Wexner Center for the Arts – förlag

Cruzamentos features 35 artists, working across all genres, who reflect the vibrant artistic scene currently flourishing throughout Brazil. Many of the artists are emerging or mid-career and, with very few exceptions, have not been widely (or ever) exhibited in the US. “Cruzamentos” translates literally as “crossings” or ‘“intersections,” but in Brazil it also refers to the mixing of cultures that renders the country so distinctive. Cruzamentos extends that metaphor to contemporary art, focusing on artists whose practices are as varied as the country itself. Although a handful of postwar Brazilian visual artists have received recognition in North America, the astonishingly high level of artistic production throughout Brazil over recent decades remains significantly overlooked beyond its borders. Among the artists included are Márcio Almeida, Jonathas de Andrade, Laura Belém, Tatiana Blass, José Damasceno, Cia de Foto, Dias & Riedweg, Marcius Galan, Fernanda Gomes, Jac Leirner, Cristiano Lenhardt, Cinthia Marcelle, Beatriz Milhazes, Regina Silveira, Adriana Varejão and Marcia Xavier.

Jeff Smith is one of the great success stories of independent comics. In July of 1991, he launched Cartoon Books in Columbus, Ohio, to publish his black-and-white comic strip Bone. A tale of three marshmallowy creatures named Bone, adrift in a world of humans, monsters and fantasy creatures, Bone has since been translated into 15 languages and won Smith countless awards. Bone and Beyond is the first volume to offer an overview of Smith's work. Published in conjunction with the Wexner Center and Cartoon Research Library's 2008 exhibition, this catalogue presents work featured in the show, including examples of Smith's original drawings for Bone, plus the more recent Shazam and Rasl, a forthcoming time travel story. Also featured are selected works by cartoonists who have influenced Smith, such as George Herriman, Charles Schulz and Walt Kelly, and essays by comic book and fantasy author Neil Gaiman, comic book artist and scholar Scott McCloud and Wexner Center film/video curator David Filipi, the exhibition's co-curator. Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, the exhibition's other co-curator, provides an introduction.

This publication borrows critic Harold Rosenberg's memorable phase “apocalyptic wallpaper” to describe the work of contemporary artists who have created wallpaper of their own design or appropriated the patterns of others, finding entirely new possibilities within this medium. Andy Warhol's celebrated Jersey Cow wallpaper, for example, humorously subverts the landscape motifs conventional wallpapers often use to bring nature indoors. Featured artists include Warhol, Robert Gober, Abigail Lane and Virgil Marti.

Landscape Confection brings together a group of emerging and mid-career artists involved in expanding the historical practice of landscape painting. Long considered one of the primary categories of Western painting, landscape has traditionally been dialectically structured by the production of either realistic or idealized representations of the natural world. The artists in Landscape Confection work in the realm of imaginary landscape. Many of the paintings derive from the unconscious space of dreams, some borrow from the discipline of topography, and still others reside at the boundary between landscape and abstraction. Most of the pictures have a high degree of whimsy and call to mind the f'êtes galantes of Watteau, redolent as they are with bodily and visual pleasure. Artist included in the exhibition and catalogue are Rowena Drig, Pia Fries, Jason Gubbiotti, Jim Hodges, Katie Pratt, Michael Raedecker, Neil Rock, Lisa Sanditz, Amy Sillman and Janaina Tschape.

Conceptual artist Josiah McElheny's work in glass explores the relationship between art, history and narrative. This catalogue chronicles his most ambitious project to date and offers a comprehensive overview of the conception and creation of his sculptural work. Also documents his first-ever film.

Sadie Benning is not only among the country's most respected and influential video artists, she also broke cultural ground as a founding member of the multimedia feminist band Le Tigre. Suspended Animation, the first monograph on the artist and the catalogue of her first U.S. museum exhibition, introduces Benning's paintings and Play Pause, an ambitious new two-channel video installation. Benning's videos, which she began to make in the late 1980s with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 "toy camera," are known for their explorations of loneliness, alienation, gender ambiguity and her own developing lesbian identity. Benning's recent paintings--flat, illustrative, exuberant--are playful, imaginary portraits that address similar themes. Play Pause, created entirely from hundreds of Benning's drawings, offers a rhythmic and affectionate view of contemporary life in a city's streets, parks and gay bars. Includes written contributions by Eileen Myles and Aleksandar Hemon, and a conversation with the New York painter Amy Sillman.

Robert Beck (b. 1959) makes drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations investigating sexuality, masculinity and violence; his work has been collected by the Getty, the Whitney and MoMA, among others. Dust documents the eponymous recent installations in materials including graphite, Polaroids, drywall and shower curtains.

The work of Paul Sietsema (born 1968) might be described as a sequence of multimedia suites, each of which begins with a phase of intensive research into historical–political themes, and which results in a body of interrelated sculptures, photographs, drawings, collages and films that propose an “exploded” model of historical progress. In general, these suites, such as Empire (2003) and Figure 3 (2008), have been discussed and exhibited individually. This publication, by contrast, brings together major elements from projects of the past decade, along with new works, which are being facilitated by the support of a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award in visual arts. The publication, like the exhibition it accompanies, is the most comprehensive survey of Sietsema’s work to date. It includes his most recent sequence, Chinese Box, done through the support of the Wexner Artist Residency Award.

In celebration of its 25th anniversary in fall 2014, the Wexner Center for the Arts presented an unprecedented exhibition of the personal collection of Leslie and Abigail Wexner. Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection features an in-depth selection of masterworks by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet. With its concentrated focus on these three twentieth-century virtuosos, along with additional works by Edgar Degas, Willem de Kooning and Susan Rothenberg, the Wexner Family Collection is truly incomparable to any other private collection formed over the last 50 years. Guest curated by Robert Storr, professor and dean of the Yale University School of Art, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue bring fresh perspective to these artists and examine the figurative impulses that connect them. The comprehensive catalogue features essays by such leading art historians and curators as James Demetrion, Valerie Fletcher, Lisa Florman, Marilyn McCully, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Robert Storr and the late Kirk Varnedoe, as well as entries on the 60 objects in the exhibition. Apart from the singular significance of each individual work, both the catalogue and exhibition demonstrate the persistence of the human figure in art throughout the twentieth century and into our own.

S-337473 accompanies Sarah Oppenheimer’s (born 1972) exhibition at the Wexner Center. The project spotlights Oppenheimer’s current investigation of the switch, and how such a device might be able to work in space to generate a matrix of views that cannot be experienced by an individual simultaneously. The illustrated catalog includes new photography of the work in situ and documentation of her cross-disciplinary collaborations, along with newly commissioned essays by scholars, including Alexander R. Galloway (Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU) and Laurent Stalder (Chair for the Theory of Architecture at the ETH in Zurich).