Gianni Jetzer – författare

This groundbreaking book, accompanying a major exhibition at the Hirshhorn, tells the story of the evolution of New York s downtown art scene in the 1980s from a DIY counterculture in the East Village to a legitimate gallery business in SoHo. Coinciding with the rise of modern branding and the onset of the information age, artists focus on commodities and consumerism began as satire but came to be much more complex: commodities and associated phenomena, such as advertising, now served as vessels for ideas, politics, and personal relationships in brand-new types of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance. In a book full of visual surprises, newly commissioned essays shed new light on this pivotal period: curator Gianni Jetzer provides a comprehensive overview, while Leah Pires illuminates lesser-known conceptual collaborations, and Bob Nickas offers an eyewitness account of the East Village gallery scene. These texts, together with an illustrated chronology, provide a fresh account of the moment at which contemporary artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman grabbed the ball from Andy Warhol and ran with it, changing the rules of the game forever.

A pioneer of textile postmodernismSheila Hicks has made wool, linen, and silk her central media, pushing the boundaries of traditional textile art. Her works combine color, form, and material in novel ways and explore architectural dimensions. As a pioneer of textile conceptual art, Hicks has developed a distinctive visual language over six decades, from finely woven miniatures to monumental installations that open up new perspectives on the possibilities of art. This book contains views of Sheila Hicks's exhibition a little bit of a lot of things at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen as well as a conversation with the curator Rob Storr and an essay by Gianni Jetzer. It also documents a master class held by the artist in St. Gallen and contains previously unpublished images.