Louisiana Museum of Modern Art – serie

Works from the past two decades and a new series from the Swedish master of the oneiric and the unsettlingMamma Andersson (born 1962) ranks as one of the most important painters of her generation. The Swedish artist is an eminent interpreter of the unique language of painting. With a sharp sense of mood, color and materiality, she has developed a personal take on the classical genres of painting: still lifes, interiors and landscapes are at the crux of her work. Her signature aesthetic is the result of repeated applications and overpainting. Oil on canvas is covered in spray paint, paint is dragged in thin bands across the surface, producing a material fullness and variety.This catalog accompanies the Louisiana’s exhibition Mamma Andersson: Humdrum Days, and contains contributions from the author Karl Ove Knausgård, the playwright Magnus Florin and the art writer and poet Barry Schwabsky, in addition to a conversation between Mamma Andersson and the exhibition’s curator, Marie Laurberg.

An essential overview of Jafa's sweeping, dynamic and disquieting video portraits of Black American lifeThough he has worked in film and music for decades, American video artist Arthur Jafa only garnered acclaim in the art world in 2016 for his video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Composed of found images and videos, his oeuvre revolves around Black American culture, the history of slavery, and ongoing structural and physical violence against Black Americans. As Jafa put it in his 2003 text “My Black Death”: “The central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontological existence) lies in the fact that common misery both defines and limits who we are. Such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also function to dissipate much which gives us our specificity, our uniqueness, our flavor by destroying the binds that define we will cease to be, but this is the good death (boa morte) to be embraced.”This essential overview presents Jafa’s best-known works, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Death and its 2018 follow-up piece The White Album, alongside never-before-seen projects and essays by notable scholars. Filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa (born 1960) grew up in Mississippi, where his lifelong fascination with found imagery manifested in his childhood hobby of assembling binders of photographs culled from various sources. As a cinematographer and director of photography, Jafa has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, Solange Knowles and Spike Lee, among many others. His work on Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust won him the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, he was awarded the Golden Lion for The White Album. Jafa lives in Los Angeles.

Sweet and slim yet powerful, this collection of Calle’s storytelling projects shows how her series have taken on lives of their ownFrench artist Sophie Calle (born 1953) works across photography, video, film, books, text and performance to conduct sociological and autobiographical investigations. She is, above all else, a storyteller. Over the course of five decades, she has built an expansive body of work that probes what it means to be human—thematically taking up intimacy, vulnerability, longing and loss. Calle fuses the registering sobriety that we associate with photography with deeply personal narratives—the artist’s or others—that are heartfelt, moving, messy, funny and ironic.Something Missing? offers a compact, yet nuanced overview of the French art star’s oeuvre, presenting both classic and recent works. The volume also features an exclusive interview conducted by one of France’s most prominent contemporary writers, Édouard Louis, bringing readers closer than ever to the artist and offering rare personal insight into her work and world. The avant-garde composer Laurie Anderson and curator Yve-Alain Bois also contribute texts, in which they respond to Calle’s unsparing inquiries into interior life.

A handsome, affordable introduction to the modernist polymath who charted the rhythms of color across textiles, illustration, painting and moreSonia Delaunay was a true pioneer of modernist abstraction; breaking with the figurative vocabulary that subordinated color to subject matter, she placed dynamic color interaction at the core of her vision, whether expressed through painting, book illustration or costume and textile design. Drawing inspiration from both traditional Russian crafts and the modern frenetic metropolis, Delaunay’s work reflects the drastic changes ushered in by industrialization. Through her polyvalent practice, Delaunay helped construct the new modern woman that she herself embodied: equal parts avant-gardist, creative entrepreneur and businesswoman.This richly illustrated catalog showcases the range of Delaunay’s work as it unfolded over 60 years, from abstract paintings and works on paper to textile design, garments, fashion photography, books and carpets—even a brightly colored sports car.Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) migrated to Paris in 1906 and became a key figure in the city’s avant-garde scene. During these early years, her paintings underwent a formal shift influenced by the vivid colors of Fauvism. She soon met her husband, fellow artist Robert Delaunay, and the couple pioneered a fusion of Cubism and Neo-Impressionism that they termed Simultanism, which denotes abstract painting that uses color in a manner comparable to the use of sound and rhythm in music. In 1964, Delaunay became the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre.

A visual voyage through the enigmatic ocean, where science meets art and where myth meets realityWe know more about the surface of Mars than we do about our planet’s oceans. And yet the ocean remains an alluring prospect to humanity: as an artistic icon, an object of scientific inquiry or even a financial resource. Encompassing art, film, literature, archeology and natural history, Ocean is a journey of discovery above and below the surface. Offering a cross section of art and cultural history, the exhibition and catalog are arranged into three themes: the ocean between art and science; the mythological ocean; and the Anthropocene ocean. From the woodblock prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi to Jean Painlevé’s photographs of aquatic life and Susan Hiller’s mapping of sea coasts, Ocean offers a mosaic view of this infinite yet imperiled source of life.Artists include: John Akomfrah, Anna Atkins, Jeanette Ehlers, Caspar David Friedrich, Susan Hiller, Pierre Huyghe, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Jean Painlevé, Howardena Pindell, August Strindberg, Wolfgang Tillmans, Francesca Woodman.

Upson's first museum exhibition following her untimely death shows the range of an artist already well on her way to becoming a modern classicAt her untimely death from cancer in 2021 at the age of 51, Kaari Upson (1970–2021) was widely regarded as one of the most significant and versatile American artists of her generation with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, performance, film and painting. Though her career was cut short, she left behind a rich, intense and strongly personal body of work that revolves around identity, body, sex, relationships, memory, illness and loss. Published on the occasion of the Louisiana’s retrospective exhibition, the catalogue comprises the Los Angeles–based artist’s most important works: from her dollhouses to The Larry Project, where she conducted something close to a criminological "investigation" of a person who once lived across from her childhood home in San Bernardino, California; her Mother’s Legs tree trunk installation and her never-before-shown large series of "foot face" drawings that she made just before she died.

Influenced by Byzantine art, Fauvism and German Expressionism, Jawlensky explored color, religious iconography and portraiture in his masterful serial paintingsRussian German painter Alexej Jawlensky (1864–1941) found his own artistic voice late in life. He was part of the revitalization of painting in the early 20th century, developing his Expressionist style through exchanges with the Fauves in Paris and his peers in Germany, including friends in and around Der Blaue Reiter. Until arthritis ended his ability to paint, Jawlensky explored color, religious iconography and portraiture in his masterful serial paintings. HIs last series of works, Meditations, comprises more than 1,000 paintings: modest in format, yet sensational. These paintings, which he described as "prayers in color," became an artistic redemption for Jawlensky, who throughout his life sought to connect his spiritual reflections with his painting. Featuring a clothbound spine, this small, slender and appealing volume features essays on Jawlensky's unique artistic projects, as well as an encyclopedia of his life and work.

Using the head as a site of investigation, Basquiat's frenetic drawings of faces are at once immediate and contemplativeBetween 1981 and 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat made between 50 and 100 drawings of heads. Working with oil stick on paper, he created a series far removed from his public paintings and collages filled with words and symbols—a more concentrated, private study whose pieces are rarely exhibited and seldom offered for sale. Stripped of external references, they read as intimate meditations on identity, perception and the fragile balance between presence and disappearance.Bringing this exceptional group together for the first time in decades in an oversize folio, Headstrong sheds new light on a lesser-known aspect of Basquiat's practice. Essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als and artists including George Condo and Julie Mehretu explore the drawings' formal invention and psychological intensity, showing how Basquiat transformed the head into a vessel for everything he was thinking and feeling—a space where imagination, history and lived experience converge.Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) is one of the most successful Black visual artists in history, despite his brief career. He emerged on the New York City arts scene in the late 1970s and quickly skyrocketed to international fame, becoming one of the most important artists of his generation. Basquiat's work and legacy continue to influence popular culture, especially art, music and fashion.

Key works and writings from six decades of pioneering image-text works in celebration of ErosFor six decades, Dorothy Iannone (born 1933) has developed an iconography that is at once epic and intensely personal. Often her works bear a close resemblance to graphic novels: hand-lettered texts and images work together to tell the story, bluntly and with humor in both verbal and visual details. Liberated sexuality and romantic relations are central themes. Iannone’s erotic scenes stem from historical representations of ecstatic unions across times, cultures and religions, with references to antiquity, Greek vases, Egyptian art, Roman and Pompeian murals, the Kama Sutra and Tantra, Icelandic sagas, Christianity, Buddhism, world literature and film history. Serving as muses, the artist’s lovers appear in her narratives: several works feature the artist Dieter Roth, who was Iannone’s partner from 1967 to 1974.This richly illustrated catalog presents some of the artist’s most important work, alongside an introduction by Italian art historian Barbara Casavechia, the artist’s own writing and an illustrated biography.