Search results for ""Author Barry Schwabsky""

The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b.1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work.Carnegie’s work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude – all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie’s paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

Read more less

The hypersensitivity Usle describes is a kind of visionary state, but it is one that is painful - and memorable precisely because it is painful. When we see certain paintings of Usle's that use bright, intense, searing colours, shouldn't we think of this early encounter with one of those states of being that suddenly and dramatically remove us from our everyday mode of perception - one of those events that teach us that everything we perceive might be perceived entirely differently, given even a small modification of the perceptual apparatus we normally take for granted? There are certain paintings by Usle, very complicated ones, that might well remind us of the experience of peering into a kaleidoscope, and while this is not to say that we are therefore to imagine that we should also find the sight of these paintings painful - far from it! no more than, not having suffered sunstroke, we would find looking through a kaleidoscope painful - it is helpful to be reminded that such experiences, in which there is a visual clamour beyond what we are used to being subject to, may not be easy or comfortable ones, and therefore they are only a step away, albeit a crucial step, from being painful. They are a little too much, and therefore they put pressure on our aesthetic expectations. This is Usle's pictorial equivalent of Rimbaud's famous "dereglement de tous les sens."

Read more less

The definitive book on a creative force who continues to influence sculpture and installation art Jessica Stockholder has long broken down the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore the body in social and cultural space - using found objects intertwined with profusions of vivid colours. This revised, updated edition spotlights the extraordinary evolution of her career, and examines the pivotal role she has played in shaping some of the most fundamental ideas around which contemporary sculpture and painting revolve today.

Read more less

The first true monograph on the work of celebrated French conceptual artist and sculptor Bernar Venet Bernar Venet is one of France's most celebrated living artists. Having emerged from the late 1960s avant-garde scene in New York, Venet developed a personal aesthetic based on an innovative use of mathematics and science, where control, chance, and chaos converge to form a fine equilibrium while investigating their relationship with the environment. Conversant in many media, Venet is mostly known for his monumental outdoor sculptures in major cities worldwide and, in fall 19, his Arc Majeur is due for completion at a site in Belgium - at almost 200 feet in height (60 metres), Venet's sculpture will be taller than New York's Statue of Liberty.

Read more less

Charles Le Brun's drawing manual on human emotions has been used for centuries by artists and students as a model for depicting facial expressions. In David Schutter's work, Le Brun's manual is set to a different direction--a series of abstract drawings recalling vestiges of the human face animated by emotion. But Schutter's drawings are neither copies nor portraiture. Rather, they are reflections on how Lebrun's renderings were made. Collected here, Schutter's work recreates not the subject matter but the very values of Lebrun's drawings--light, gesture, scale, and handling of materials. The cross-hatching in the original was used to make classical tone and volume, in Schutter's hand the technique makes for unstable impressions of strained neck and deeply furrowed brow, or for drawing marks and scribbles unto themselves. As such, these drawings end up denying a neat closure--unlike their academic source material--and render unsettling states of mind that require repeated viewing. Accompanied by essays from art critic Barry Schwabsky and Neubauer Collegium curator Dieter Roelstraete, The Escape will appeal to students, critics, and admirers of seventeenth-century, modern, and contemporary art alike.

Read more less

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda elucidates the artist’s intricate, meditative compositions.Arruda has gained critical acclaim for atmospheric paintings that fluctuate between abstraction and figuration, imagination and reality. This monograph presents three groups of works loosely characterized as seascapes, jungles, and monochromes. Collectively titled Deserto-Modelo, they have an ephemeral, transient quality.Arruda’s intimately sized paintings of seascapes and junglescapes are characterized by their subtle rendition of light. Painted from memory, they are devoid of specific reference points, instead achieving their variety through the depiction of atmospheric conditions. Verging on abstraction, the compositions are grounded by an ever-present, if sometimes faint, horizon line that offers a perception of distance. They appear at once familiar and imaginary. Through his often evocative and textured brushstrokes, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling his genres’ historical associations with the notion of the romantic sublime.Alongside meticulous color plates and powerful details, author Will Chancellor offers a close reading of the work, raising questions about artifice, thresholds, and perception. Critic Barry Schwabsky unpacks the challenges posed by Arruda’s mysterious painted surfaces. As a whole, this book provides a detailed introduction to the work of a uniquely thoughtful and inventive artist.

Read more less

Key works from the 50-year career of the great Dansaekhwa abstractionist One of the early members of the Dansaekhwa art movement, Suh Seung-Won (born 1941) set the foundations for modernism in Korea. For over 50 years, Seung-Won's delicate monochrome paintings have explored the concept of "simultaneity," using geometric patterns to delineate his aesthetic understanding of time and space. This lavishly illustrated monograph collects selected works from throughout the artist's career, presented here alongside historical photographs from the artist's life and earliest exhibitions. Major new texts from critic Barry Schwabsky and art historian Sohl Lee track the development of Suh's revolutionary aesthetic since the 1960s and its parallels in the development of the artworld and Korean culture during that time. Suh Seung-Won is an essential look at one of the most vital artists of Korea's modernist movement and the subtly powerful monochrome abstractions that have defined his legacy.

Read more less

A leading figure of the Korean avant-garde Dansaekhwa group in dialogue with European abstraction Chung Sang-Hwa (born 1932) is a central figure of Dansaekhwa (also known as Tansaekhwa), an artistic movement in postwar Korea that offered a fundamentally different approach to modernist abstraction. Though the term translates literally to “monochrome painting,” Dansaekhwa is rather characterized by its labor-intensive processes, repetitive gestures and reductionist aesthetics. Over his nearly six-decades-long career, Chung has developed a singular, meditative process of repetitively applying and removing paint from his canvases, resulting in multilayered, tactile monochromatic surfaces. Chung Sang-Hwa: Excavations, 1964-78 highlights a critical period in the artist’s career in which he was immersed in the international avant-garde movements of both Asia and Europe. This fully illustrated volume includes an essay by critic Barry Schwabsky, a translated excerpt from the writings of Shin Young-Bok by Harvard professor David McCann, and an interview with Chung Sang-Hwa by Bona Yoo.

Read more less

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Varda Caivano's exhibition The Density of the Actions, February 22–April 19, 2015 at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. The book features texts by Barry Schwabsky, Paula van den Bosch, Terry R. Myers, Peter St John, Georges Perec, and Solveig Øvstebø, as well as 43 color and 6 black and white images of Caivano’s paintings and the Renaissance Society installation.

Read more less