Matthew Marks Gallery – förlag

This is the first monograph on Chicago-based Hairy Who artist Suellen Rocca (born 1943), presenting her paintings, drawings and prints from the 1960s. Among her contemporaries, Rocca’s work is notable for its vocabulary of pictographic imagery inspired by consumer catalogues, magazine advertisements and children’s activity books.Featuring full-color plates of more than 50 artworks, virtually all of which are reproduced here for the first time, this volume presents a thorough overview of the artist’s work from 1964 to 1969. An essay by Dan Nadel traces Rocca’s artistic development, situating her within art history. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s essay employs verse and prose to explore the thematic undercurrents of Rocca’s work. Completing the book are a bibliography and a narrative chronology of the artist’s life, illustrated with historical photographs and ephemera from her archive.

Ray Johnson (1927–95) was a seminal Pop artist, a proto-conceptualist and a pioneer of mail art.Always one to throw sand in the gears of art-world institutions, he tended to circulate his work either in truly alternative spaces (like sticking up out of the uneven floorboards of a warehouse downtown) or through the US Postal Service. Throughout his life, Johnson sent collages, drawings and less easily categorized forms of printed matter to friends, colleagues and strangers. Already in 1965, Grace Glueck described Johnson as “New York’s most famous unknown artist.” Though his work resists efforts to pin it down, Johnson can be said to have found a particularly useful medium in collage. Collage allowed Johnson to reflect—but also to participate in—the modern collision of visual and verbal information that only became more frenzied as the 20th century wore on.This volume collects 42 collages made by Johnson between 1966 and 1994, most never exhibited or published before, with a new essay by writer Brad Gooch, who first came into contact with Johnson when he began receiving unsolicited mail art shortly before the artist’s death. The collection of works in this volume shows the artist at his most expansive, combining art history with celebrity, word with image and the personal with the universal.

In the late 1970s Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was commissioned by architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to create an artwork for the lobby of a new office building underway in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Kelly responded with one of his most ambitious artworks to date, Color Panels for a Large Wall, an 18-panel painting executed in two versions. The larger, at over 125 feet wide, was the biggest painting he had ever made, and its trajectory would pass through not just Cincinnati but also Amsterdam, New York and Munich before ending up at its permanent home, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where it has been prominently installed in the I.M. Pei–designed East Building since 2004.The smaller version, over 30 feet wide, remained in the artist's possession. This catalog tells the complete story of these two remarkable paintings.

This catalogue focuses on the formative drawings that Anne Truitt (1921–2004) made while living in Tokyo from 1964 to 1967—a pivotal moment for her, both artistically and intellectually. Though she later destroyed the sculptures she produced there (all in aluminum, a material she ultimately found unsuited to her intentions), this process of discovery was essential to the clarification of her sculptural vision. The innovations she developed in Japan, many in the form of drawings, would profoundly inform her lifelong practice. This book presents the full range of these works on paper, from hard-edge polygons to veil-like fields of color. An illustrated chronology provides a detailed account of her experiences in Japan and its impact on her subsequent work. Also reproduced for the first time are photographs of the 23 sculptures she made in Japan, all since lost or destroyed.

Works on paper from a leading member of the Hairy Who art collectiveSuellen Rocca (born 1943) is perhaps best known for the work she made as a member of the Hairy Who, a group of six Chicago artists who exhibited together from 1966 to 1969. This book presents, for the first time, 30 works on paper made between 1981 and 2017. Building on the unique graphic vocabulary and innovative compositions of her 1960s work, these drawings represent a turn toward imagery she describes as "more internal." Animals, trees and unclassifiable creatures are placed in densely patterned settings that carry a genuine emotional charge.In the book’s essay, Cat Kron notes Rocca’s "increased attention to the unconcious," tracing parallels between the artist’s "anxious imaginings" and the automatic drawing of the Surrealists. As Rocca puts it, "I just begin, and the drawing is a journey between me and the marks on the paper."

The recent works of YBA artist Gary Hume (born 1962) include not only his signature paintings on aluminum, but also paintings on paper that mark a critical shift in both tecture and depth. These large-scale but intimate works meditate on Hume's mother and her struggle with dementia, as well as scenes recollected from the artist's childhood.