Contemporary Painters Series – serie

The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b.1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work.Carnegie’s work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude – all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie’s paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

This book assesses the paintings of Tal R (b. 1967), an Israeli-born Danish artist whose enigmatic work offers intersections of personal experience and wider history through a visual jigsaw, finely balanced between representation and abstraction, of what the artist has termed 'Kolbojnik', a Hebrew term for leftovers.Tal R's paintings are exceptionally idiosyncratic yet informed by an expansive view of the history of painting, with a diverse range of references including Fauvism, Symbolism and folk art. To the casual observer, his works depict amalgams of people, places and things. But deeper scrutiny reveals them as complex conceptual playgrounds where these seemingly simple categories are exploded and examined as 'construction' sites of both literal material (including collage, photography and sculpture) and meaning.For all students and lovers of painting, Tal R's works, like those of Chris Ofili or Laura Owens, have cleared a pathway for painting to continue after modernism and post-modernism without apology, beyond the worn-out 'death of painting' mantra. Martin Herbert's fascinating text offers an authoritative account of the twists and turns that path has taken so far.

This is the first comprehensive overview of the career to date of British artist Hurvin Anderson (b.1965). Anderson is known for painting loosely rendered ‘observations’ of scenes and spaces loaded with personal or communal meaning.Anderson’s painting style is notable for the ease with which he slips between figuration and abstraction, playing with the tropes of earlier landscape traditions and 20th-century abstraction. His paintings of barbershop interiors, country tennis clubs and tropical roadsides teem with rich brushwork and multitudes of decorative patterns or architectural features, at once obscuring and adding to underlying ruminations on identity and place.Drawing on interviews with the artist, Michael J. Prokopow offers a critical assessment of Hurvin Anderson’s painting practice to date that will be enlightening for all students, dealers and collectors of contemporary painting.

This monograph on the paintings of Lois Dodd provides invaluable analysis and contextualisation of her work alongside such New York City contemporaries as Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and other denizens of the Tenth Street milieu of the 1950s. Emerging from the shadow of Abstract Expressionism, Dodd and this circle clung to a realism based in the early modernist tradition.Beginning in the 1950s, Lois Dodd has steadfastly pursued her observational painting, remaining aloof from passing trends. She is widely admired as a ‘painter’s painter’ whose landscapes and city scenes display subtle effects of place, light and weather within graphically distilled compositions. Dodd’s works capture the intangible character of changing seasons or particular hours of day in locations throughout New York City, rural New Jersey and Maine, but the paintings betray no mark of era; they are curiously timeless.Through extensive studio visits and interviews, Faye Hirsch considers the processes, places and impulses behind Dodd’s paintings and reveals her outwardly peaceful, reflective canvases to be the product of an alert and forceful eye and a powerfully efficient execution.

This is the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the work of Californian artist Mary Weatherford (b.1963), beginning in the mid-1980s and extending to the present. Weatherford was a student of pioneering twentieth-century art historian Sam Hunter at Princeton. Her broadly literate and visually arresting paintings address the legacies of American modernists from Arthur Dove and Agnes Pelton to Willem de Kooning and Morris Louis, while grappling with the politics of gender, the representation of specific moods and experiences, and other concerns squarely rooted in the present moment.From her early monumental targets, through canvases studded with real shells and starfish, as well as more abstract evocations of landscape inspired by caves, to her recent neon-appended panels whose atmospheres of rolling colour foreground the painting process itself, Weatherford’s works argue forcibly and convincingly for the engagement of painting with contemporary life. Suzanne Hudson’s text, the fruit of many studio visits and long interviews, reveals a singularly inventive artist whose boundless facility for reinvention will compel any viewer, student or critic of painting.

Since the mid-1970s, American painter Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within grids of multi-coloured blocks. Matthew Jeffrey Abrams's thoughtful book, the first full monograph on the artist, highlights Whitney's unique and sophisticated understanding of line and colour and his commitment to abstract painting over four decades of consistent practice. Abrams brings together Whitney's personal and professional narratives to weave a chronological analysis of the work and the artist's wider cultural contribution. Born in Philadelphia in 1946, Whitney moved to New York in 1968, and under the guidance of Philip Guston he began to experiment with abstraction, drawn to the basic formal qualities of Abstract Expressionism, the pure chroma of the Color Field movement, and the minimalist approach of such artists as Donald Judd. Steadfastly pursuing abstraction at a time when critical interest was focussed on figurative art and photography, Whitney has not received the critical recognition due to him until late in his career. This book affirms his outstanding achievement.

This book presents a comprehensive view of the work of American painter Philip Taaffe (b.1955), who has expanded the parameters of painting through his use of silkscreen, linocuts, collage, stencils, gouache, chine-collé, marbling, acrylic, enamel, watercolour and gold leaf. Possessing many technical skills, Taaffe has moved decisively between unique pictorial inventions and appropriations, as well as overlaying divergent modes of representation, through cultural patterns found in ornament, and biomorphic abstraction.John Yau's insightful text is the first to look at every part of Taaffe's artistic development, from the works he made at Cooper Union while a student of Hans Haacke, to the present. It pays special attention to Taaffe's acquisition of different techniques, as well as investigating his various sources of inspiration, which include the work of experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Harry Smith, the Natural History illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, and the ancient art of paper marbling.

Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist and visual artist. This is the first book to present a full account of Adnan’s fascinating life and work, using the drama of her biography, the complexity of her identity, and the cosmopolitan nature of her experience to illuminate the many layers and dimensions of her paintings and their progress over several crucial decades.Adnan came relatively late to painting - her first images were created in the late-1950s in response to the Californian landscape. Her vocabulary of lines, shapes and colours changed little over time, and yet there are huge variations in mood, texture, composition and material. Similarly, there is a balance between understanding her paintings as pure abstractions, emulating the shape of thought, and seeing them for the actual landscapes of the many places Adnan  loved, embraced and responded to.Tackling the complexities of her subject with skill and insight, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie unpacks Adnan'smulti-layered career to capture the full scope of her artistic endeavours and impressive achievements.

This comprehensive monograph offers a detailed examination of the paintings of the acclaimed German painter Neo Rauch (b.1960).Rauch’s paintings deftly blend the iconography of Socialist Realism from his upbringing and art-school training in GDR-era Leipzig with the stylistic mannerisms of the Baroque and Romantic past, conjuring heavily populated sites of great commotion and complexity, remarkably without recourse to preliminary drawing. His compositions and their enigmatic figures are rich with reference and allusion, but the stories they tell are indistinct and somehow out of time. They have an ancient modernity – or the freshness of renewed antiquity.Michael Glover discloses Rauch’s working methods, revealing how the artist approaches the making of his work, how his images come into being, and the importance of words and their etymology to the creation or disruption of an artwork. These are works that interrogate the very meaning of the artistic impulse; ruminations in the guise of history painting that in fact question what a painter could and should be creating at this particular historical moment.

A prolifically creative artistic polymath, American artist Amy Sillman (b.1955) works in drawing, zines, iPhone videos, installation, collaboration, teaching and curating, but painting has remained always at the very heart of her practice. This comprehensive monograph covers two decades of production, from the late-1990s to the present. Valerie Smith’s text reveals Sillman’s uniquely time-based approach to painting, influenced and inflected as much by filmmakers and musicians and the processes of her other chosen disciplines as by strictly art-historical forebears. Sillman’s works perform an intensive cognitive and gestural interrogation of her chosen materials: discovering, undoing and reforming trains of painterly thought, often over long periods of time and across large numbers of linked works. Sillman’s painting emerges as a radically expressive force; a pointedly self-reflexive practice that reformulates contemporary painting as an ever-evolving continuum and never simply a finished work.

The allusive paintings of Verne Dawson (b.1961) suggest an artist fascinated with storytelling. Seeking to contextualise Dawson's imagery, John Hutchinson's survey of the artist's work to date provides fascinating insight into a complex body of work. Dawson's idiosyncratic paintings defy contemporary art-world trends and eschew categorisation, revealing an artist attuned to ideas and values that stimulate an original artistic vision. Informed by a range of interests and influences, from fairy tales to 19th-century American landscape painting, Dawson's eerie and diverse canvases are intriguing and thought-provoking. Highly individual, Verne Dawson's visionary body of work will make an important addition to the Contemporary Painters Series and to contemporary-art libraries in general.

This is the most comprehensive monograph to-date on the innovative abstract site-related installations of German artist Katharina Grosse (b.1961).Grosse’s daring move from the canvas into both architectural space and the landscape, with her signature colourful spray paintings, has resulted in a deeply compelling body of work. From a Toronto airport to a decrepit beach structure on the New York coast and the spaces of major museums worldwide, Grosse’s works present thorough, if often temporary, carnivalesque transformations of extant places and situations.Author Gregory Volk has known Katharina Grosse and written about her work since the very outset of her career, and has witnessed her journey from unique talent to radical visionary. As he suggests here, Grosse’s continually developing practice, simultaneously ungainly and exhilarating, bewildering and liberating, radically extends the possibilities for contemporary abstract painting.

Blending the reflected cultural climate of his adopted home, Los Angeles, with the multi-layered world of American popular culture, Jim Shaw (b.1952) creates rich, dream-like worlds within distinct bodies of work. Addressing, for the first time, how the artist's oeuvre inter-relates, this substantial monograph argues that the artist's seemingly disparate series actually function together to present a lucid and insightful portrait of America today.Emerging out of the long West-Coast shadows of California Assemblage by way of LA Pop and Conceptualism, Shaw’s narrative-driven art marries art history and contemporary existence, as well as literature and comic books, ancient myths and modern movies, science and its variations in popular psychology — not only blurring the boundaries between art and life, but cultivating that confusion to consider the relationship between fact and fiction that seems to define so much of the world we inhabit today.Giving contemporary viewers an effective way to think about art, this publication is an invaluable resource for those interested in painting today and its interaction with modern life.

This is the first full-length monograph on the paintings of Bernard Frize (b.1949), an artist whose work straddles movements and styles from Colour Field to Minimalism, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. Frize's works utilise a carefully constructed range of tools, processes, choreography and collaboration to catalogue, in complex and unexpected abstract form and colour, the possibilities of his chosen materials.Emerging from the politicised 1970s onwards, Frize swam against the tide of opinion regarding painting’s apparent obsolescence to develop a painting practice that could express political commitment and social concerns, while avoiding both overt statement and pure decoration.David Rhodes’ text provides a detailed consideration of Frize’s development, from the earliest works onwards. Placing his paintings in a broader art-historical and philosophical context, a wider conversation about painting itself is presented alongside Frize's significant place within the medium's history.

This book presents a detailed account of Guillermo Kuitca's major bodies of work, analysing his diverse range of imagery and reflecting on his engagement with the spaces in which we live.Following Kuitca’s development from the 1980s to his latest body of work, the narrative reveals an artist who has continually challenged himself and his audience with new kinds of painterly language. In Kuitca’s hands, everyday visual material such as road maps, street plans, architectural blueprints and theatre seating charts are transformed into remarkable paintings. Their impact comes from their apparent engagement with dark subjects such as the Holocaust and Argentina’s 'Dirty War,' as well as the artist’s innovative imagery and techniques.Drawing on conversations and studio visits the author has had with the artist, Guillermo Kuitca reveals the multifarious elements of a challenging and exciting body of work. It is essential reading for anyone fascinated by this truly original artist.

This is the first monograph to give an overview of the entire career to date of artist Ding Yi (b. 1962), whose work, unlike most other well-known Chinese painters, is wholly abstract. Large in scale, and extraordinary in detail, Ding Yi's paintings invite a myriad of questions, not least how an intuitive artist works with recurrent patterns and symbols. Tackling this paradox, the authors discuss a range of questions pertinent to the artist, primary of which is how China has shaped his work, both culturally and environmentally, over the past thirty years.Based on extensive interviews with the artist, Ding Yi presents a definitive portrait of an important contemporary painter, who holds a unique position in Chinese art history. As such, it is essential reading for fans and the uninitiated alike.

Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) is one of the most celebrated painters of her generation, coming to prominence in the mid-1990s in the wake of the so-called 'culture wars' and the art world's controversial embrace of identity-politics and multiculturalism.In this in-depth look at her oeuvre, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith unpacks the complexities of her richly layered paintings, examining themes such as identity, race, displacement and the ecological environment, which Gallagher has explored throughout her work. The author takes the reader from Gallagher's early years — looking at her formative influences — through her engagement, from the late 1990s on, with the inherited modernist forms of the monochrome and the grid and with the violence and division at the root of modernism itself. Also explored are her phantasmagoric explorations of oceanic life, which draw on the discoveries of natural science, the traumatic history of the Atlantic slave trade and the speculative fictions of Afrofuturism. For anyone interested in contemporary art and the ways particular artists are expanding its borders, in form and content, this is essential reading.

The remarkable plein air paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b.1963), which chronicle everyday lives within our diverse modern world, are the focus of this first monograph of his career to date.Immersing himself in communities around the globe, Xiaodong seeks to present people who often sit on the fringes of society who find themselves marginalised within a contemporary world striving for homogenisation. At first glance a traditional realist painter, closer examination reveals an artist exploring a range of media while interrogating the opportunities presented by modern technology. The result is an outstanding body of work, often monumental in scale, that examines, reconsiders, and extends observational painting in fresh directions, while bringing into question the lines between fact and fiction, the traditional and the contemporary, to create a wholly original vision.

With a body of work that explores a broad spectrum of subjects - from lesbianism and feminism to contemporary politics and the natural world - Nicole Eisenman (b.1965) challenges convention and encourages viewers to construe meanings from images that demand interrogation and debate.Illustrating paintings spanning the early 1990s to the present day, Dan Cameron unpacks the complexities of Eisenman's oeuvre via thematic chapters that address key ideas which emerge when drawing specific works together. As such, this first major account of Eisenman's painting career, presents a clear analysis of the primary motivators that have fuelled the imagination of one of the most interesting and original contemporary artists working today.

Over the last three decades, Jacqueline Humphries (b.1960) has, through an innovative painterly process, challenged the limits of abstraction. She has produced a body of work that reaches beyond modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and abstraction as we know it.Multi-layered in application, Humphries challenges the viewer to interact with her painting in diverse ways, inviting new approaches to looking and being with a work. Expertly analysing the ways in which Humphries has challenged convention and placed abstract painting at the centre of our twenty-first century visual environment, Frances Guerin's illuminating text reveals an artist at the peak of her powers.