The Problem of Taste: On the Late, Great Dave Hickey with Jarrett Earnest

1-Up

Dave Hickey

Jarrett Earnest

By Dave Hickey. Edited and with an introduction by Jarrett Earnest

From the legendary and iconoclastic critic Dave Hickey, a collection of twenty of his most emblematic essays on art

“We really don’t need to know the aesthetic and moral parameters of a work to love it—­only to know they are there.” —Dave Hickey

The late Dave Hickey was a singular voice on art, music, democracy, and culture. Known for his radical criticism, he united different worlds through a range of literary styles and techniques to ultimately explore what it means to be human. Complementing his iconic collections 

 unites twenty of Hickey’s characteristically astute essays on art from over twenty years, most of which were originally published in exhibition catalogues that are long out of print. The result is a volume that shows the writer at his most creative and incisive in an ever-relevant exploration of beauty and value. Compiled and with an introduction by the writer and critic Jarrett Earnest, and featuring cover art by Ed Ruscha, this latest book is ideal for cult followers and new readers of Hickey, for artists and art critics, and for thinkers across all disciplines.

Including essays on Terry Allen, Karen Carson, Sarah Charlesworth, Vija Celmins, Vernon Fisher, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Luis Jiménez, Hung Liu, Josiah McElheny, Elizabeth Peyton, Lari Pittman, David Reed, Bridget Riley, Norman Rockwell, Ed Ruscha, Steve Schapiro, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol, as well as Hickey’s 2002 text “Buying the World,” which he later edited for inclusion in the revised edition of 

1982–2002

Feint of Heart: Art Writings

An artwork by Elizabeth Peyton, titled Omai (Afterlife) after Sir Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai, 1776, dated 2023

Elizabeth Peyton, Portrait at the Opera (Elizabeth), 2016

Lucas Zwirner

Elizabeth Peyton’s art is one of glances and gestures that become indistinguishable from her in the moment she paints them. The works are an expression of specificity, but also of Peyton’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subjects. There is a feeling that becomes cumulative in her art, unadulterated and almost destabilizing, built up through the many brush marks that characterize her surfaces. Through the depth of these images, constructed one stroke at a time, the emotional substrate of our reality is revealed. 

—Lucas Zwirner, “The Profession of the Painter,” in 

, Peyton’s debut monograph from David Zwirner Books, explores the artist’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subject matter, from 

. These are paintings that dwell in the permeability of light and space, reveling in what Peyton calls “painting and art as a space to capture energy that can take you someplace else.”

Published on the occasion of her exhibition Angel at David Zwirner, London, in 2023, this volume includes full-color plates of eighteen new works, Peyton’s own photographs connected by “the feeling of love, faith, and nature moving through all of them,” and a text by Lucas Zwirner.

Interior spread from a book titled Elizabeth Peyton: Angel, published by David Zwirner Books in 2024.

Elizabeth Peyton: Angel

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Ruth Asawa with hanging wire sculpture, 1951. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Brave, unconventional, and determined, Ruth Asawa let nothing stop her from living a life intertwined with art.



Renowned for her innovative wire sculptures, Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was a teenager in Southern California when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forced into camps. Asawa’s family had to abandon their farm, her father was incarcerated, and she and the rest of her family were sent to a detention center, and later to a concentration camp in Arkansas. Asawa nurtured her dreams of becoming an artist while imprisoned and eventually made her way to the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

This graphic biography by Sam Nakahira, developed in consultation with Ruth Asawa’s youngest daughter, Addie Lanier, chronicles the genesis of Asawa as an artist—from the horror of Pearl Harbor to her transformative education at Black Mountain College to building her life in San Francisco, where she would further develop and refine her groundbreaking wire sculptures.

Asawa never sought fame, preferring to work on her own terms: for her, art and life were one. Featuring lively illustrations and a dozen photographs of Asawa’s artwork, this graphic retelling of her young adult years demonstrates the transformative power of making art.

Ages thirteen and up.


Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape

Tom McDonough

A concise introduction to the theatrics and rituals of the art fair

This latest book on the work of Los Angeles-born, Cologne-based photographer Christopher Williams (born 1956) explores the transparent theatricality of the modern art fair, inspired by Art Cologne 1967. Williams’ black-and-white photographs lead the viewer through clinical product shots from his 

 series paired with images of past art fairs, including the photographer’s own participation in a booth hosted by David Zwirner Gallery. The result is a stoic meditation of the object as commodity and the spaces in which these goods are purchased. This publication includes a feature essay by art historian Tom McDonough, who writes of Williams’ work: “trust in the transparency of the visual field [is] consistently and thoroughly undermined. The static set promised a totalized image and simultaneously withheld it, suspending the audience in an uncomfortable awareness of the lack inscribed in the pro-visual field.”

Christopher Williams: Kölnische Dramaturgie

Clarion

Ebony L. Haynes

Pope.L

Hamza Walker

Curator’s note by Ebony L. Haynes. Conversation between Pope.L, Hamza Walker, and Ebony L. Haynes. Texts by Gordon Matta-Clark

A joining of two artists, exploring their shared fixation on the problematics of architecture, language, institutions, scale, and value

“[The exhibition is] powerful and unhinged and overbuilt—a monument to the entropy of the postindustrial city, and the tenuous dance of its inhabitants.” —

Gordon Matta-Clark and Pope.L are esteemed for their respective interdisciplinary practices that examine the value and paradoxes of urban life as well as the risk inherent in art making. Utilizing performance, film, drawing, and various multimedia projects, the two artists often open up interstitial spaces by realizing sweeping gestures that take into account shifting, decentralized zones. Grounded in the concept of failure, the sixth exhibition at 52 Walker and its accompanying catalogue reconsider societal, artistic, and structural failure—and its related expressions of hope.

With an introduction by the curator and director of 52 Walker, Ebony L. Haynes, this publication also includes a conversation between Haynes, Pope.L, and the director of LAXART, Hamza Walker, where they discuss the visual, material, and conceptual similarities between Pope.L’s and Matta-Clark’s work and what it means to treat the possibilities of failure as an artistic medium. Writings by Matta-Clark related to works in the exhibition highlight his interest in working with the void as material.

Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures

Bob Thompson

Rashid Johnson

Curator’s note by Ebony L. Haynes. Texts by Gylbert Garvin Coker, Emilio Cruz, Rashid Johnson, and A. B. Spellman

A colorful, fantastical, and musical body of work by the painter Bob Thompson

“Thompson, who finally seems to be on fame’s doorstep, invents in much the same way: he makes you feel how it might have felt to see a picture of an angel for the first time.” —

Influenced by jazz, Bob Thompson painted spirited, colorful compositions that feature an interplay of bodies, allegories, and natural landscapes while reconfiguring European masterworks. Though his career as a painter spanned only a brief period, from 1958 to his untimely death at age twenty-eight, Thompson left behind a singular and influential body of figurative work that remains vitally resonant. Looking at his particular consideration of color, line, and figuration—developed during a period when abstraction was the dominant trend in American art—this intimate exhibition catalogue, the seventh volume in the 

 series, pays homage to the friction Thompson generated between his proximity to and deviation from canonical sources.

The phrase “So let us all be citizens,” taken from a speech the artist gave as a teenager, forecasted his passion for the tenets of freedom and expression, and encapsulates the power of Thompson’s work in widening the scope of what is imaginable in contemporary painting and who might engage with it. With an introduction by Ebony L. Haynes and an essay by the renowned artist Rashid Johnson, this publication expands upon Thompson’s dynamic practice and features works that spotlight his signature high-contrast palette.

Bob Thompson: So let us all be citizens

Mara Hoberman

Oh Gwangsu

Texts by Mara Hoberman and Oh Gwangsu. Writings by Yun Hyong-keun



A contemplative exploration of the work of Yun Hyong-keun, a renowned Korean abstract painter, during a transformative period in Paris in the early 1980s



“His brushstrokes bled naturally across the linen or cotton raw canvas—appearing light brown as its fabric was not bleached—reminiscent of traditional East Asian calligraphy or ink and wash paintings.” —



From 1980 to 1982, Yun Hyong-keun resided in Paris, seeking both peace from the violent political turmoil that exploded in South Korea in 1980 and a new, artistic center in which to create work. His brief but illuminating stay in the city became the locus of his freedom of expression.

Yun’s signature abstract compositions engage and transcend Eastern and Western art movements and visual traditions, establishing him as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. He is the most prominent figure associated with the Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement, the name given to a group of influential Korean artists from the 1960s and 1970s. Using a restricted palette of ultramarine and umber, Yun created his compositions of monolithic swathes by adding layer upon layer of paint to raw canvas or linen and to hanji (Korean mulberry paper), often applying the next coat before the one below had dried.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at David Zwirner, Paris, in 2023, this limited-run cloth-bound catalogue focuses on his paintings and works on 

 made in Paris. In an accompanying text, the art historian Oh Gwangsu considers Yun’s work prior to his move to Paris, particularly the artist’s shift toward his signature works in the 1970s. The writer Mara Hoberman reflects on Yun’s practice and influences upon his arrival in the European capital, including an examination of his more nuanced understanding of the color black, which takes on different meanings in France and Korea.

Yun Hyong-keun / Paris

An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

The Artist Journals

Featuring lush, powerful paintings by Noah Davis, this blank book—the latest in 

 series—offers the ideal forum to energize the inner artist or writer.



The late American artist Noah Davis made his mark both as a painter of ethereal figurative works and as a pillar of the Los Angeles creative scene. With Karon Davis, his wife and a fellow artist, he founded the Underground Museum in 2012, a generative cultural institution and arts space in Los Angeles. His first Artist Journal celebrates his singular approach to delicate rendering, unexpected brushwork, and subjects surrounded by potent emotional luminescence.

Each journal is beautifully crafted in Verona, Italy.

Noah Davis: The Journal

Martin Bailey

Émile Bernard

Vincent Van Gogh

ekphrasis

By Émile Bernard. Letters by Vincent van Gogh. Introduction by Martin Bailey



An intimate testament to the power of friendship between two creative forces



“I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but I still don’t invent the whole of painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made—but to be untangled—in the real world.” —Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard

The painter and poet Émile Bernard’s firsthand account of the beloved painter Vincent van Gogh’s life offers deep perspective into the Dutch artist’s process, artistic preoccupations, and difficulties. In the 1890s, Bernard penned prefaces for collections of letters from Van Gogh, some of which were published while others were not. In 1911, Bernard gathered together these prefaces for a new publication, to which he also contributed a new introductory text, of the artist’s letters and sketches which he enclosed in his correspondence. This volume comprises these prefaces, published in English for the first time, as well as a selection of letters from Van Gogh to Bernard. In addition to including biographical details and reflections on art and friendship, Bernard chronicles his attempts to have Van Gogh’s work recognized after his death. Shedding light on the artistic community they inhabited, he also discusses notable figures such as Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.

Letters written by Van Gogh to a young Bernard further highlight the significance of the friendship between the two men. Van Gogh’s words of advice to Bernard as well as ruminations on his own practice, inspirations, and creative struggles are revealed in these pages.

Introduced by Van Gogh specialist Martin Bailey, these texts present a sensitive and discerning portrait of the artist that goes beyond his reputation as a troubled genius.

My Friend Van Gogh

Spotlighting the narrative and mythical imagery of Marcel Dzama’s work, this one-of-a-kind blank book holds a unique space for creative play and contemplation.



“Enjoy what you are making, people can feel it in the work. . . . I feel that art has been a good escape from the reality we are in.” —Marcel Dzama

Drawing inspiration from folklore and fairy tales and incorporating art-historical influences, Marcel Dzama’s work has secured a cult following of musicians and artists and the general public alike. His celestial imagery, masked characters, and aquatic scenes resonate with viewers of all ages and backgrounds. The vibrant and fantastical work featured on the cover and endpapers of Dzama’s first 

 enchants the mind and encourages unbridled expression.

Each journal is beautifully crafted in Verona, Italy.


Marcel Dzama: The Journal

Luc Tuymans in his studio, 2022. Photo by Otman Q

Éric de Chassey

Joshua Cohen

Jonathan Crary

Lynne Tillman

Su Wei

Texts by Éric de Chassey, Joshua Cohen, Jonathan Crary, Lynne Tillman, and Su Wei

Stunning translations of images from the internet and the artist’s iPhone to canvas, Luc Tuymans’s quiet paintings belie an underlying moral complexity.



“Once Tuymans’s muted compositions felt fatalistic; now they appear as committed assaults on our digital fragmentation and the lies that thrive in its cracks.” —Jason Farago, 



One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive figurative style beginning in the 1980s that has proven singularly influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously convey and conceal meaning. Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources.

This monograph of recent work reveals how Tuymans’s paintings grasp the mystery, strangeness, and possibilities of contemporary image making. It highlights a body of work that Tuymans has been working on since 2020, bringing together three exhibitions: 

, at David Zwirner, New York. For this trilogy, Tuymans has heightened the contrast and saturation in his paintings, underscoring the urgency of our contemporary global moment. With texts by the novelist Joshua Cohen, the art historians Jonathan Crary and Éric de Chassey, the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, and the writer Su Wei, this publication offers an in-depth, dimensional understanding of both Tuymans’s outlook and his assertion of the relevance of painting in our digitally saturated world.

 signed by the artist and featuring a slipcase is available in a limited run of 250 copies.

Luc Tuymans: Nice

Doro Globus

Rose Blake

Text by Doro Globus. Illustrated by Rose Blake

 offers young readers exciting insights into the many ways artists work and the reasons why they make art.

Geared to children ages 4 to 8, but with appeal for all ages, this colorful and playful book asks: Who are artists? Why do they make art? What materials do they use? What tools do they work with? What forms do their artworks take?

Structured around a tour of an artists’ studio complex, the book introduces readers to street artists, ceramicists, conceptual artists, textile artists, photographers, glassblowers, and more! The artists share their working spaces and their techniques while explaining why they make art.

Rose and Doro’s first publication,

 for “demystifying the art world and making it accessible to budding young artists,” and lauded by the renowned author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers, who wrote, “If this book helps shed light to just one kid that [art] is a viable career option, then it has done its job, as art is indescribably important!”

Now Rose and Doro have teamed up for a second time to bring their experiences with and love for the world of art to a young audience.



I Am an Artist

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Hilton Als

Alex Fialho

Evan Garza

Wayne Koestenbaum

Texts by Hilton Als, Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum

Alice Neel's unstinting, visionary engagement with the lives of those around her resulted in an inclusive oeuvre. This aspect of queer representation in her work is explored for the first time in this new catalogue.

Curated by Hilton Als and organized in collaboration with the Estate of Alice Neel, 

 highlights the artist’s vibrant involvement with the human condition. Within a lifetime of work, Neel painted many people from many walks of life—this catalogue is the first to focus on queer communities, those who were part of their circle, as well as allies and others with whom the artist was in broader conversation—together forming a collective portrait that both embodies and complicates an understanding of the queer world of Neel’s moment and the artist’s place within it.

This collection of paintings includes rarely seen works depicting individuals including Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich, as well as writers, artists, friends, and advocates. As Als notes, this book includes “not just portraits of gay people but those of theorists, activists, politicians, and so on who would qualify as queer by virtue of their different take in their given field and thus the world. So doing, they reflect Alice’s own interest in and commitment to difference.”

The catalogue accompanies Neel’s first significant exhibition in Los Angeles, at David Zwirner in 2024. Edited and with a text by Als, the volume includes newly commissioned contributions by Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World

Larry Neal

Allie Biswas

By Larry Neal. Introduction by Allie Biswas

A collection of seminal essays on the arts by Larry Neal, a founder of the 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, 

, 1968

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to produce work that was politically oriented, rooted in the Black experience, and written for the Black community. Engaging with fiction, music, drama, and poetry in his texts, he challenged the dominance of the Western art-historical canon and charged Black artists and writers with reshaping artistic traditions according to their own history. As he proclaimed in his essay “The Black Writer’s Role,” written in 1966, “Black writers must listen to the world with their whole selves––their entire bodies. Must make literature 

, the way our music makes them feel.”

The writer Allie Biswas, who selected the texts Neal wrote from 1964 to 1978 included here, introduces the volume, illuminating the rich and varied context in which he produced his work.

Any Day Now: Toward a Black Aesthetic

Karl Ove Knausgaard

This collection of Mamma Andersson’s latest paintings spotlights the beauty and mystery of nature and the erasure of time

"What Mamma Andersson does in some of these pictures is on the one hand depict the illusions, the one thing which is another thing—masks, theater, statues, paintings—and on the other portray that which is only itself, potted plants, tree trunks, trees, landscapes. Everything is motionless, these rooms are located out of time." —Karl Ove Knausgaard, 

In a series of oneiric paintings inspired by interiors and the landscape of her childhood, the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson muses on the line between reality and illusion. She introduces thoughtful warm hues into an otherwise cool, muted color palette, lending an otherworldly feeling to the everyday scenes and subject matter that populate this new body of work, painted between 2020 and 2021.

, this publication features a commissioned essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a meditation on childhood memories of carefree exploration and the portal art creates between the world we live in and the worlds Andersson conjures with her brush.

Mamma Andersson: A Storm Warning

A celebration of the representation, figuration, and classical antiquity in Mamma Andersson’s newest paintings.

"When I look at this collection of pictures, . . . what strikes me first is the image-making capacity itself and the endless stream of images it brings forth and always has brought forth into the world.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard, 

The Swedish painter Mamma Andersson draws inspiration from a wide range of photographic source materials, art history, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden. The paintings and works on paper collected in this volume explore atmosphere and mood through representations of masks, statues, and figurines, which take on a dreamlike, mythical quality in stark silhouettes. While recalling classical genres of still life, landscape, and interiors, this body of work, painted in 2021 and 2022, blends our sense of the past, present, and future.

A companion to the artist’s previous books 

, this limited-run publication features a new essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard. The text considers the history and evolution of the human desire to depict our surroundings, placing Andersson’s doubled renderings—“pictures of pictures”—within a tradition of painting not from life but from representations of life.

Mamma Andersson: Sleepless

Frank Walter

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Barbara Paca

Charlie Porter

Introduction by Hilton Als. Texts by Barbara Paca, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, and Charlie Porter

Explore Frank Walter’s relationship to Antigua and Dominica through a range of works and writings that express his intimate connection to Caribbean nature, landscape, and place.

“Nothing seems to be reworked—it is as if each piece drew or painted itself without being adjusted, revised, or fussed over.” —



“One gets the sense,” writes Hilton Als on Frank Walter, “in looking at [his] rivers and sky, that his perspectives were hard-won: he doesn’t just look at a bank and water, he pulls back, rather like a cinematographer . . . to get at the poetic essence of a scene.” Walter’s visionary encounter with the visual and natural world around him is the focus of the selection of paintings in this volume. Tender, quiet, and lush, the works were inspired by his thoughts, knowledge, journeys, and surroundings. Depicting vistas from Antigua to the rugged Scottish Highlands—painted, in some cases, years later from memory—Walter’s work offers a transporting visual journey and a meditation on the act of engaged observation.

Published on the occasion of the 2022 exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue includes an introduction by the show’s curator, Hilton Als. Barbara Paca, the leading expert on Walter, writes a text detailing her personal experience meeting Walter. An essay by Charlie Porter takes readers on a walk through Walter’s London as he muses about the artist’s life and art. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro travels to Antigua and Dominica to explore the history of the islands and Walter’s lasting impact there.

By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter

A still from a film by Francis Alys, titled Children’s Game #26: Kisolo, Tabacongo, DR Congo, dated 2021.

Texts by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Luis Pérez Oramas, and Lorna Scott Fox



An updated archive of Alÿs's long-term study of children’s enduring need for play

Since 1999, Belgian multimedia artist Francis Alÿs has been producing videos that document the games that children play on the street and in courtyards around the world. 

 is an ongoing archive of the urban practices that modernity has banished from everyday life, as the concepts of public space and free time have grown increasingly distorted by the domination of motor vehicles and electronic diversions. Many of these videos were shot in economically underdeveloped regions of the world, where the strength of tradition and community have allowed the shared life of a childhood on the street to survive. The children’s games that Alÿs captures gesture toward a threatened underground culture crossing generations and borders. Their rules, images, and references suggest an ancient, potent substrate underlying our shared experience.

Francis Alÿs: Children's Games

An oil on canvas painting by Dana Schutz, titled The Arts, dated 2021.

Edited by Malou Wedel Bruun, Anders Kold. Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner, Anders Kold. Text by Jarrett Earnest, Lauren Groff, Anaël Pigeat. Interview by Anders Kold.



With a vast selection of works from the last two decades and Polaroids of the artist's studio, this mid-career catalog provides unique perspective on Schutz's oeuvre and methods

Dana Schutz is one of the great figurative painters of our time—an eminent storyteller who depicts people in complex and often gigantic compositions. For two decades now, Schutz has distinguished herself with her tremendous narrative power, vigorous sense of color and ability to merge the gruesome, grotesque, absurd and comic.
This richly illustrated catalog presents paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture, providing an overview of Schutz's entire career to date. Alongside a thorough analysis of Schutz's work by curator Anaël Pigeat, it presents a studio visit described in detail by art critic (and friend of the artist) Jarrett Earnest, whose text is accompanied by Polaroids of the studio that unfold Schutz’s working methods. Also featured is a conversation between curator Anders Kold and the artist, and a poetic essay by award-winning author Lauren Groff.


Dana Schutz: Between Us

Heimarbeit. Adapted for Use. IKEA Küchen Ensemble

., Christopher Williams’ 2023 exhibition at Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. The exhibition included six hand-painted signs, four new photographs in full colour, five new wall treatments, two new films, one new sculpture, one new publication in full colour, and one unique arrangement. This book, designed by Petra Hollenbach, includes documentation of this project and a panel discussion from ‘Theater in der Kritik’ on Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play Oberösterreich which has been buried in the ZDF archive since 1972. It includes four full colour plates and four technical drawings describing the adaptable kitchen set IKEA Metod Küchenkombinationen.

Christopher Williams: Blocking Templates

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Friends in a Field: Conversations with Raoul De Keyser

Texts by Douglas Fogle, Hanneke Skerath, and Ilse Roosens

A dialogue of sensibility and attention: artists from Forrest Bess to Amy Sillman juxtaposed with the delicate paintings of Raoul De Keyser

Over the course of his nearly five-decade career, Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser created paintings that bridge the mysteries of the everyday and the intangible world of abstraction. 

 takes the artist’s radical painterly practice as the beginning of a conversation with a diverse group of artists—both living and dead—whose works share a sensibility and attentiveness to the fragile intangibility of the world. In their paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, these artists join De Keyser in presenting the world back to us as a kind of abstract visual poetry. 

 presents works by Richard Aldrich, Forrest Bess, Matt Connors, René Daniëls, Raoul De Keyser, Vincent Fecteau, Maysha Mohamedi, Rebecca Morris, Betty Parsons, Amy Sillman, Ricky Swallow, Patricia Treib, Luc Tuymans, and Lesley Vance.

Text by Phong Bui, Leopoldine Core, Torkwase Dyson, Brian Greene, David Grubbs, Alteronce Gumby, Wayne Kostenbaum, Dorothea Lasky, Lucy Lippard, Rebecca Oppenheimer, Lynne Tillman

A critically acclaimed encounter between two American masters of threshold perception and color nuance

This book brings together the work of abstract painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–67) and key figure of the Light and Space movement James Turrell (born 1943). Turrell first encountered Reinhardt at a lecture at Pasadena Museum in 1962, and paid homage to the influence Reinhardt had on his own work through the exhibition 

, held at Pace Gallery in early 2022. As curator, Turrell designed the presentation and lighting concept to illuminate his chosen works from Reinhardt’s geometric, monochromatic “red,” “blue” and “black” paintings. This book documents this immersive exhibition through numerous installation photographs taken under different lighting conditions, accompanied by prose and poetry from a wide range of contributors, written in direct response to the visual experience of seeing the exhibition. Contemporary artists, writers, scientists and poets explore the experiential nature of both Reinhardt and Turrell’s work.

Ad Reinhardt: Color Out of Darkness

Texts by Gottfried Boehm, Vincent Broqua, Fritz Horstman, Raimer Jochims, Donald Judd, Heinz Liesbrock, Amy Jean Porter, Jeannette Redensek, and Margit Rowell

The essential account of Albers’s enormously influential proto-Minimalist series, featuring studies and archival materials

Made over the course of a quarter century between 1950 and his death in 1976, Josef Albers’s groundbreaking series 

 comprises 2,000 oil paintings. His quest for continuous reflection and refinement inspired numerous young Minimalist and Conceptualist artists in their search for a reduced formal language. This outstanding volume explores the secrets of Albers’s subtle aesthetic and the questions it poses: what is the significance of the square? How did Albers’s thoughts on color and its use as a material evolve over this span?

Featuring studies on paper, archival materials and essays by Albers aficionados Margit Rowell and Donald Judd, among others, this richly illustrated publication sheds light on the various inspirations that influenced Albers early on in Europe and later in America, and illustrates the lasting impact of his art and thinking.

Out of stock

Josef Albers: Homage to the Square, 1950–1976

Dynamic and forward thinking this unconventional retrospective monograph takes its cues from Alice Neel’s life and work— at once intimate, powerful, and bursting with color.

Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century and a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. “One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by,” she explained, “right hot off the griddle.” This beautifully designed volume takes a unique approach to the exhibition catalog, highlighting Neel’s understanding of the fundamentally political nature of how we look at others, and what it means to feel seen. Long a favorite of portrait lovers, Neel has recently gained an even wider 21st-century audience appreciative of the searing candor with which she viewed the world, the depth of her humanity, and her championing of the underdog. This beautifully produced catalog features a thoroughly modern design, as well as an essay by renowned critic Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge.

Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle

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