Tine Colstrup – 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 eerily prescient work of a near-forgotten Japanese artist, whose 1960s and ’70s sculptures anticipate contemporary ecological anxietiesContemplating Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s (1935-90) work in the 21st century provokes a sense of the uncanny on multiple levels: grotesquely beautiful on their own, his abject sculptures seem to foretell today’s environmental concerns with their depictions of ecological decay. Born in Osaka, Kudo’s life was greatly impacted by the aftermath of the atomic bomb in 1945; this trauma compounded by the Vietnam War’s ever-present atmosphere of destruction led to a consistent focus on dystopia and decomposition in his work.Kudo’s fluorescent birdcages and blacklight terrariums are furnished with an assortment of sculptures and found objects: melted plastic flowers, colorful phallic chrysalises and dismembered resin body parts come together to convey a distinctly modern anxiety in regard to our ailing world. Kudo’s work does not intend to provide comfort in the midst of crisis; rather, his pieces urge viewers to reflect on how we may or may not continue to survive in a world that we ourselves have ruined through pollution and consumerism.As the artist’s work reaches a peak of topicality, this volume presents a focused selection of Kudo’s pieces from the 1960s and 1970s that demonstrate a postwar awareness of the atomic bomb’s effect on reproduction and the environment.

A handsome, affordable introduction to the modernist polymath who charted the rhythms of color across textiles, illustration, painting and moreSonia Delaunay was a true pioneer of modernist abstraction; breaking with the figurative vocabulary that subordinated color to subject matter, she placed dynamic color interaction at the core of her vision, whether expressed through painting, book illustration or costume and textile design. Drawing inspiration from both traditional Russian crafts and the modern frenetic metropolis, Delaunay’s work reflects the drastic changes ushered in by industrialization. Through her polyvalent practice, Delaunay helped construct the new modern woman that she herself embodied: equal parts avant-gardist, creative entrepreneur and businesswoman.This richly illustrated catalog showcases the range of Delaunay’s work as it unfolded over 60 years, from abstract paintings and works on paper to textile design, garments, fashion photography, books and carpets—even a brightly colored sports car.Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) migrated to Paris in 1906 and became a key figure in the city’s avant-garde scene. During these early years, her paintings underwent a formal shift influenced by the vivid colors of Fauvism. She soon met her husband, fellow artist Robert Delaunay, and the couple pioneered a fusion of Cubism and Neo-Impressionism that they termed Simultanism, which denotes abstract painting that uses color in a manner comparable to the use of sound and rhythm in music. In 1964, Delaunay became the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre.

A visual voyage through the enigmatic ocean, where science meets art and where myth meets realityWe know more about the surface of Mars than we do about our planet’s oceans. And yet the ocean remains an alluring prospect to humanity: as an artistic icon, an object of scientific inquiry or even a financial resource. Encompassing art, film, literature, archeology and natural history, Ocean is a journey of discovery above and below the surface. Offering a cross section of art and cultural history, the exhibition and catalog are arranged into three themes: the ocean between art and science; the mythological ocean; and the Anthropocene ocean. From the woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi to Jean Painlevé’s photographs of aquatic life and Susan Hiller’s mapping of sea coasts, Ocean offers a mosaic view of this infinite yet imperiled source of life.Artists include: John Akomfrah, Anna Atkins, Jeanette Ehlers, Caspar David Friedrich, Susan Hiller, Pierre Huyghe, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Jean Painlevé, Howardena Pindell, August Strindberg, Wolfgang Tillmans, Francesca Woodman.

Key works and writings from six decades of pioneering image-text works in celebration of ErosFor six decades, Dorothy Iannone (born 1933) has developed an iconography that is at once epic and intensely personal. Often her works bear a close resemblance to graphic novels: hand-lettered texts and images work together to tell the story, bluntly and with humor in both verbal and visual details. Liberated sexuality and romantic relations are central themes. Iannone’s erotic scenes stem from historical representations of ecstatic unions across times, cultures and religions, with references to antiquity, Greek vases, Egyptian art, Roman and Pompeian murals, the Kama Sutra and Tantra, Icelandic sagas, Christianity, Buddhism, world literature and film history. Serving as muses, the artist’s lovers appear in her narratives: several works feature the artist Dieter Roth, who was Iannone’s partner from 1967 to 1974.This richly illustrated catalog presents some of the artist’s most important work, alongside an introduction by Italian art historian Barbara Casavechia, the artist’s own writing and an illustrated biography.