Guggenheim New York – serie

A groundbreaking study of visionary artist Hilma af Klint. When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than a thousand paintings and works on paper that she kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint’s radically abstract painting practice – one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction.Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States, Hilma af Klint represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of the artist’s life and work. Essays explore the social, intellectual, and artistic milieu of af Klint’s 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars, and curators considers af Klint’s sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art – a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, the site of the forthcoming exhibition.

ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, is the first large-scale historical survey in the United States dedicated to the German artist group Zero (1957–66). Founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, joined by Günther Uecker in 1961, the group expanded to include ZERO, an international network of like-minded artists who shared the group’s aspiration to redefine art in the aftermath of World War II. Featuring more than thirty artists from nine countries, the catalogue explores the experimental practices developed by this extensive network of artists whose work anticipated aspects of Land art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. The publication is organized around points of intersection, exchange, and collaboration that defined these artists’ shared history. Among the themes explored are the establishment of new definitions of painting; the introduction of movement and light as both formal and idea-based aspects of art; the use of space as subject and material; the interrogation of the relationship between nature, technology, and humankind; and the production of live actions or demonstrations. At once a snapshot of a specific group and a portrait of a generation, this title celebrates the pioneering nature of both the art and the transnational vision advanced by the ZERO network.

This catalogue presents an important new trend in contemporary photography, offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualize them within the history of art and culture. Drawing deeply on the legacies of conceptual and commercial photography, these artists pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centres on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines and record covers. The result is an image imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance – a sort of displaced self-portraiture – that resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings. Driven by a deep interest in the medium of photography, these artists investigate the nature, laws and magic of film photography at the moment of its disappearance in our digital age. They attempt to rematerialize the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and by creating photo-sculptures and installations. Artists include Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag and Sara VanDerBeek.

The Guggenheim Museum’s sold-out publication Maurizio Cattelan: All is returning to print. Hailed as a provocateur, prankster and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960, Padua, Italy) has created some of the most unforgettable images in contemporary art – most notoriously `The Ninth Hour’ (1999), a sculpture of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite. Derived from popular culture, history and organized religion, Cattelan’s subjects range widely, and his work, while bold and irreverent, is deadly serious in its scathing cultural critiques. The second edition of All updates the catalogue that accompanied the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s 2011–12 retrospective survey of the artist. For this exhibition, Cattelan sidestepped the totalizing effect of a retrospective by devising a site-specific installation in which his entire oeuvre was suspended from the oculus of the museum’s iconic rotunda. This book offers an equally unique response to the conventions of the catalogue. It is a faux-leather-bound hardcover with gold stamping and thin paper that is designed to resemble an old textbook or bible. The volume details almost every work of Cattelan’s from the late 1980s to the present within a double-column page format, featuring full-colour reproductions and accompanying entries. The revised edition describes the artist’s return to art making after a five-year `retirement’ with a special, ongoing project opening at the Guggenheim in May 2016. It also features a redesigned cover and installation images of the exhibition All. Nancy Spector has augmented her critical overview of Cattelan – which documents not only his artistic output but also his ongoing activities as a curator, editor and publisher – with a new coda. Since its original publication, All has become the Cattelan bible, and this revised edition exploring the latest chapter of the artist’s influential career ensures it will remain the definitive source on his work for years to come.

Gego infused her art with architecture and engineering to create unique works of delicate suspenseAccompanying the first major museum retrospective exhibition of Gego’s work in the US in more than 15 years, this expansive, definitive catalog charts the evolution of Gego’s singular approach to abstraction through organic forms, linear structures and systematic spatial investigations. Featuring nearly 300 images, including more than 160 sculptures, drawings, prints, artist’s books, textiles and installations made between the early 1950s and the early 1990s, this volume also presents 11 illustrated essays by experts in the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art that trace Gego’s artistic development across various mediums and disciplines, including her significant contributions to architecture and design; ground her practice in various art movements that materialized in Latin America, Europe and the US during her lifetime; and consider the pedagogical influence of her two-decade teaching career in Caracas. An illustrated chronology tracks Gego’s life and artistic progression as well as her exhibition history, contextualized within the rich cultural milieus in which she lived and worked. Also featured are images of Gego’s Reticulárea, an environmental installation widely considered to be her magnum opus, and a series of photographs taken by the artist’s partner at their shared home and studio in Caracas. Gego remains little known in the US today, despite her unique and striking formal and conceptual contributions. This essential publication advances an expanded understanding and appreciation of the artist’s work within the context of 20th-century modernism.Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–94) came of age as an artist in the midst of Venezuela’s development as a modern state, emerging as a vital figure in Latin American modern art whose work intersected with major transnational art movements of the 20th century while remaining distinctly her own. Born in Hamburg and trained as an engineer and architect in Germany, Gego immigrated to Venezuela in 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution. In her new home of Caracas, she worked as an architect and a designer before embarking on her artistic career, which she pursued until her death in 1994.

Twenty-first-century Kandinsky: a reappraisal of the Russian abstractionist’s art, life and thought through the extraordinary collection of the iconic museumOne of the foremost artistic innovators of abstraction in the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky sought to liberate painting from its ties to the natural world and promote the spiritual in art. This richly illustrated publication looks at Kandinsky anew, through a critical lens, reframing our understanding of this vital figure of European modernism, who was also a prolific aesthetic theorist and writer.A series of thematic essays considers his engagement with avant-garde artistic communities including the Bauhaus, his relationship to improvisation and music, his travels in Europe and Russia, and the influences behind his self-declared anarchist mode of abstraction, among other topics. Tracing Kandinsky’s life and work through his years in Moscow, several cities in Germany, and Paris, the texts offer striking new insights into an artist whose creative production and style were intimately tied to a sense of place—and displacement—and evolved amid the political and social upheavals catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II.Kandinsky’s history is closely linked to that of the Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting the artist’s work in 1929; a year later, they met at the Bauhaus, in Dessau. This book features more than half of the museum’s deep holdings of works by Kandinsky, presenting the full arc of his artistic development and career. Included are paintings in oil and oil with sand, reverse-glass paintings, as well as woodcuts, watercolors and drawings on paper. An illustrated chronicle of Kandinsky’s life and career, including selected exhibitions and publications, rounds out the volume.

A collection of Jenny Holzer’s texts, presented as layout drawings for stone benches, that trace and illuminate our complex worldPublished on the occasion of the exhibition Jenny Holzer: Light Line, a reimagining of the artist’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, this artist’s book will provoke and inspire. Each page features a phrase chosen by Holzer from three of her text series—Truisms, Living and Survival—in the form of drawings she has used for many years to create her iconic stone benches. All interior pages are vellum, a physical and conceptual layering that invites novel readings of Holzer’s work. This unique volume extends her practice with a material presentation of real and imagined works that weaves new connections through its pages.Holzer harnesses the power of words to convey joy, sorrow, contemplation, rage and everything in between. Her work presents writing—both her own and that of others—in an array of mediums, including electronic signs, plaques, paintings and stonework. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City street posters, and continuing through her more recent light projections, mobile LED signs and experiments with artificial intelligence, her practice rivals ignorance and violence with humor, kindness and courage. The public dimension is integral, and the surprising sites where her work appears range from city streets to stadium scoreboards, memorials, T-shirts and condom wrappers. The thought-provoking and indelible words she chooses highlight the pressing issues of our time.For over 40 years, Jenny Holzer (born 1950) has presented her work in public places and international exhibitions, including Times Square, the Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim Museums. She received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the US State Department’s International Medal of Arts in 2017 and the Wall Street Journal’s Art Innovator Award in 2022. She lives and works in New York.

From his early self-portraits to his site-specific installations, this volume underscores Rashid Johnson's fearless engagement with the central themes, questions and aesthetics of the contemporary eraCo-organized by the Guggenheim New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, A Poem for Deep Thinkers is a three-decade survey of Rashid Johnson’s artistic career. It situates the artist within three interconnected spheres: as a scholar of art history; as a mediator of Black popular culture and its widespread commodification; and as an artist engaged with the globalization of contemporary art. The exhibition and accompanying catalog feature nearly 90 artworks, including early photographs, Cosmic Slops, spray-painted text works, collage paintings, Broken Men mosaics, film projects, and key sculptures and installations that incorporate materials such as shea butter, black soap, plants, ceramic vessels and wax. These explorations demonstrate Johnson’s uncommon fluency with multiple materials and forms as well as a nuanced ability to synthesize the condition of the human psyche.Lavishly produced with gold block edges and illustrated with more than 200 images, the publication offers creative meditations on excerpts by literary icons Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Genet, Paul Beatty and Amiri Baraka, interspersed among insightful essays and an interview that further illuminate Johnson’s work.Born and raised in Chicago, Rashid Johnson (born 1977) received fine arts degrees from Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of 24, his work was included in Thelma Golden’s 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Johnson made his directorial debut with his 2019 adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son.

A new look at a vanguard modernist artist who reimagined the still life, landscape and portrait genresThis landmark publication coincides with the major Guggenheim New York exhibition of works by the remarkable German Expressionist Gabriele Münter. Münter’s painting practice between 1908 and 1920 is the central focus of the exhibition and accompanying book. The study also illuminates her lesser-known later work and includes significant examples of her photography taken during earlier extensive travels in the United States. Münter was notably a cofounder of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a loose and transnational confederation of progressive artists and other creatives, with whom she probed the expressive potential of color and the symbolic resonance of forms. Her introspective portraits during World War II capture the “new woman” and explore questions of gender identity.Highlighting more than 90 paintings, drawings and photographs, this publication not only traces Münter’s pioneering and understudied practice but also challenges accepted historical narratives that have tended to sideline women artists. Reproductions of archival material appear alongside choice selections of the artist's sketches, prints and reverse glass paintings. Thematic texts by renowned scholars explore identity, place, belonging and the embodied experience of modernist women artists during this period.Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) was at the forefront of the German avant-garde in the early 20th century and exhibited extensively at galleries and salons throughout Europe during her lifetime. Along with her artistic colleague and one-time partner, Vasily Kandinsky, Münter was a founder of the influential Expressionist group of artists, Der Blaue Reiter.

Each copy of this two-volume overview of Bove’s work is made unique through a different diamond-shaped paper element hand-cut by the artist.Accompanying the first museum survey of Carol Bove's multidisciplinary work, this two-volume catalog traces pivotal shifts across the artist's 25-year career, ranging from her fugitive early drawings to her compositions of scrap metal and manipulated steel tubing known as "collage sculptures." Bove's inventive work spans many mediums and formal approaches but is unified by an exacting play of material, scale, color and space. She places these elements in dialogue with cultural histories to create the conditions for a resonant perceptual encounter.The publication is housed in a die-cut slipcase inspired by Bove's distinctive use of geometry and color. For the first edition, these cases feature paper ephemera elements the artist has personally selected and hand cut into diamond shapes, making each copy a unique object. Contained within are two books that offer complementary but autonomous perspectives on Bove's ever-evolving body of work. The first contextualizes her practice across seven generously illustrated scholarly essays, accompanied by an extensive selected exhibition history and bibliography. The second, an artist's book conceived by Bove, features immersive photographic details of her works printed at the precise scale of the objects they represent, interleaved with a series of recent paper collages. Together, the two volumes present the first comprehensive survey of Bove's career in the form of a book-object, realized in tandem with the most expansive presentation of the artist's work to date.The work of Geneva-born American artist Carol Bove (born 1971) spans sculpture, drawing, collage, painting and installation. Bove has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2003); Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013–14); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2021), among others.

This innovatively designed publication, which accompanies the announcement of the short list for the Hugo Boss Prize 2008, features special artist-designed pages by each of the finalists--Christoph Büchel, Patty Chang, Sam Durant, Emily Jacir, Joachim Koester and Roman Signer--as well as accompanying essays.

In 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright received a letter from Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, asking the architect to design a new building to house Guggenheim’s four-year-old Museum of Non-Objective Painting. The project evolved into a complex struggle pitting the architect against his clients, city officials, the art world and public opinion, but the resultant achievement testifies to both Wright’s architectural genius and the adventurous spirit of its founders. The Guggenheim Museum is an embodiment of Wright’s attempts to render the inherent plasticity of organic forms in architecture. His inverted ziggurat dispensed with the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms and forced them to retrace their steps when exiting. Instead, Wright whisked people to the top of the building via elevator, and led them downward at a leisurely pace on the gentle slope of a continuous ramp. The galleries were divided like the segments of an orange, into self-contained yet interdependent sections. The open rotunda afforded viewers the unique possibility of seeing several bays of work on different levels simultaneously. The spiral design recalled a nautilus shell, with continuous spaces flowing freely one into another. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: An Architectural Appreciation celebrates Wright’s crowning achievement with reflections by prominent architects, historians and critics. Paired alongside a half-century of photographs, they convey how, as Paul Goldberger has said, “almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.”

Paperback edition of the authoritative Guggenheim catalog on the Italian avant-garde movementItalian Futurism was officially launched in 1909 when F.T. Marinetti published his "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism." This catalog considerably advances the scholarship and understanding of an influential 20th-century artistic movement. As part of the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States, this publication examines the historical sweep of Futurism from its inception with Marinetti’s manifesto through the rise of Italian fascism and the movement’s demise at the end of World War II. Presenting over 300 works created between 1909 and 1944 by artists, writers, designers and composers such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Marinetti, Ivo Pannaggi, Rosa Rosà, Luigi Russolo, Tato and many others, this publication encompasses not only painting and sculpture but also architecture, design, ceramics, fashion, film, photography, advertising, poetry, publications, music, theater and performance.

This comprehensive survey of the work of the Swiss-born modern master Alberto Giacometti offers a fresh and incisive account of his entire creative output. Published on the occasion of Giacometti’s first major museum presentation in the U.S. in over a decade, the volume brings together nearly 200 sculptures, paintings and drawings to trace the artist’s wide-ranging and hugely innovative engagement with the human form across various mediums. While Giacometti may be best known for his distinct figurative sculptures that emerged after World War II, including a series of elongated standing women, striding men and expressive busts, this volume devotes equal attention to the artist’s early and midcareer development. It explores his lesser-known engagement with Cubism and Surrealism as well as African, Oceanic and Cycladic art, which preceded his shift to figuration, while also highlighting his remarkable talents as a draftsman and painter alongside his sculptural oeuvre. Of particular focus is Giacometti’s studio practice, which is examined through rarely seen plaster sculptures that highlight the artist’s working process, in addition to ephemera and historical photographs documenting his relationship with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – which hosted the artist’s first U.S. exhibition, in 1955 – and with New York City.

The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and sculptureAcross decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of “absolute awareness” in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artist’s first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, Alex Katz: Gathering offers a definitive account of Katz’s artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artist’s work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production.Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artist’s practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding “cutouts” and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artist’s oeuvre.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.