Karen Marta – författare

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.’

Ancient Greek art, archeology and artifacts invoke both the ritual and the mythological in Waliszewska’s paintingsThe totemic, symbolist paintings of Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska (born 1976) can be viewed as engaging in a specific kind of irruption: the sudden, forceful entry of ancient visual tropes into the present. The 15 works featured in Irruption of Antiquity are testament to this anachronistic intermixing of modern aesthetics with classical imagery, specifically that of ancient Greek art and mythology. Serving as both documentation and extension of the exhibition installed across two floors of Athens’ Benaki Museum, this book collects writings by the exhibition's curator, Alison Gingeras, who probes the charged iconographic tensions between objects spanning Neolithic Greece, classical antiquity, the Byzantine world and the modern Greek era, and Waliszewska’s intense psychological tableaux.

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.

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.

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.

Philippe Parreno (born 1964) undermines the notion of the discrete, ownable, copyrighted artwork through collaborations with artists such as Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe, performances, dialogue and the cultivation of exhibitions as real-time encounters. This superbly produced monograph, designed by M/M, offers the first substantial inventory of Parreno's work since the late 1980s, covering his multifarious production from film (such as the famous Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait, made with Douglas Gordon, 2006) to spectacle (Il Tempo del Postino, with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2007). It also includes critical and fictional texts by Maria Lind, Charles Arsène-Henry, Enrique Juncosa and Simon Critchley, as well as an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

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.

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.

Like a chessboard on which players showcase their skills, this amusing exhibition becomes a whole greater than its partsFriends and artists were invited by Massimiliano Gioni and Dakis Joannou to select works for The Greek Gift. The exhibition was assembled through a series of moves and countermoves. Like a chessboard on which the players showcase not only their skills, but their love of the game, the exhibition became a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Works from Cao Fei, Marcel Duchamp, Pipilotti Rist and more examine the impact of technology on the human imaginationA fresh perspective on the future of art and innovation, Dream Machines walks the line between utopia and paranoia, fearlessly exploring the interplay of man and machine. Amid the growing prominence of AI in our daily lives, the exhibition catalog encourages us to reflect: can we keep up with the evolution of our own creations?

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.

Astonishing sculptures and canvases from a classically trained artist who embraced failure and repetition, experimenting with unorthodox approaches to casting and paintingBased on her posthumous 2022 exhibition Never Enough at the DESTE Foundation in Athens, this publication celebrates American artist Kaari Upson (1970–2021), who worked across mediums—including sculpture, video, drawing and painting—to probe the depths of our collective psyche. Over her brief yet prolific 15-year career, Upson developed an elaborate universe woven out of memory, conjecture, fact and fiction. Imbued with a mystical animism, each work merges personal and collective traumas, desires, fears and fantasies. The colorful design of the exhibition, which featured 31 artworks spanning Upson's career, is faithfully reproduced in the book, which includes an essay by Dakis Joannou about his friendship with the artist and how he acquired the works in the collection, as well as a history of the making of these works by the late artist's close friend and collaborator Michael Benevento.

Probing the many sites and sources of inspiration for Condo's vivid, paranoiac paintings and totemic sculpturesThis catalog documents Condo's (born 1957) exhibition The Mad and The Lonely, the site-specific installation at the DESTE Foundation's Project Space at the Slaughterhouse on the island of Hydra in Greece, which included a number of small-scale paintings and sculptures selected from the artist's long career and recontextualized in the storied space. With a vivid 40-page leporello, this square hardcover book includes a text by Dakis Joannou and an essay by Condo himself that probes the many sites and sources of inspiration for The Mad and The Lonely.

Ursu?a’s anachronistic artifacts transport viewers into a realm of ancient tropes, grotesque votives and scarred bronze figuresRomanian artist Andra Ursu?a (born 1979) draws from the visual language and display strategies of archaeological museums to invent faux-historical artifacts belonging to a defunct civilization whose relics seem to speak to the anxieties of our present. Apocalypse Now and Then documents the titular site-specific installation in Hydra, Greece, wherein Ursu?a displayed fragments of sculptures and studio detritus that had been successively built up and destroyed with analog and digital tools, including Desolation Ware, a series of lost-wax cast bronze sculptures. In addition to ample installation shots, the volume explores the work’s themes—such as the history of object-making and sculpture and the ways in which this manually derived system of knowledge and speculation has come to shape our visual world—in new texts by DESTE founder, Dakis Joannou, curator Elena Filipovic and the artist herself.