"When you revisit a place that matters to you for the first time in a long time it is a rich, spiritual experience, but if you then revisit such a place too frequently it loses some of its power. The power lies in the absences." — Christopher Pratt Widely considered to be one of Canada's most prominent and celebrated painters, Christopher Pratt stands with other great artists — Alex Colville, Lawren P. Harris, Jean Paul Lemieux, and Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald — who influenced him and the way he r...
Mary Kelly (October Files)
Essays and interviews that span Mary Kelly's career highlight the artist's sustained engagement with feminism and feminist history. When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, it caused a sensation-an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled resistance to the work's interrogation of feminine identity and the cult...
'An incredibly honest tale of survival, escape and resilience' The Observer 'Roche is a charming, unflinchingly honest guide on a journey that's as funny as it is heart-breaking.' JUNO DAWSONHow does an untrained eye recognise the process of dying, when your mind is fixed firmly on living?A radically honest and uplifting memoir about defying death and learning to live.Juno Roche was born into a working-class family in London in the sixties, who dabbled in minor crime. For their father, violence...
Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018 brings together texts by Canadian artist Ken Lum. They include diary entries, articles, catalogue essays, curatorial statements, a letter to an editor, and more. Along the way, the reader learns about late modern, postmodern, and contemporary art practices, as well as debates around issues such as race, class, and monumentality. Penetrating, insightful, and often moving, Lum's writings are essential for understanding his varied practice...
A comprehensive and inspiring collection of essays by Larry Neal, a founder of the seminal Black Arts Movement. "The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America." — Larry Neal Growing up in Philadelphia, Neal was surrounded by Bebop music and writing. He cu...
Running The Gauntlet The Complete Revised Works Of Christopher Seth New Edition
by Christopher Seth
Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting she saw in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a mysterious Moroccan screen behind her. This woman seemed a welcome secular version of the nuns of Hampl's girlhood, free and untouchable, a poster girl for twentieth-century feminism. In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of that woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the increasing rush of the modern era. Her tantalizing me...
Whose Time Is It? (Sternberg Press / The Contemporary Condition)
by Stamatia Portanova
Following the “emerging life adventures and experiences” of Sophia, a robot animated by blockchain and AI, to present a study in temporal automation. In what way do the two technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence actualize and, crucially, automatize the cognition of time? These kinds of machines are increasingly part of both our contemporary present and our prospective future, but how do we really define a present and a future? And more important, how do these machines themselves...
Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) was an undisputed success during his life. Crowds flocked to see his vibrant compositions and thanks to mass marketing of his work through mechanical reproduction, he reached audiences on an unprecedented scale. Despite Gerome's undisputed accomplishments, his success met with critical hostility. Emile Zola, champion of Edouard Manet, dismissed Gerome as a cynical manufacturer of anecdotal images for popular consumption - a critique repeatedly levelled at artists in...
Vincent Van Gogh, Painted with Words
by Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten
The correspondence between Van Gogh and Bernard covers the period 1877-89 and is largely devoted to the discussion of Van Gogh's problems and ambitions concerning painting.
In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays ? a scathing, sexy, sublimely humourous and honest personal testimony. From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation - Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir.
Bridget Riley is one of the outstanding figures of modern painting. She has pursued a course of rigorous abstraction for over fifty years, from her celebrated black and white Op Art works in the 1960s to the complex colour paintings of the 1990s. On the occasion of a major exhibition of her work in 1992 at London’s Hayward Gallery, BBC Radio broadcast a series of five dialogues, each one between Riley and a well-known figure from the art world. These encounters, edited by an art historian, are c...
"Surveys the life and work of the man widely known as 'the godfather of conceptual art.' Accompanying the eponymous exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, it is the first comprehensive attempt to chart Siegelaub's activities as a curator, publisher, bibliographer, and collector across different realms, from conceptual art and mass media to politics and textiles"--
Writings on Art collects 25 texts by Piero Manzoni—translated into English for the first time or newly translated—elucidated through an insightful editorial commentary and extensive archival images. Piero Manzoni: Writings on Art features twenty-five texts by Piero Manzoni, spanning from 1956 to 1963, the year of the artist’s premature death. Selected by art historian Gaspare Luigi Marcone, all writings have been either translated into English for the first time or newly translated. Each text i...
Goya and Munch: Modern Prophecies
by Trine Otte Bak Nielsen, Manuela Mena, Janis Tomlinson, Ute Kuhlemann Falck, and Ask Salomon Selnes
Francisco de Goya and Edvard Munch revolutionised art through their groundbreaking pairing of raw realism and unique imaginative power. Exploring inner worlds and existential questions, they had a formative impact on art history and our understanding of our times. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Goya and Munch: Modern Prophecies, the first comprehensive presentation of these two artists in tandem. It is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of all the exhibited works a...
A revelatory consideration of the wide-ranging practice of one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century A pioneer of minimalism and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is best known for his monumental wall drawings. LeWitt’s broad artistic practice, however, also included sculpture, printmaking, photography, artist’s books, drawings, gouaches, and folded and ripped paper works. From the familiar to the underappreciated aspects of LeWitt’s oeuvre, this book examines the w...
Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III is the third volume in a series examining the work of acclaimed video artist and photographer Sharon Lockhart. Known for collaborating with remote or marginal communities such as blue-collar workers of the twenty-first century, as she did in Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break I, the artist also blurs the line between photography, video art, and documentary. The results are staged and artificial, yet at the same time intimate and deeply human. Her newest museum installa...
This immersive publication explores the artistic journey of one of today’s most prominent conceptual artists, with a specific focus on his groundbreaking series, “Children's Games.” Whether he’s moving a sand dune in Peru or pushing an enormous ice block through the streets of Mexico City, Francis Alÿs is constantly seeking to decipher complex social, political, and cultural issues in ways that are simultaneously affecting, imaginative and provocative. Highlighting rarely seen source material,...