never-before-seen photographs of her studio, along with insightful text contributions from Barry Schwabsky, Lena Dunham, and Ariel Levy.

The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b.1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work.Carnegie’s work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude – all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie’s paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

This selection of Smith's work features generous selections from Fifteen Exits, Reverdy Road, Mercury and London Bridge, alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo and Content. On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: 'It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School's love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith's British contemporaries'.

Published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at Newport Street Gallery, built to house work from Damien Hirst’s art collection, John Hoyland: Power Stations provides a fascinating insight into the life and work of one of Britain’s leading abstract painters. Renowned for his intuitive manipulation of color, form and texture, John Hoyland (1934–2011) saw nonfigurative imagery as offering "the potential for the most advanced depth of feeling and meaning." Including work drawn from a pivotal period in Hoyland’s career—1964 to 1982—Power Stations shows an artist equally comfortable with geometric and gestural abstraction, combining elements of both in vividly hued, large-scale paintings. The first extensive survey of Hoyland’s work since the artist’s death, this volume reaffirms Hoyland’s status as a major innovative force within the pantheon of international abstraction.