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.

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.