Karen Marta - Böcker

In Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play The Chairs, chairs stand in for characters at the brink of the world's end. Artist and curator Andreas Angelidakis pays homage to Ionesco at Swiss Institute with Fin de Siècle, a fantastical and idiosyncratic narrative of design after modernism. Inspired by Ionesco's play, Angelidakis reanimates a number of important chairs from design history and popular culture, casting them in dramatic roles. As a document of Swiss Institute's inaugural Architecture and Design show, this volume includes a conversation on late-modernist design between Angelidakis and Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Met; a dialogue on AirBnB's approach to space with Alessandro Bava, Aaron Taylor Harvey, Sean Monahan and Rachael Yu; an essay and specially created artist's book by Angelidakis; and a glossary of the chairs selected for the exhibition.

Inspired by Le Corbusier's 1925 Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, the second exhibition in Swiss Institute's annual Architecture and Design series presents a prototype for the 21st-century home, simulating a living environment where the house moves beyond its physical confines and into the digital realm.

Palmer's work blends word and image, anticipating Raymond Pettibon and David ShrigleyNew York- and Florida-based artist Roger Clay Palmer (born 1947) has been painting, drawing, and writing for over 50 years. Inspired by the Southern oral tradition of his youth, his experiences in the army as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and Japanese haiga and Zenga, Palmer blends word and image, anticipating artists like Raymond Pettibon and David Shrigley, to a darkly humorous, sometimes difficult effect. Palmer’s witty, grisly animals, figures and cityscapes are paired with phrases like “a lightning storm while buried with your cat” or “there was a time of day when the bulls and I got real bad ideas at exactly the same time.” Together they reveal, in the artist’s words, the “anger, rage, longing, sadness, courage and grace” in American culture.With a focus on recent work, Roger Clay Palmer brings together 60 exemplary paintings on paper and organizes them thematically, with sections focused on his depictions of animals, eyes, landscapes and war. Including an essay by curator David Norr, this long-overdue monograph is an invitation into Palmer’s intense and unruly world, full of idiosyncratic insight and biting wisdom.

Roberto Matta, Cecilia Vicuña, Alfredo Jaar, Paz Errázuriz and others offer insight into Chilean art and politicsThis volume looks closely at the Chilean experimental art scene, in which practitioners have mastered avant-garde strategies and encouraged cultural dissidence. Over the past five years Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed three generations of Chilean artists, performers and writers, many of whom worked despite the horrific violence and censorship of the Pinochet dictatorship and now navigate through the hazy context that surrounds the post-dictatorial nation in the 21st century. This unique constellation of practices has become a model for a particular mode of postmodernism based on research and experimentation. The stunning archival images and extensive interviews organized chronologically with Roberto Matta, Juan Pablo Langlois, Catalina Parra, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Carmen Beuchat, Eugenio Dittborn, Paz Errázuriz, Gonzalo Díaz, Cecilia Vicuña, Diamela Eltit, Raúl Zurita, Alfredo Jaar and Seba Calfuqueo offer a deeply personal insight into Chile’s evolving culture.

Surveying Hasper’s joyously chromatic abstract paintings and works for public sitesArgentinian artist Graciela Hasper’s (born 1966) brightly colored geometric abstract paintings, made over the last three decades, are a means to bring people together and to build bridges between audiences, which is precisely what she does with her large-scale public projects. This is the artist’s first English-language monograph.

An artist's photographic portrait of domesticity, steeped in luminosity and eroticismBrazilian artist Marcos Chaves (born 1961) uses photography, installation, video, texts and sound to alter the way we view the world around us. Here Chaves explores his domestic surroundings through seemingly casual snapshots with plays of light and involuntary eroticism that reveal playful references to art history.

An oral history of the Latin American artists who moved to New York in the late 1960s and pioneered a new conceptualism informed by their migrant experiencesIn the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a time of global cultural and social upheaval, a key group of Latin American artists migrated to New York. Part of the generational shift toward Happenings, Minimalism and Conceptualism, the group worked in conversation with experimental practices while exploring topics of migration, identity, politics, exile, and nostalgia. Drawing from both American culture and the cultures of their countries of origin, their works reflect the unique perspectives—both as insiders and outsiders—that these artists had as newcomers.Conceived as a visual reader with newly sourced and existing testimonies, This Must Be the Place is the first book of its kind to highlight this generation of artists in interviews and primary source material. Organized by themes and illustrated with artworks, photographs and other archival material, the testimonies of these artists offer the reader a dynamic, candid and historically rich memoir of 1960s and 1970s New York.

Continuing the search for El Dorado and its ever-changing mythologyThis volume, El Dorado: A Reader, presents commissioned essays by contemporary scholars and selected historical excerpts that investigate the ways that El Dorado has alchemized from myth to reality.

In the “St. Petersburg gamble,” the house offers to flip a coin until it comes up heads. The payoff doubles each time tails appears. By conventional definitions, the St Petersburg gamble has an infinite potential return; nonetheless, most players feel that they should not risk more than a few dollars each time. Explaining why people offer such small sums for something with infinite potential remains contentious in both economics and philosophy. The St. Petersburg Paradox embodies Swiss Institute’s longstanding dedication to producing inventive group exhibitions, putting artists across a century (Marcel Duchamp, Ericka Beckman, Hans Arp, Amalia Ulman, Tabor Robak) in dialogue with each other to explore the precarious nature of gaming and the impulses that underlie the way risk is calculated.Embracing the conceptual framework of an exhibition at Swiss Institute and its related public programs, each book in the SI Series adds retrospective context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts. Each book in the series assumes a unique format to delve into the work of an artist, an artistic movement or a philosophical conundrum.

Work Hard, the curatorial debut of celebrated Swiss artist Valentin Carron (born 1977), presents a creative discourse between a surprising group of artists: Edmond Bille, Vittorio Brodmann, Marguerite Burnat-Provins, Luciano Castelli, Claudia Comte, Sylvain Croci-Torti, Latifa Echakhch, Frédéric Gabioud, Mathis Gasser, Fabrice Gygi, Andreas Hochuli, Trix and Robert Haussmann, David Hominal, Bernhard Luginbühl, Urs Lüthi, Fabian Marti, Méret Oppenheim, Simon Paccaud, Mai-Thu Perret, Ugo Rondinone, Denis Savary, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely.In this book Carron suggests an imaginary time and place in art history while conjuring mythologies of labor and exploring the very personal approach that he took to understanding the narrative of national identity. Essays by Mai-Thu Perret and Balthazar Lovay plus an annotated walkthrough by Carron evoke the vernacular poetry of quirky Swissness.

For Los Angeles–based sculptor, painter, filmmaker and installation artist Kaari Upson (born 1972), possessions are the gateway into the human psyche.Contained within them are all the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of their owners. Like a shaman, Upson creates her own gateways, using unorthodox techniques to imbue everyday objects such as mattresses and bags with an arcane magic. The result is auratic works that act as powerful symbols of absence, failed aspirations and loneliness.Part of the 2000 Words series conceived by Massimiliano Gioni and published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, this monograph contains an essay by Ali Subotnick that examines Upson’s pseudoscientific approach to her art that allows her to create confounding work that is simultaneously familiar and foreign.

The artist’s biography as told by Metzger himself, a leader of the Auto-Destructive Art and Art Strike movements. A visionary artist and radical thinker, Gustav Metzger asked provocative questions about the role of the artist and of conventional forms of artmaking and display. In this richly illustrated book, Metzger tells the story of his life and work in a series of interviews with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. He recounts his Orthodox Jewish childhood in 1930s Nuremberg and his arrival in England as part of the Kindertransport before shedding light on his development as an artist, including his early contributions to computer art, his leading role in the Destruction in Art Symposium of 1966, and his call for an ‘art strike’ from 1977–80. An artist for our times, Metzger’s uncompromising commitment to combating environmental destruction was fundamental to his understanding of art as a vehicle for change. This publication speaks emphatically to the undimmed urgency of Metzger’s artistic position, offering an insight into his interests in ecology and nature and, in the later part of his life, the threat of extinction and the motto he adapted from W. H. Auden: ‘We must become idealists or die.’

William Kentridge reimagines his film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot through text and image in this striking artist’s book.William Kentridge reimagines his film series ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot’ that premiered during the 2024 Venice Biennale in this comprehensive artist’s book. The artist enters into a rich dialogue with himself in the studio, hashing out questions of art, work, memory, history, and time in magnitudes ranging from the intimate to the universal. Created in close collaboration with the artist, this publication translates his multidisciplinary approach to his films—combining film with performance, collage, drawing, and music—into book form, richly illustrated, with exquisite special features such as tipped-in drawings and transparent interleaves bringing the vivid materiality of the artist’s studio into the hands of the reader.

Multimedia treatments of biopower and politics in MexicoCombining data and aesthetics, Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg (born 1980) makes drawings, collages, videos and sound installations and sculptures that embrace the natural and social sciences in order to raise questions about sociopolitical realities.

Using Victor Turner's theory of states of limbo, Anti-Structure approaches an event horizon based on Urs Fischer's gravity-defying sculpturesNamed after a term coined by anthropologist Victor Turner, describing a state of limbo during a rite of passage, Anti-Structure places Urs Fischer's (born 1973) gravity-defying sculptures in dialogue with an eclectic assortment of artists from across time and genre including Nausica Pastra, George Lappas, Pantelis Xagoraris and Takis Zenetos.

Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's (born 1979) work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

Through painting, performance, sculpture and design, New York–based artist Kerstin Brätsch (born 1979) depicts the mutation of images over time, and the volatility of data consumption. This book includes an essay by Massimiliano Gioni on her engagement with the social lives of images.

A monograph exploring Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerabilityThe art of Kiki Smith (born 1954) confronts what it means to be human. Her sculptures are often feminine figures that become personifications of sexuality, trauma and abjection. This monograph contains an essay by Margot Norton examining Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerability.

Critical insight into the gesturing hand piece from Kara Walker's monumental sugar sphinxKara Walker’s (born 1969) Figa, a sculpture monumental in both size and symbol, was installed at the DESTE Foundation’s Hydra Slaughterhouse in 2017. Once a part of Walker’s colossal 2014 installation A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, Figa is made up of the hand piece from the anamorphic sphinx that gestures a “fig sign,” at once both a symbol of fertility and a “fuck you.” In making a return to the site of the Sugar Factory work and the work’s progeny in Hydra, this book offers critical insight on A Subtlety and Figa. Through extensive photographic documentation of the installation of the hand sculpture in Hydra by Ari Marcopoulos and seven fables written by Walker illustrating the power of folklore, mythology and black identity across the history of the United States, Figa in book form captures a blockbuster exhibition in two parts.

A concise introduction to the subversive career of contemporary art’s great tricksterNew York– and Milan-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960) has provoked controversy and admiration alike with his subversive sculptures, installations and publications. His playful, satirical body of work—which includes Comedian (2019), a banana duct-taped to the wall at ArtBasel Miami Beach, and America (2016), the 18-karat gold toilet he later installed in the Guggenheim’s restroom—reflects a pointed critique of institutional and cultural norms in the art world and society at large.Part of the 2000 Words series conceived by Massimiliano Gioni and published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, this monograph contains an essay by Gioni that excerpts his previous writings on Cattelan, his close friend and collaborator.

Leading and emerging artists and recent exhibitions from Dakis Joannou’s DESTE FoundationMore than just a catalog of recent exhibitions, DESTE 33+: 2015–2022 is a map to the fascinating web of collaborations and friendships at the heart of Dakis Joannou’s curatorial world. A rich array of archival images and new essays lend an overarching view to the DESTE Foundation’s recent work. Studded with contributions by such artists as Urs Fischer, Kara Walker and Jeff Koons, it also introduces members of the younger generation continuing to shape and challenge contemporary art. "DESTE has always had a stake in the current climate," Joannou notes, and, even in the face of the pandemic’s upheaval, continues "engaging in a global dialogue and offering a platform for new voices." Eight years after the release of DESTE 33 Years: 1983–2015, which introduced a broad audience to the DESTE project, this volume is an essential primer on the state of art today.

Documenting Koons’ multisensory homage to the sun god, a timeless dialogue with ancient historyThe definitive record of Jeff Koons’ (born 1955) Apollo Wind Spinner, his transcendent offering to Apollo, this volume brings together lush plates of the eponymous 2022 DESTE exhibition alongside an essay by Daniel Birnbaum and an extensive interview with the artist by Dakis Joannou. Koons’ multisensory installation shone a light on the interwoven history of Greek myth, readymade sculpture and contemporary art to wide acclaim—so much so that the inhabitants of Hydra voted unanimously to have the work remain permanently installed on the roof of the DESTE Slaughterhouse building.The many threads of this particular story are explicated here through a detailed "glossary of terms," tracing references from Plato to Duchamp and enlightening the reader on one of Koons’ most distinctive works of the last decade.