Christine Mehring – författare

From the 1980s, many Chinese artists have experimented with a range of unconventional materials. Their works-in plastic, paper, silk, ash, and tobacco-form a major trend in Chinese art. The Allure of Matter offers the first serious consideration of these ground-breaking material explorations, coining the term Material Art to describe works that place "matter" itself as the primary vehicle of investigation and expression. The book contains four ground-breaking essays, profiles of twenty-five artists, and corresponding color images.

This richly illustrated volume offers an in-depth look into artist Sadie Benning’s exhibition Shared Eye, presented at the Renaissance Society and the Kunsthalle Basel.The forty mixed-media panels in Shared Eye defy easy categorization: they include collage, painting, photography, and sculpture. The seriality of the installation also nods to the artist’s history with the moving image. Throughout the 1990s, Benning created an extraordinary body of experimental video work, improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera. More than two decades later, in Shared Eye we see the handmade aesthetic, grainy imagery, and durational logic of Benning’s early videos take on different forms to correspond to our current moment.The catalog documents the exhibition in full color, and it features an interview between the artist and Julie Ault, essays by John Corbett and Christine Mehring, and an introduction by the Renaissance Society’s executive director, Solveig Øvstebø, and Elena Filipovic, director of Kunsthalle Basel. These texts provide illuminating framework for the exhibition and key insights into how Benning pushes the limits of abstraction in response to our present political climate.

This title takes an illuminating look at the unique work and artistic vision of Gerhard Richter. Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter was first educated under the prevailing doctrine of Socialist Realism, but retrained after emigrating to West Germany, thus uniquely embodying the division of Germany during the Cold War. This volume brings together new studies of his early career by an international group of scholars. The authors approach the context from a variety of angles including the social and political histories of a divided Germany, the conflicted development of Soviet Socialist Realism in East Germany, a Cold War visuality integrating pre- and post- resettlement works, the archival dimension of the artist's output in relation to "Richter's Atlas", and the artist's involvement in the representation of his work in archives, exhibitions, and catalogues.