Ralph Rugoff – författare

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artistLos-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist.This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings documents the 2022 exhibition of ten new paintings and a new hologram at Gagosian Paris. The exhibition brought together naturalistic paintings of simple wooden slats, which at once represent a new direction in Ruscha s work and extend his long-standing interest in realism, modernist abstraction, and the American vernacular. The catalogue includes plate photography of the ten paintings and one hologram as well as installation views of the exhibition. Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and lives and works in Los Angeles. A career-spanning retrospective, ED RUSCHA/NOW THEN, will open at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in September 2023 and travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April 2024. Since 1993, Gagosian has presented twenty-five major exhibitions of Ruscha s work in the United States and Europe. New, illustrated essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff, offering critical and historical contexts for the work, are included in this bilingual English and French catalogue.

Documenting this American artist's first solo museum exhibition, Charles LeDray will focus on his obsessively crafted miniature sculptures in a variety of media, including textiles, ceramics, seashells, and bone, that reflect on childhood, gender, sexuality, and autobiography.

Family photographs are a universally familiar genre, and an intimate one, which makes this collection an accessible entry point for its deceptively simple but deeply complex social and representational issues. In turning their cameras on their own households,17 artists including Miguel Calder*n, Ari Markopoulos, Chris Verene and Gillian Wearing consider the family as a dynamic social institution, and confirm, if there was any doubt, that its affairs are never simply personal, but rather are entwined with and illustrative of broader historical, anthropological and economic considerations. Using the languages of snapshots, documentary and staged photography, as well as conceptual and performance art, and focusing on the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, these artists link the family to class and financial issues, gender and ethnic stereotypes, shifting marital and generational roles, and the impacts of war and immigration. Emotionally incisive and visually inventive, Shoot the Family transforms that most common artifact--the family photograph--into an illuminating investigation of contemporary culture. Essay by Ralph Rugoff and a short story by Lynne Tillman.

Spanning over 50 years of contemporary art, When Forms Come Alive - which accompanies a major exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery - explores the ways in which artists have been inspired by movement, flux and organic growth, from a dancer’s gesture to the breaking of a wave, or from a flow of molten metal to the interlacing of a spider’s web. It features a range of energetic sculptural forms that seem to ooze, undulate, blossom, erupt and sprawl across gallery spaces. This richly illustrated hardback book explores the artists and their work in detail, and includes essays by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff and art historian Natalie Rudd which cite the artists' work within the context of postminimalism, and explore formal and material innovation in sculpture across the past half century. Texts on each artist by a range of writers will accompany a broad-ranging selection of images. Includes the works of 21 international artists, namely Ruth Asawa, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Lynda Benglis, Michel Blazy, Paloma Bosque, Olaf Brzeski, Choi Jeong Hwa, Tara Donovan, DRIFT, Eva Fabregas, Holly Hendry, EJ Hill, Marguerite Humeau, Jean-Luc Moulene, Senga Nengudi, Ernesto Neto, Martin Puryear, Matthew Ronay, Teresa Solar Abboud and Franz West.

Published in celebration of the Hollywood star’s 100th birthday and in association with the Marilyn Monroe estate, to accompany the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait celebrates Monroe’s enduring legacy as a cultural icon, by exploring her impact on photography, art and film. Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous and photographed women of the twentieth century whose cultural significance continues to fascinate generations. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait reflects on Monroe’s extraordinary impact on photographers and artists, showing familiar and rarely seen photographs of her, alongside outstanding artworks made during her lifetime and afterwards, that collectively create a portrait of her. Today, as we better understand the challenges Monroe faced in her life and the agency she sought in shaping her career, her photographs have accumulated new meanings and captivated new audiences. From her collaborations with photographers such as Eve Arnold and Richard Avedon to bold reinterpretations of her by Pop artists including Pauline Boty and Andy Warhol, Monroe’s image has been continually reimagined, speaking to her lasting impact on visual culture and our understanding of beauty, fame, and power. Far more than a Hollywood star, Monroe was a complex figure; ambitious, witty, charismatic, and deeply involved in the crafting of her public persona. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait includes contributions from the actor, director and writer Lena Dunham, playwright and cultural commentator Bonnie Greer and feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who offer fresh and personal perspectives on Monroe’s cultural significance and enduring legacy.

Circus Americanus is a riotous excursion through America's changing visual landscape. Exploring its remote corners and bizarre byways, Ralph Rugoff takes us on a tour of theme park slums and mystical police cars, futurist war and the "aesthetics of safe chaos." With an idiosyncratic eye for detail, he maps a culture in which "reality" has become just another theme, revealing an America much stranger than the glamorous kitsch of its surfaces. Whether he is writing about Las Vegas casinos, forensic cartoons, the enigma of Napoleon's preserved penis or the aesthetics of sewage treatment, Rugoff considers everyday marvels with a concern for how we live together in a world beyond belief.