Karma – förlag

First published in 1998, Leeming’s landmark biography of Beauford Delaney returns to printLong out of print, this new edition of David Leeming’s landmark biography of Beauford Delaney (1901–79) features an introduction by Hilton Als. Leeming, also the author of James Baldwin’s acclaimed 1994 biography, delves into the captivating life of one of the most significant Black artists of our time. With rare affection, tact and insight, he paints a vivid portrait of an artist who defied convention and left an indelible mark on both art history and everyone he encountered—including a diverse array of writers, artists and musicians, from Henry Miller and Jean Genet to Baldwin and Georgia O’Keeffe.Tracing Delaney’s humble beginnings in a deeply religious family in Knoxville, Tennessee, to New York, to his untimely demise in a Parisian asylum, Leeming draws not only on his close friendship with the artist but also journals, notebooks, letters and critical reviews, guiding the reader through the evolution of his practice and his remarkable life. As Als writes in his introduction: “Sadly, there are many ways for the queer Black boy to die—but also, many ways for him to live. Delaney saved his own life through art, the making of worlds based on what he saw in his internal and external universe."David Adams Leeming (born 1937) is an American philologist and Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The World of Myth (1990), James Baldwin: A Biography (1994) and the Oxford Companion to World Mythology (2005). He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Using El Lissitzky’s artwork as a starting point, New York–based painter Sebastian Black (born 1985) abstracts space and graphic shapes in this slim artist's book.

Published to coincide with her solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, this catalogue surveys over five years of Los Angeles–based artist Liz Larner's (born 1960) wall-based ceramic works. Larner’s process explores the natural compression and fragmentation of the body and of ceramic forms themselves. Fired and coated with pigment and resin, each ceramic work fits into one of six categories: inflexion, caesura, subduction, mantle, passage and calefaction. Resembling magnificently colored ancient tablets or sculptural specimens of the mineral world, the pieces have fissures and cracks that evoke geological processes.With a photo-essay by Catherine Opie, an essay by curator and writer Jenelle Porter, and an interview between Larner and Aspen Art Museum Director Heidi Zuckerman, this is an accessible entry into the work of an eminent female artist whose practice continues to radically enliven contemporary sculpture.

Chosen Ones is a comprehensive monograph on the work of German painter Bendix Harms (born 1967), spanning over 15 years of work. A repertoire of motifs recurs throughout the nearly 400-page volume: birds, trees, airplanes, cars and the artist's profile­­, all rendered in loose, exuberant strokes of gray and muddy orange. Drawing on elusive autobiographical references, the paintings--whether of grotesque figures or more surrealistic scenes--are often humorous and suggestively narrative, compelling in their apparent disregard for and liberation from concept. “I love artists’ late works,” he has said, “when they display a completely free style because it no longer matters whether their work will earn them applause or a rap over the knuckles.” The first major monograph on the artist, Chosen Ones features texts by Gisela Corleis and Grace Dunham as well as black-and-white photographs by Harms, in addition to reproductions of more than 300 paintings.

First published in 1993, Sister is a story of love and violence bearing justice. In author and critic Jim Lewis’ first novel, an orphaned, 17-year-old Wilson leaves his Nebraska home and heads south to Mississippi. There, he finds work as a gardener on the estate of the Miller clan—a nuclear family with two lovely daughters, Marian and Olivia, living in compliant happiness. Wilson’s surreptitious presence soon casts a quiet path of destruction through the Miller home with very tangible results for the sisters. Twenty years after its original publication, Lewis’ lyrical, atmospheric novel remains exacting in its appraisal of young love linked to loss and unnerving in its examination of the isolated American family.

How to Ruin an Omelet is the third in a series of artist’s books by Los Angeles–based painter Michael Williams (born 1978), following California Land for Sale!! and Yoga Online. Using a fashion sketchbook with figurative templates as its foundation, How to Ruin an Omelet is a lively amalgam of text and image.

In 2009 Ida Applebroog’s (born 1929) assistants found a box marked “Mercy Hospital.” Inside was a series of drawings the artist made nearly 50 years ago, during a period of institutionalization after suffering a debilitating breakdown in San Diego in 1969. During this tumultuous period, Applebroog, by her own account, “withdrew from the world entirely, for a period hardly able to speak at all.” Instead she turned to drawing, producing works in graphite, India ink and watercolors, at times accompanied by text from authors such as Kafka and Freud.The drawings oscillate between the figurative and the abstract, laying bare the female form and calling to mind art-historical precedents informed by psychopathology, particularly works produced in early and mid-20th-century France by the likes of Wols.The publication of Mercy Hospital, with a text by Jo Applin, is the first time that Applebroog’s work from this period has been documented in full.

Boats Crosses Trees Figures 1977–78 is a survey of Peter Halley’s (born 1953) early works on paper made during his years as a graduate student at the University of New Orleans.Already pointing clearly to the pictorial concerns that he would focus on throughout his career these works initiate Halley’s interest in the interaction of opposites, primarily abstraction and figuration but also interior and exterior, foreground and background, light and dark, appearance and disappearance.Inspired by the color and sound of New Orleans, Halley translates the physical world into bright, geometric compositions constructed of gridded squares of color, where, through the combination of formal severity and openness as equal partners, seemingly simple compositions turn into complex amalgams of various possible views of an image and its space.

Things You Shouldn’t Understand is the newest in a series of drawing books by Los Angeles–based painter Michael Williams (born 1978).It employs the motif of marker bleeding through a page to propel the narrative, each image repeating in mirror form and interacting with a new one on its facing page, as a psychedelic cast of creatures twists and turns.

In American Spirit, New York–based conceptual photographer Roe Ethridge (born 1969) presents an unabashedly gorgeous collection of mountainous vistas and meta-advertising spreads that riff on the name of the eponymous cigarette brand.Wide-open views of Western peaks are interspersed with close-shot portraits, still lifes and consumer imagery, a Manifest Destiny atlas for the post-internet era.

16 Pictures is the latest in a series of photobooks by American artist Robert Grosvenor (born 1937). Included here are color photographs of vehicles, scale models and ordinary objects. Sometimes blurry, sometimes overexposed, and very often brightly colorful, the photographs depict scenes that may be staged or chanced upon.

The latest volume of writing by influential New York–based critic and curator Bob Nickas collects his 2012–14 column for Vice magazine’s Komp-laint Dept. This column unleashed the full omnivorous range of the author’s interests. There are essays on musicians such as Neil Young, Sun Ra, Royal Trux and Lydia Lunch, which look at their biographies and the history of Nickas’ personal relationship with their music; there are lengthy and often very funny “complaints” about, among other things, two different presidents, Jeff Koons, New York architecture, the meeting of fashion and punk, religion in general, nostalgia and the problem with contemporary graffiti. Additionally, there are meditations on filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and Nicolas Refin. The book is rounded out by perhaps the definitive (two-part) examination of how and why Richard Prince uses appropriation.Bob Nickas has worked as a critic and curator in New York since 1984. He is the author of Theft Is Vision (2007) and The Dept. of Corrections (2016).

This book collects drawings, supplemented by her own photographs, by artist Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975), of midcentury modern houses in the Hamptons, Fire Island and Martha's Vineyard. Bernhardt spent the summer of 2017 living at Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton. She and her son embarked on bike rides around the area, and Bernhardt became fascinated by, as she writes, "huge and small wonderful wood and glass masterpieces, some with crazy window shapes, some A-frames, some with concrete, all interesting designs ... I started making fast black ink sumi-e-like drawings of the houses, breaking down the houses to their basic forms of line." Featuring an introductory text by the artist and a historical overview by David Sokol of architecture in the Hamptons, Katherine Bernhardt: Houses offers a unique, personal account of the forms and structures of modernist vacation homes.

Paul Mogensen (born 1941) had his first one-person exhibition at the Bykert Gallery, New York, in March 1967. A pioneering minimalist painter, Mogensen worked then—as now—on paintings guided by such ancient mathematical rules as the golden ratio. In early 1968, Mogensen boarded a rivet-plated British passenger ship in Madras (now Chennai), India, which traveled for six days to Penang Island, Malaya, off the west coast of Malaysia. He carried with him a children's notebook in which he drew a few ideas related to what he was seeing on his travels and worked on the arithmetic that continues to inform his paintings. Paul Mogensen: Early 1968 is a facsimile of the workbook from that time. An intimate volume, offering a glimpse of how Mogensen worked out his mathematical imagery in relation to the outside world, this publication is the only book available on this key minimalist artist.

This is the fourth volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book project. It is primarily a calendar of Lozano's personal, artistic and chemical interactions in 1969–70. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, the painter Lee Lozano (1930–99) kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1970 while living in New York's SoHo neighborhood. In 1972 she rigorously edited these books, thus completing the project.

This is the fifth volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book project. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on Lozano's work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art's role in society and humorous asides from daily life.

This book collects images that New York–based artist Anne Collier (born 1970) originally presented as a slideshow of 80 35mm slides depicting found images of female subjects in the act of taking self-portraits. Dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these relics of the analog age were collected by Collier, each image discarded by its original owner but finding its way back to relevance in Collier’s work. The slideshow consists of amateur snapshots of women photographing themselves with film cameras prior to the advent of the digital "selfie." Instead of circulating on social media, these abandoned images once existed for a private audience. The resulting work is steeped in a deep sense of loneliness, illustrating photography’s contentious relationship to memory, loss and self-representation. The book represents a kind of sequel to Collier's 2017 book Women with Cameras (Anonymous).

The latest in Karma's acclaimed series of overviews, this 424-page clothbound volume is the first comprehensive survey of New York–based minimalist painter Paul Mogensen (born 1941). Born in Los Angeles, Mogensen arrived in New York in 1966 already associated with such peers as David Novros and (through Novros) Brice Marden. His first solo exhibition at the Bykert Gallery came the following year. Since that time, Mogensen has created often colorful works that follow rule-based progressions (such as the “n + 1” method) to generate sharply executed geometric abstractions.In a text for this volume, the artist Lynda Benglis usefully summarizes the special character of Mogensen’s art: “Paul is a colorist who is measured in his method. It may be said that he is a decorative painter as well a painter of a philosophical disposition. He is stringent in his approach, as stringent as a mechanic might be with a Ferrari. There are no accidents.”

Kokuyo Business Paper is the latest of Michael Williams’ (born 1978) artist’s books published by Karma. This newest book focuses on drawings on top of photocopies and employs the gatefold as a primary characteristic of the book. Each fold has the potential to hide and reveal another image, forcing the viewer to look and open each fold.

Before her self-imposed exile from the art world, Lee Lozano (1930 99) was a highly regarded painter who defined a generation of American artists infusing conceptualism with a new intensity. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York's SoHo neighborhood.Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art's role in society and humorous asides from daily life.In the decade before her infamous dropout piece culminating in a move to Dallas where she would remain until her death Lozano returned to these notebooks, editing the entries, sometimes blacking out entire pages. Private Book 1 is the first in the series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles.

This is the sixth volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book (1930 99) project. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on Lozano's work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art's role in society and humorous asides from daily life. One excerpt reads: For my opening at the Whitney I would like to do a very special FANCY: want to give an invitation personally to the downtown people I know from being/living in this neighborhood for so long. In fact these are the only people I want at my opening. Just NEIGHBORHOOD people: from drugstores, food & laundry stores, stationary stores, etc. GET IT?"

This is the seventh volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book (1930 99) project. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on Lozano's work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art's role in society and humorous asides from daily life.Don't be RIVAL RABBITS," she writes here. "Give your ideas away. Help the world survive. SHARE AN IDEA JOINT."

This book collects a series of new portraits by the critically acclaimed New York based painter Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975). The drawings depict a man named Francesco D'Angelo, whom she met while traveling in Peru. The two began sending photos back and forth through WhatsApp of their daily lives.The drawings are accompanied by a group of photo pairings that Bernhardt made of him, alongside other depictions of D'Angelo, as well as images found online that point to similarities between him and others (an image of Jesus in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, for example).

A handsome and hefty clothbound compendium of Lozano’s explorations of gender through drawingThis 640-page volume comprises drawings from a critical six-year period in the development of American painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano’s (1930-99) practice. Her daring, facetious sketches investigate issues of gender and the body through the erogenous anthropomorphization of tools.Lee Lozano: Drawings 1958-64 includes two newly commissioned essays by Helen Molesworth and Tamar Garb. “What I love about Lozano—besides the crazy, ham-fisted quality of her drawn line, pictures made with pencils that appear to have been held with a fist—is how her demonstration of the word 'connection' is not bound to any of the anodyne ways we currently use it,” writes Molesworth. “There’s nothing about 'listening' or 'building community' or 'empathy' in any of these drawings. For Lozano, connection is fraught and hairy. Connection is dangerous.”

A half-century of social change in America, documented in the writings of Danny Lyon, photographer and author of The Bikeriders and The Destruction of Lower Manhattan“From the beginning, even before he left the University of Chicago and headed south to take up a position as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Danny Lyon dreamed of being an artist in language as well as in pictures,” writes Randy Kennedy in the introduction to American Blood. In 1961, at the age of 19, for example, Lyon penned a brutally satirical article for a student mimeo magazine in which he argued for the deterrent power of prime-time televised executions (“the show would open, no doubt, like a baseball game, with a rendition of the National Anthem”).Lyon is widely celebrated for his groundbreaking work in photography and film. Less recognized is the extensive body of writing that has broadened and reinforced his reach, in both the pages of his own publications and in others as varied as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, civil rights publications, underground magazines and Lyon's blog.This 400-page volume spans republished and previously unpublished texts from nearly six decades of his career, comprising a vast, meticulously archived history of American social change. Also included are conversations between Lyon and Hugh Edwards, Nan Goldin and Susan Meiselas. As Kennedy writes, Lyon’s collected writings, “remarkable as both artistic and moral models, remain far too little known, especially for an author who has seen what he has seen and possesses the rare ability to write about it as he speaks; Lyon is a world-class talker, funny, wise, sanguine and indefatigable.”Danny Lyon (born 1942) is one of the most influential documentary photographers of the last five decades. His many books include The Movement (1964), The Bikeriders, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), Knave of Hearts (1999), Like a Thief’s Dream (2007) and Deep Sea Diver (2011).

An acidic portrait of the grifters and pretenders of the art world, from the celebrated author of The Mars RoomIn Rachel Kushner’s latest work of fiction, The Mayor of Leipzig, an unnamed artist recounts her travels from New York City to Cologne—where she contemplates German guilt and art-world grifters, and Leipzig—where she encounters live “adult entertainment” in a business hotel. The narrator gossips about everyone, including the author. “Taking a time out from what happened to me in Cologne and in Leipzig,” Kushner writes, “I want to let you in on a secret: I personally know the author of this story you’re reading. Because she fancies herself an art world type, a hanger-on. Who would do that voluntarily? I mean, it’s not like someone held a gun to my head and said, Be an artist. I chose it, but I still can’t imagine having anything to do with the art world if you don’t have to. Also, people who don’t make stuff, who instead try to catalogue, periodize, and understand art, they never understand the first thing. Art is about taste, a sense of humor, and most writers lack both.”Rachel Kushner (born 1968) is the author of The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018). Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s and the Paris Review.

Conversations with leading women artists, composers and writers from Judy Chicago, Anohni and Lynne Tillman to Ellie Ga, Tauba Auerbach and Renee GreenThis massive volume comprises over 80 interviews published across a 13-year span of Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s career as a writer, educator, editor and cofounder of November magazine. The majority of the interviews first appeared on Artforum.com’s interviews column, which O’Neill-Butler edited for 11 years. The book is divided into two sections, “Q&A” and “As Told To”—the first comprising interviews in a traditional format and the second recast by O’Neill-Butler in the interviewee’s voice.Interviewees include: Judy Chicago, Shannon Ebner, Carolee Schneemann, Lucy R. Lippard, Joan Semmel, Liz Deschenes, Eleanor Antin, Andrea Fraser, Anohni, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, Adrian Piper, fierce pussy, Nan Goldin, Nell Painter, Frances Stark, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Alex Bag, Agnès Varda, Lisi Raskin, Mary Mattingly, Carol Bove, Jennifer West, Aki Sasamoto, Mary Ellen Carroll, Rebecca Solnit, Rita McBride and Kim Schoenstadt, Karla Black, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lynda Benglis, Sturtevant, Rachel Foullon, Ellie Ga, Lisa Tan, Mira Schor, Jo Baer, Ruby Sky Stiler, Suzanne Lacy, Rebecca Warren, Katy Siegel, Marlene McCarty, Rachel Mason, Mary Kelly, Dianna Molzan, Lynne Tillman, Polly Apfelbaum, Jesse Jones, Dorothea Rockburne, Sarah Crowner, Lucy Skaer, Sophie Calle, Mary Beth Edelson, W.A.G.E., Mary Heilmann, Pauline Oliveros, Kathryn Andrews, Jessamyn Fiore, Aura Rosenberg, Lucy McKenzie, Rhonda Lieberman, Lucy Dodd, Hong-Kai Wang, Sakiko Sugawa, Beverly Semmes, Virginia Dwan, Jeanine Oleson, Tauba Auerbach, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Donna J. Haraway and more.

Elegant monochrome glamour in Katz's new print seriesThis handsome clothbound catalog gathers Alex Katz’s recent titular print portfolio. The series of 25 prints features close-up, black-and-white portraits that remove the subjects from any contextual backdrop, emphasizing instead subtle shifts in expression. Rendered in bold lineation and tightly framed, the women depicted recall the models and celebrities featured in mid-20th-century fashion imagery, underscoring Katz’s ongoing fascination with perceptions of beauty and glamour that permeate the public sphere. The portraits are bookended by a pair of meditations on beauty: Carter Ratcliff imagines a comedically philosophical dialogue between himself and beauty, and Jarrett Earnest shares 31 encounters with beauty in art and life.Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of America’s most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide. Katz is best known for his large-scale canvases of flatly rendered figures cast against a monochrome background.

Early paintings and ephemera by Tabboo!, full of 1980s New York punk glamourThis clothbound volume appraises the formative years, from 1982 to 1988, of legendary performer, painter, designer, puppeteer and muse Tabboo!’s career. The book displays historical ephemera—including homemade flyers for performances at iconic clubs—along with the artist’s paintings. Additionally, an essay on the “Glamorous Life” by Jarrett Earnest explicates the thematic concerns of the catalog. In a 1995 interview with Linda Simpson about his early work, Tabboo! observed: “the subject matter was drag, glamour, ladies’ shoes, lingerie, hairdos, vinyl—same as now.” Tabboo!: 1982–88 underscores the joy of creating and living, exuberantly.Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian, born 1959) moved to New York City’s East Village in 1982 and quickly established himself as a fixture in its drag scene. In the style of fellow Boston School artists Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson and Mark Morrisroe, he chronicled the zeitgeist with a raw, diaristic approach. In his work, dizzying visuals of nightlife and its cast of characters accompany affectionate portraits of his friends; seedy glamour and high camp meet in a jubilant fusion of collage, paintings and photography. Not one to be an aloof observer, Tabboo! was often photographed himself—by Goldin, Morrisroe, Pierson, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, David Armstrong and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Both creator and muse, chronicler and participant, he emblematizes the open experimentation central to the mythology of glamorous underground culture.