A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Johanna Burton

Peter Halley

Midori Matsui

Wolfgang Tillmans

Jan Verwoert

Texts by Johanna Burton, Peter Halley, Midori Matsui, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Jan Verwoert

Known since the early 1990s for his photographs of young people in their social environment – clubs, gay pride parades, warehouse parties – Wolfgang Tillmans created an enigmatic, sexy and highly innovative photography while inventing new icons of beauty and style for gallery goers and magazine readers alike. This book is an updated and expanded edition of his 2002 monograph, featuring a new survey on his work from the past ten years and new artist’s writings.

At the end of the 1950s William Eggleston began to photograph around his home in Memphis using black-and-white 35mm film. Fascinated by the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston declared at the time: "I couldn't imagine doing anything more than making a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson. " Eventually Eggleston developed his own style which later shaped his seminal work in color—an original vision of the American everyday with its icons of banality: supermarkets, diners, service stations, automobiles, and ghostly figures lost in space. 

includes some exceptional as-yet-unpublished photographs, and displays the evolution, ruptures and above all the radicalness of Eggleston's work when he began photographing in color at the end of the 1960s. Here we discover similar obsessions and recurrent themes as present in his early black-and-white work including ceilings, food, and scenes of waiting, as well as Eggleston\s unconventional croppings-all definitive traits of the photographer who famously proclaimed, "I am at war with the obvious."

William Eggleston: From Black and White to Color

Best known for his oversized, dead-pan portraits, his unmediated shots of commonplace interiors, and his seemingly straightforward photographs of architecture, Thomas Ruff has quietly approached many familiar genres, and proceeded to discreetly reinvent them. For his 

 series, Ruff found images in newspapers, and then re-photographed and enlarged them to isolate the photographs from the text, allowing Ruff’s viewer, now no longer a reader, to make assumptions about the photograph without any information to support the viewer’s inferences. The book consists of 400 reproductions from German newspapers that Ruff collected over the span of 10 years (1981–1991).

Thomas Ruff: Zeitungsfotos / Newspaper Photographs

Ruff has always had a fascination with astronomy. His attempt at photographing night sky failed due to the lack of detail captured in the pictures he had taken. Ruff’s equipment could not render the detail he wanted as well as air and light pollution added to the difficulties of capturing the beautiful constellations. His solution was to take observation shots from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) based in the Andes in Chile.

Thomas Ruff: Sterne

Philippe Van Cauteren

Robert Fleck

Gregor Jansen

Martin Germann

Valeria Liebermann

Texts by Philippe Van Cauteren, Robert Fleck, Gregor Jansen, Martin Germann, and Valeria Liebermann

Coinciding with museum exhibitions by Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K in Ghent and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Düsseldorf, this book comprises five series of photographs ranging from the start of Ruffs’s artistic career in the late 1970s to recent work in 2014. This selection, being shown under the title 

, takes as its philosophical and scientific thread the spectrum between natural and virtual light – a fundamental shift that has taken place in the medium of photography over the last thirty years.

 (1992-1996), as well as parts of Ruffs’s most recent series called 

 (2012-2014) – a digitally generated simulation of this historical genre. In each of the series, Ruff subjects the photographic medium to systematic analysis: social, political, and aesthetic aspects of image production are laid bare, and thereby the history of Modernity as it was initiated by the emergence of photography in the 19th century. As a conceptual photographer, Ruff is not so much interested in photographing reality; he focuses more on portraying the realities of photography.

Thomas Ruff: Lichten

Robert Bean

Edward Burtynsky

Jane E. Nokes

Dieter Roelstraete

Introduction by Edward Burtynsky and Jane E. Nokes. Texts by Robert Bean and Dieter Roelstraete

 is the third annual publication celebrating the winner of the 

, Canada’s largest contemporary photography award for an established Canadian artist.

During the celebrated career of this year’s award winner Stan Douglas (starting in 1983), photography has played a vital role in his artistic development. This publication highlights the significance of the photographic image in the critical and historical reception of Stan Douglas’s approach to art and media. The stories, sites, and events that Douglas explores are populist, literate and timely. Frequently, his photographs describe the overlooked histories of cultural identity, displacement, and injustice that reveal an uncanny resemblance to present-day events. This is achieved through an insightful attention to photography as both medium and subject. Folding the spectator into the visual culture of memory and oblivion that photographs evoke initiates profound observations about the ubiquity of photography in contemporary culture. The photographs of Stan Douglas affirm the validity and volatility of the photographic medium at this decisive moment in the history of art and photography.

Stan Douglas: Scotiabank Photography Award

Hal Foster

Published to celebrate the critically acclaimed 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, a show that 

 art critic Ken Johnson called “near perfect,” 

 devotes over three hundred pages to a key five-year period of the artist’s earliest work. Anchored by exquisite black-and-white plates, from installation views of works in situ to documentary photographs, this “impressively realized” publication offers “a blow-by-blow account of Serra’s rapidly expanding art-world presence,” as described in a 

 review. Focusing specifically on work the artist produced during the period between 1966 and 1971, this classic tome documents the significance of his early work, with archival texts and reviews, alongside new scholarship by American art critic and historian Hal Foster.

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this monograph aims to reconsider the groundbreaking practices and ideas that so firmly situate Serra in the history of twentieth-century art. Its stunning selection of seminal works illuminates the debut of the artist’s innovative, process-oriented experiments with nontraditional materials, such as vulcanized rubber, neon, and lead, and introduces the interplay of gravity and material—of "verticality and horizontality,” writes Foster—that would remain a fundamental aspect of Serra’s production over the subsequent decades. Also featured in the publication are key early examples of the artist’s work in steel, as well as stills from some of his most important early films.

Richard Serra: Early Work

Lucas Zwirner

Kim Gordon

Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Text by Lucas Zwirner. Interview with the artist by Kim Gordon. Photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath

In the summer of 2013, Raymond Pettibon took over one of David Zwirner’s gallery spaces in New York, transforming the high-ceilinged, garage-like white cube into his studio in order to prepare a show of drawings and collages within—and sometimes directly on—its walls. Titled 

, evoking the Middle English expression that has come to express a certain formality today and is defined as “namely,” or “that is to say,” the exhibition gave new meaning to the term “site specific,” featuring vibrant, gestural works Pettibon created in conversation with his surroundings that operated as a sort of archive, both product and record of his relationship to that space and time. Unified by their bold, vivid lines and unconventional framing, they feature allusions to a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from violence, humor, and sex to literature, youth, art history, and sports—embodying the artist’s signature mix of social and political commentary, diary entry, and automatic drawing.

This publication, presenting large color plates of the works created over that summer by Pettibon, who also produced an original drawing for its sturdy cardboard cover, explores the intricate relationship between image and language that has long fascinated the artist. Just as the works in the exhibition existed at once as art and document, so too does the book itself have the hefty, physical presence of a work of art. Extensive installation views capture the dynamic combination of visual imagery and text that has come to characterize Pettibon’s practice, and a selection of gritty black-and-white photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s working process. Context is provided by Lucas Zwirner, who accompanied the artist throughout this period and contributed the book’s essay, “A Month with Raymond.” As Zwirner describes it, the show functioned “as an essayistic whole held together by imaginative leaps and subtle connections which Raymond has left unexplained and uninterpreted.” That perspective is rounded out in an interview with the artist by Kim Gordon, a visual artist and musician, who first encountered Pettibon’s work in the early 1980s in Los Angeles.

Raymond Pettibon: To Wit

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Kasper König

Jef Van Eynde

Barbara Weiss

Afterword by Barbara Weiss, Kasper König. Photographs by Jef Van Eynde.

In the summer of 2012, the acclaimed Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) was preparing a show with David Zwirner, planned for March 2013. His friend, the photographer Jef Van Eynde, visited him that summer. “We were allowed to take a look at a new series of small paintings in his studio,” Van Eynde recalls in his postscript to this volume. “In their startling simplicity, these had been reduced right down to the essential. Some of them just had an oversized hook for a hanger, with the canvas simply wrapped around a wooden board.” De Keyser died in October 2012, and Van Eynde’s photographs of the paintings and the titular wall upon which they were arranged are the only documentation of his intentions for the Zwirner show. This intimate volume gathers these alongside portraits of De Keyser at home and in his studio.

Raoul De Keyser: The Last Wall

Christine Mehring

Christoph Schreier

Texts by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier

 art critic Roberta Smith as a “precocious art star,” German artist (Blinky) Palermo (1943–1977) has been associated with distinct twentieth-century art practices, from abstraction to Minimalism and Conceptual art. But his diverse body of work in fact defies easy classification. Throughout his brief and influential career—leading all the way up to his untimely death at the age of 33—Palermo executed paintings, objects, installations, and works on paper that mined various contextual and semantic issues at stake in the construction, exhibition, and reception of works of art, eternally “stretching and questioning” the boundaries of every medium he touched.

This fully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier and documents the 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. It is the first publication to tackle Palermo’s late work, which is characterized by explorations of the tensions between material and color, surface and depth, and figuration and abstraction—focusing in particular on the paper works he produced between 1976 and 1977, the last year of his life. “Less a system builder than an analyst working on intuition,” writes Schreier in his catalogue essay, Palermo “explored surface, shape, and color—the constituent elements of the image—with the aim of turning them into actors with a lively and delicately balanced play of forces.” The simplicity of the artist’s vision is beautifully evinced by the catalogue’s vibrant color plates, which reveal every stroke and each grain of paper shining through from behind the pigment.

1976-1977

Palermo: Works on Paper

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

 is a retrospective look at two of Oscar Murillo’s earliest and rarest publishing projects, 

, both of which are newsprint publications. Rather than reprinting these small-run, zine-like papers, this photographic archive documents them as objects with three-dimensional physicality — photographed by Blommers and Schumm, the publication’s main content is devoted to high-gloss, still-life shots which record each folded page as a bona fide artwork.

To tie in with the haptic associations of a broadsheet paper, the artist’s newest painted works — from which the title of the publication is taken — are included as a series of fold-out posters at equivalent scale. The result is a new approach to archive and compilation.

Also included are 5 loose, fold-out posters of Murillo’s paintings.

Oscar Murillo: La era de la sinceridad

Portrait of Neo Rauch, 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter.

Norman Rosenthal

This publication is currently backordered.

The richly textured, seductive paintings of German artist Neo Rauch are marked by a “distinctive Pop-Surrealist-Social Realist style,” as described by 

 art critic Roberta Smith in 2002. Incorporating disjunctive references to disparate eras, techniques, and aesthetics, they evoke “avant-garde theater stage sets from an earlier time ... both buoyant and tamped down, comic and earnest.” In many of his compositions, human figures engaged in manual labor or indeterminable tasks work against backdrops of mundane architecture, industrial settings, or bizarre and often barren landscapes. Scale is frequently arbitrary and non-perspectival, which adds to an overall dreamlike atmosphere; spatial relationships seem to construct an imaginary realm all of its own, one which both defies logic and feels somehow familiar.

, produced to coincide with the 2014 exhibition of Rauch’s new works at David Zwirner in New York, brings together small and large format paintings that expand the artist’s unique iconography of eccentric figures, animals, and hybrids within vaguely familiar but imaginary settings. This oversized catalogue—designed in close collaboration with the artist—is anchored by sixteen stunning plates and numerous 1:1 details that bring to life, and give viewers intimate access to, these compelling compositions. Themes of rebirth and new beginnings abound: Rauch consistently creates characters who appear to be in the process of transformation, literally on the brink of renaissance. These figures, though squarely centered in his paintings, often have the appearance of being part of still lifes: collaged, anachronistic elements belonging to different time zones and eras offer a contemporary take on the storied tradition of visual and psychological pastiche.

 features an illuminating essay by art historian and curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, who presents a careful reading of Rauch’s new work, including its relationship to fairy tales; the influence of the German Democratic Republic on his development as an artist in the 1980s; and the overarching sense of alienation that is present within his narratives. The book also includes a reprint of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Young Giant,” specifically chosen by Rosenthal to further expand his analysis.

Neo Rauch: At the Well

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

Leontine Coelewij

Colm Toibin

Theodora Vischer

Text by Leontine Coelewij, Colm Toibin. Interview by Theodora Vischer

Marlene Dumas is one of the most prominent and influential painters working today. In an era dominated by the mass media and a proliferation of images, her work is a testament to the meaning and potency of painting. Dumas draws on her expansive visual archive and the nuances of language to create intense, psychologically charged works which explore themes such as sexuality, love, death, and guilt, often referencing art history and current affairs. Her paintings and drawings are characterized by their extraordinary expressiveness and sometimes controversial subject matter. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies a major exhibition at the Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Fondation Beyeler. Surveying the artist’s oeuvre from the mid-70s to the present, it features over 100 of her most important paintings and drawings alongside lesser-known works from the early period of her career. 

 also includes a new interview with the artist; extracts from previously published but lesser-known texts (some available in English for the first time); and a new short story from prize-winning author Colm Tóibín written in response to the paintings. Essays and texts from a wide range of contributors examine the key themes and motifs in her work and reflect on Dumas’s entire career.

Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden

Described by Deborah Solomon in a New York Times profile as “one of contemporary art’s most compelling painters,” Marlene Dumas has continuously explored the complex range of human emotions, often probing questions of gender, race, sexuality, and economic inequality through her dramatic and at times haunting figural compositions. Originally published in 2010 on the occasion of 

, Dumas’s first solo presentation at David Zwirner in New York, this much sought-after exhibition catalogue—which sold out shortly after publication—has been reprinted to coincide with the artist’s 2014–2015 European retrospective exhibition 

, organized by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel.

Throughout her career, the internationally renowned artist has continually created lyrically charged compositions that eulogize the frailties of the human body, probing issues of love and melancholy. At times her subjects are more topical, merging socio-political themes with personal experience and art-historical antecedents to reflect unique perspectives on the most salient and controversial issues facing contemporary society. The large-scale works included in 

 are primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. 

, the painting that began the series, at first appears to present a scene at the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall), an important site of religious pilgrimage located in Jerusalem. However, this work is based upon a photograph from a newspaper that portrayed a group of Orthodox Jews on their way to pray at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. Through her delicate treatment of every scene, Dumas destabilizes preconceived notions about what, in fact, is being pictured—engaging the often ambiguous nature of ideas like truth or justice. “In a sense they are my first landscape paintings,” Dumas further notes in the catalogue, “or should I say ‘territory paintings.’ That is why they are so big.” The somber color plates reproduced in the publication are given context by Dumas’s own musings, a text framed as a letter to David Zwirner in which she tries to tell him “about the ‘why’ ” of this powerful series.

Marlene Dumas: Against the Wall

installation_view_john_mccracken_works_from_1963-2011_david_zwirner_new_york_2013_view_9

Portrait of John McCracken. Photo by Joe Goode

Robin Clark

Anne Reeve

Text by Robin Clark. Interview with the artist by Anne Reeve

My works are minimal and reduced, but also maximal. I try to make them concise, clear statements in three-dimensional form, and also to take them to a breathtaking level of beauty.

John McCracken occupies a singular position within the recent history of American art, as his work melds the restrained formal qualities of Minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. He developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective, smooth surfaces that he was to become known for.

Published on the occasion of the comprehensive presentation of McCracken\s work at David Zwirner, New York in 2013, this catalogue charts the evolution of the artist\s diverse oeuvre, encompassing both well-known and lesser-seen examples of his production from the early 1960s up through his death in 2011 with a range of sculptures, paintings, and sketches. Featuring new scholarship by art historian Robin Clark, it includes reproductions of fascinating archival and documentary material that was discovered during the curatorial process, from the artist’s sketches to gallery invitation cards, early catalogue covers, historic photographs, as well as installation views of the exhibition.

John McCracken: Works from 1963-2011

Jane McFadden

Nigel Prince

Anthony Spira

Jan Tumlir

Miguel von Hafe Pérez

James Welling

With contributions from Jan Tumlir, Jane McFadden, Anthony Spira, James Welling, Nigel Prince, and Miguel von Hafe Pérez

Bringing together important experimental works and ephemera, this volume documents a watershed moment in James Welling’s photographic career.

A seminal figure in the “Pictures Generation”—a group of artists working in 1980s New York—James Welling is best known for his pioneering use of photography and for engaging questions about art and the nature of representation. This book focuses on a particularly fecund period in Welling’s life, charting the works, influences, and shifting ideas that he has been pursuing ever since. Chronologically arranged, it features works from the 1970s and 1980s interspersed with never-before-seen watercolors, collages, notes, production stills, music, and other ephemera that provide insights into the working process of one of America’s most innovative and significant photographers.

James Welling: The Mind on Fire

Matthew S. Witkovsky

For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. 

—the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist—set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England.

In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans—a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling’s close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction.

A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, 

reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. The book is published to accompany the first-ever complete 

 of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Welling: Diary/Landscape

Dieter Schwarz

From the beginning of his career, Fred Sandback (1943–2003) used drawing to formulate his ideas of sculptural volume. In pictures of existing rooms, Sandback explored the possibilities of spaces and planes by drawing his famous horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in colored pencil. In the 1980s, he expanded his drawing repertoire to include acrylic, the pochoir technique, and pastel. In these late drawings–considered to be more pictorial than his pencil sketches–Sandback elaborated on the experience of space, mass, and volume in ways impossible in a coherent space: many of these sculptural ideas are absolutely boundless. Only a specific section of the whole is intimated in the drawing, for which Sandback invented unusual techniques: actual incisions instead of drawn lines, for instance, or painterly traces on transparent film. Superbly produced and edited, 

 assembles works from a thirty-year span, supplemented by sculptural works.

Fred Sandback: Drawings

Amanda Cruz

Matthew Drutt

Introduction by Amada Cruz. Text by Matthew Drutt

In celebration of its 15th anniversary in 2010, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, mounted an ambitious state-wide exhibition of 336 seminal billboards created by Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996). Developed with special permission from the artist's estate, this presentation was the first-ever comprehensive survey of Gonzalez-Torres's billboard works in the US. Situated deliberately in the public's path in four cities (Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio), these artworks gracefully interrupted daily routines with poignant reflections on life, love, and humanity. The transcendent quality of Gonzalez-Torres's work was magnified in the Texas landscape, and the project garnered international attention for its unprecedented commemoration of this remarkable body of work. This book covers all the billboard pieces and serves as a mini-retrospective of this critical part of Gonzales-Torres's career.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Billboards

Over the course of his thirty-five year career, Christopher Williams has produced photographs that engage the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery—often through a wry combination of parody and homage—and explore their sociopolitical contexts and implications. Using the process of reproduction as a point of entry, the artist questions the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality.

 is the second volume in an ambitious series of books developed by Williams in conjunction with his first major museum survey, 

, a critically acclaimed exhibition co-organized for 2014-2015 by The Art Institute of Chicago with The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Whitechapel Gallery, London

Following the first publication, an exhibition catalogue that relied more heavily on text than image, 

was conceived to exist as a stand-alone visual object and extend the artist’s conceptual and aesthetic concerns into book form. A perfect companion to the first publication, it reproduces a carefully curated selection of Williams’s painstakingly constructed photographs and features striking graphic design in the near-complete absence of language, with no essay, captions, or even a title page. Through clever manipulations of cropping, ordering, and pagination, 

offers readers an original aesthetic experience and comprehensive insight into the practice of one of today’s most thought-provoking artists, while—through pure visual splendor—pushing the boundaries of the artist’s book into new realms. As with all publications in the series, it has been produced in three colors—yellow, red, and green—each of which features subtle differences in layout.

Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Massimiliano Gioni

Glenn Ligon

Minna Moore Ede

Alicia Ritson

Matthew Ryder

Robert Storr

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, Minna Moore Ede, Alicia Ritson, Matthew Ryder, Robert Storr, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

A major survey including new and celebrated works by Turner Prize–winning artist Chris Ofili. Set to accompany the first major museum show in the United States of contemporary British artist Chris Ofili, this richly illustrated volume surveys two decades of artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration to yield hybrid juxtapositions of high and low culture. Best known for intricately constructed works featuring beadlike dots of paint, elephant dung, and images culled from popular media, Ofili’s unique lexicon combines African culture, Western art history, and hip-hop music, spanning a wide variety of sources which include the Bible, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Blaxploitation films, and William Blake’s poems. Animated by exotic characters, outlandish landscapes, and folkloric myths, Ofili’s most recent work resonates with references to the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. This compelling new book offers a fresh perspective on the artist’s vital practice, which both celebrates and calls into question the power of images and their ability to address fundamental questions of representation.

Chris Ofili: Night and Day

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Richard Shiff

Robert Kudielka

Paul Moorhouse

Texts by Robert Kudielka, Paul Moorhouse, and Richard Shiff. Interview by Robert Kudielka.

Published on the occasion of Bridget Riley’s major exhibition at David Zwirner in London in the summer of 2014, this fully illustrated catalogue offers intimate explorations of paintings and works on paper produced by the legendary British artist over the past fifty years, focusing specifically on her recurrent use of the stripe motif. Riley has devoted her practice to actively engaging viewers through elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, creating visual experiences that at times trigger optical sensations of vibration and movement. The London show, her most extensive presentation in the city since her 2003 retrospective at Tate Britain, explored the stunning visual variety she has managed to achieve working exclusively with stripes, manipulating the surfaces of her vibrant canvases through subtle changes in hue, weight, rhythm, and density. As noted by Paul Moorhouse, “Throughout her development, Riley has drawn confirmation from Euge`ne Delacroix’s observation that ‘the first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.’ [Her] most recent stripe paintings are a striking reaffirmation of that principle, exciting and entrancing the eye in equal measure.”

Created in close collaboration with the artist, the publication’s beautifully produced color plates offer a selection of the iconic works from the exhibition. These include the artist’s first stripe works in color from the 1960s, a series of vertical compositions from the 1980s that demonstrate her so-called “Egyptian” palette—a “narrow chromatic range that recalled natural phenomena”—and an array of her modestly scaled studies, executed with gouache on graph paper and rarely before seen.

A range of texts about Riley’s original and enduring practice grounds and contextualizes the images, including new scholarship by art historian Richard Shiff, texts on both the artist’s wall paintings and newest body of work by Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a 1978 interview with Robert Kudielka, her longtime confidant and foremost critic. Additionally, the book features little-seen archival imagery of Riley at work over the years; documentation of her recent commissions for St. Mary’s Hospital in West London, taken especially for this publication; and installation views of the exhibition itself, installed throughout the three floors of the gallery’s eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse located in the heart of Mayfair.

Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014

Klaus Kertess

Having begun his studio practice as a painter and draftsman, in 1985 Al Taylor (1948–1999) devised a uniquely innovative approach to process and materials that seamlessly enveloped drawings and three-dimensional objects as he created compositions that were grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Taylor ultimately sought to expand the possibilities of vision in his search for new ways of experiencing and imagining space, and his multilayered investigations of perception across variant dimensions provide the viewer with an insight into the artist’s idiosyncratic thinking, his methodology, and his playful sense of humor.

This publication focuses on two bodies of work by Taylor, 

. Although distinctly individual, both of these series examine Taylor’s lifelong explorations of the circle. In his 

 series from 1991–1992, the artist studied the inside and outside of circular forms and investigated the multi-dimensional possibilities that could be revealed by conceptually and physically moving “around” them to expose the mutable perception of their intrinsic shape. Using hula hoops, garden hoses, plastic-coated cables, and recycled bottle cap rings, he created three-dimensional spirals and coils, interlocking loops, and dissected circles that were mounted on the wall, left freestanding, or suspended by wires from the ceiling to activate changing perspectives. In this group of works, the artist renders conceptual ideas about the dimensionality of linear curves, the role of gravity and chance on motion, and the passage of time. In his 1993 

 series, Taylor expanded his circle “research” by investigating the play of light that would theoretically be reflected off of the exterior—or projected out of the interior of cylinders. In a group of wall-mounted constructions created out of tin cans, wood, hot-rolled steel bands, and asymmetrical lengths of wire, the artist characteristically “draws” in real space with objects that appear to vacillate between three and two dimensions. In his studies of tin cans, Taylor explores the formal concerns of composition, mathematical proportionality, linear movement, and the spatial possibilities of light. Consistent with the dual nature of his practice, the artist’s facility as a draftsman is evidenced in an array of works on paper from each series that run the gamut from still lifes to purely abstract drawings.

Al Taylor: Pass the Peas and Can Studys

Sigmar Polke, Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Paul Chan

Christophe Cherix

Tacita Dean

Barbara Engelbach

Mark Godfrey

Stefan Gronert

Kathy Halbreich

Rachel Jans

Erhard Klein

Jutta Koether

Matthias Mühling

Marcelle Polednik

Christian Rattemeyer

Kathrin Rottmann

Magnus Schaefer

Lanka Tatersall

Texts by Paul Chan, Christophe Cherix, Tacita Dean, Barbara Engelbach, Mark Godfrey, Stefan Gronert, Kathy Halbreich, Rachel Jans, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Christine Mehring, Matthias Mühling, Marcelle Polednik, Christian Rattemeyer, Kathrin Rottmann, Magnus Schaefer, and Lanka Tattersall. Bibliography by Erhard Klein. Interview with the artist by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Working across an unusually broad range of media, including painting, photography, film, drawing, and sculpture, Sigmar Polke is widely regarded as one of the most influential and experimental artists of the post-war generation. His irreverent wit and promiscuous intelligence, coupled with his exceptional grasp of the properties of his materials, provided the foundation for his punishing critiques of the conventions of art history and social behavior. Experimenting wildly with materials and tools as varied as meteor dust and the xerox machine, Polke made work of both an intimate and monumental scale, drawn from sources as diverse as newspaper headlines and Dürer prints. Polke avoided any one signature style, a fluid method best defined by the word “alibi,” which means “in or at another place.” This also is a reminder of the deflection of responsibility which shaped German behavior during the Nazi period, compelling Polke’s generation to reinvent the role of the artist. Published in conjunction with 

, the first exhibition to encompass the artist’s work across all media, this richly illustrated publication provides an overview of his cross-disciplinary innovations and career. Essays by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director of The Museum of Modern Art; Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern; and a range of scholars and artists examine the full range of Polke’s exceptionally inventive oeuvre and place his enormous skepticism of all social, political and artistic conventions against German history.

Sigmar Polke: Alibis 1963–2010

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