Douglas Fogle – författare

Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds? Conceived around the title Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International, curated by Douglas Fogle, explores the increasingly relevant yet perplexing proposition of what it means to be human in the world today. The question, "Is there life on Mars?" is a rhetorical one, posing a metaphorical quest to explore humanity's response to a world where global events challenge and seem to threaten our everyday existence. Working in a range of media, from micro to macro levels of experience, from tragedy to comedy, the 40 artists from 17 countries in the exhibition explore the alien inside each of us. They include Doug Aitken, Kai Althoff, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Daniel Guzmán, Mike Kelley, Barry McGee, Wilhelm Sasnal, David Shrigley, Rudolf Stingel, Paul Thek, Wolfgang Tillmans and Andro Wekua, among others. In questioning the absurdity of our lives while demonstrating hopeful aspirations for the future of humankind, these artists foreground the poetic over the monumental and the intimate over the heroic. In the end, the exhibition asks if we ourselves are already on Mars.

Long awaited, the first survey of the work of one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographersFor almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.

Long awaited, the first survey of the work of one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographersFor almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.

Over the past decade Los Angeles painter Lesley Vance's (born 1977) practice has evolved from her acclaimed early still-life works into colorful, gestural abstract compositions. Employing the same virtuosic command of paint, these captivating works subtly play with depth and space perception, creating hard-edged shapes that respond to light and shade to create an illusion of sculptural-seeming bodies via effects that are as precise as they are painterly.Vance's oil paintings and watercolors since 2013 are here collected in a beautifully illustrated monograph, with a lengthy new essay on the artist and her practice by Douglas Fogle, former chief curator of the Hammer Museum, as well as an artist interview with writer Amy Sherlock. Lesley Vance: Painting 2013 2019 presents a stunning body of radical new works by this masterful painter.

Teddy bears, toys and fruit populate Imai’s intimate and imaginary compositions In The Scene, Japanese painter Ulala Imai (born 1982) draws references from popular culture, including Peanuts comics and Star Wars, to make delicate still-life-style works that, according to author Hiji Nam, create a “magical mannerist fable world.”

Luisa Lambri’s art revolves around the human condition and its relationship with space, touching on areas such as the politics of representation, architecture, the history of abstract photography, modernism, feminism, identity and memory.The title of the exhibition presented at PAC, in Milan, is a tribute to Carla Lonzi who, in 1969, published “Autoritratto”, a collection of interviews with avant-garde artists that revealed their private sides. In the same way, Lambri constructs personal and intimate readings of the subjects of her photographs and encourages a dialogue between the observer, the work of art and the space.Light, time and movement play an important role in her work, where slight differences reflect the artist’s movement within the space. Lambri uses architecture to create her images, rather than images to document architecture, revealing negligible details of modernist architecture or iconic minimalist sculptures. At PAC, her works relate to the unique qualities of the architecture designed by Ignazio Gardella, for which the exhibition was specifically developed.Text in English and Italian.

How do artists challenge us to see the everyday world around us with fresh eyes? How do they make our world strange? A century of defamiliarized art, from Marcel Duchamp to Rachel HarrisonThis substantial volume brings together nearly 250 art works spanning more than 100 years that ask us to reconsider how we look at the world. Brought together by Chara Schreyer over the course of three decades, these works invite us to rethink our perception of the everyday in the wake of Duchamp’s radical reimagination of the art object and the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky’s conception of “making strange.” Whether looking at the idea of “making strange” in the work of Duchamp and O’Keeffe, the legacy of Minimalism and its discontents in the sculptures of Judd and González-Torres, the idea of disaster in America as seen through the eyes of Warhol and Ligon, the uses of language in the works of Weiner and Holzer or the restaging of life through photography from Arbus to Sherman, this catalog reevaluates the relationship between art and the world.