Malou Wedel Bruun – författare

Surveying the films, installations and performances of the superstar Icelandic artistWidely recognized as one of the most exciting and significant voices of contemporary art, Icelandic performance and multimedia artist Ragnar Kjartansson takes a loving yet critical look at Western culture. His longform video installations explore the dynamics of repetition, often through music, and develop into feats of endurance, both physical and emotional. The Guardian deemed his 2012 work The Visitors “the best artwork of the 21st century.”Combining quintessential videos such as Me and My Mother and Bliss with lesser-known paintings and sculptures, the retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents three new pieces made for the exhibition (including the title work with the plywood flames burning on the catalog cover) and captures the litany of senses Kjartansson has embraced without hesitation in his 20-year career. New work created for the anthology includes a painted plywood monument to “an epic waste of love and understanding” and a new performance piece titled Scaredman. The richly illustrated catalog includes personal contributions and dialogues in response to each of the artist's works on display by leading contemporary artists and scholars. Curator Tine Colstrup discusses A Lot of Sorrow with Marina Abramović, and reflects on Terrible, Terrible with Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina. The book proves itself an invaluable guide to Kjartansson’s examination of love, identity, melancholy, masculinity and power.Ragnar Kjartansson (born 1976), a native of Reykjavik, Iceland, studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm. He represented Iceland at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia in 2009 and participated in the 2013 Encyclopedic Palace of the World at the 55th Biennale di Venezia in 2013.

The cave – both as a physical space and a metaphor – is a provocation to test the limits of contem- porary architecture. It invites new thinking about how architecture can adapt to a more community- focused, ecologically sensitive, low-carbon future. This publication and the accompanying sixth exhibition in The Architect’s Studio series at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art are dedicated to the Kenyan architects Cave_bureau. Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja from Cave_bureau describe eight of their projects. Stunning visuals are accompanied by essays poignantly asking questions about the future of architecture in the age of the Anthropocene, the effects of colonial extraction and erasure on African architecture as well as the specificity of each continent and each geographic space.CAVE_BUREAU is a Nairobi-based bureau of architects and researchers founded in 2014 by Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja. The bureau charts explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature. Its work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the African city as a means to confront the complexities of our contemporary rural and urban lives.

With a vast selection of works from the last two decades and Polaroids of the artist's studio, this mid-career catalog provides unique perspective on Schutz's oeuvre and methodsDana Schutz is one of the great figurative painters of our time—an eminent storyteller who depicts people in complex and often gigantic compositions. For two decades now, Schutz has distinguished herself with her tremendous narrative power, vigorous sense of color and ability to merge the gruesome, grotesque, absurd and comic.This richly illustrated catalog presents paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture, providing an overview of Schutz's entire career to date. Alongside a thorough analysis of Schutz's work by curator Anaël Pigeat, it presents a studio visit described in detail by art critic (and friend of the artist) Jarrett Earnest, whose text is accompanied by Polaroids of the studio that unfold Schutz’s working methods. Also featured is a conversation between curator Anders Kold and the artist, and a poetic essay by award-winning author Lauren Groff.Dana Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan, and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, and her MFA from Columbia University, New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Dana Schutz: Eating Atom Bombs held at the Transformer Station, Cleveland, Ohio (2018), which debuted a series of paintings by the artist; an exhibition of new work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); a career survey at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2015); and a solo exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, England (2013), which traveled to the kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2014).

Black light: a concise introduction to the beloved modernist and fabled painterGeorgia’s most famous artist, Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918) is a fabled figure in the story of early modernism. The painter, self-taught and penniless during his lifetime, was heralded posthumously for his "naive" style. Pirosmani’s paintings are simple—blunt, colorful depictions of rustic scenes gleaming against black canvas backgrounds, extraordinary icons of glowing intensity.This exhibition catalog showcases around 50 rarely seen Pirosmani masterpieces alongside a historical text on the artist written in 1926 by Kirill Zdanevich (who "discovered" Pirosmani); a fictional (but historically accurate) essay discussing Tbilisi as the Paris of Pirosmani’s age by the Danish art historian and writer, Kaspar Thormod; an interview with the Georgian art historian Nana Kipiani and her artist husband Levan Chogoshvili by Swiss curator Daniel Baumann; and reflections on the artist by contemporary artists Thea Djordjadze, Mamma Andersson and Tal R.