Hugh Allan – författare

Sweet Liberty brings together 15 years of work by painter Dan Colen (born 1979), one of the “bad boys” of the New York art world who emerged onto the scene in the early 2000s alongside artists like Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley. Witty, shocking, poignant and nihilistic, Colen’s art presents a portrait of contemporary America and investigates the acts of producing and looking at art.Alongside significant early works such as “Me, Jesus and the Children” (2001–03), this publication features paintings from Colen’s long-running Gum and Trash series, as well as four installations in which Colen appropriates imagery from the mass media and American subcultures. This volume marks, in Colen’s own words, “the first time I’ve been able to present the full range of my work and the wide-ranging ideas, crafts, materials, technologies and processes that I engage with.”

Three emerging painters exploring the possibilities of colorTrue Colours brings together the work of three emerging artists: Helen Beard (born 1971), Sadie Laska (born 1974) and Boo Saville (born 1980). Despite using paint in very different ways, the artists all share an interest in exploring the possibilities of color. Beard uses a vivid rainbow palette to create interlocking arrangements of bright primary color, which combine to describe explicit sexual encounters. Laska creates dreamlike compositions using paint and collage, evoking a rebellious post-pop aesthetic. Saville applies over 40 layers of paint to produce extraordinary large-scale abstracts, made up of flawlessly gradating shades. This fully illustrated book is available with three different cover designs and includes interviews with the artists by Polly Borland, Rachel Howard and Lizzi Bougatsos, plus essays by Michael Bracewell, Freire Barnes and Amie Corry, exploring the artists’ work within the broader context of the philosophy of color.