Search results for ""author bob nickas""

A diaristic glimpse of a zeitgeist on the brink, from the influential New York curator and writer Widely recognized for his bold, dissenting and prolific criticism and curation, Bob Nickas has been a fixture of the New York City art scene for nearly 40 years, having organized more than 120 exhibitions since 1984. He has left an indelible impression on the artistic milieu as the founding editor of index magazine; a regular contributor to Artforum; a curatorial advisor for MoMA PS1; and the author of several collections of writing and interviews, including Theft Is Vision, Live Free or Die, The Dept. of Corrections and Komplaint Dept. Nickas’ most recent undertaking, Bob Nickas: Yesterworld, consists of hundreds of diary entries written over the course of 2019. Part memoir, part social commentary, Yesterworld is a richly detailed, intimate account of the New York art world in the final years of the Trump administration and in the final months before the advent of Covid-19. Nickas reflects on significant exhibitions, openings, major news headlines, recently published books and his own social escapades.

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Pieces-Meubles is the title of a two-part exhibition, held in 1995 and 2016, curated by New York art critic Bob Nickas at the invitation of Galerie Patrick Seguin. The 1995 exhibition compared contemporary art with 20th-century design, inviting around 20 artists to choose a piece of furniture to interact with their work or to integrate it by creating a new work. The 2016 exhibition was centered around Jean Prouve, whose 6x6 dismountable house, the Maison des Sinistres de Lorraine, had been installed at Galerie Patrick Seguin. Among the invited artists, some of whom participated in both exhibitions, were John Armleder, Richard Artschwager, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Adam McEwen, Albert Oehlen, Haim Steinbach, Rudolf Stingel and Franz West.This book illustrates these two innovative exhibitions. Introduced with a substantial preface by Nickas, Pieces-Meubles is abundantly illustrated with in-situ photographs, as well as archival images for the furniture and architectural components of the shows.

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The latest volume of writing by influential New York–based critic and curator Bob Nickas collects his 2012–14 column for Vice magazine’s Komp-laint Dept. This column unleashed the full omnivorous range of the author’s interests. There are essays on musicians such as Neil Young, Sun Ra, Royal Trux and Lydia Lunch, which look at their biographies and the history of Nickas’ personal relationship with their music; there are lengthy and often very funny “complaints” about, among other things, two different presidents, Jeff Koons, New York architecture, the meeting of fashion and punk, religion in general, nostalgia and the problem with contemporary graffiti. Additionally, there are meditations on filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and Nicolas Refin. The book is rounded out by perhaps the definitive (two-part) examination of how and why Richard Prince uses appropriation. Bob Nickas has worked as a critic and curator in New York since 1984. He is the author of Theft Is Vision (2007) and The Dept. of Corrections (2016).

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The most comprehensive overview of artist Josh Smith’s radicaltechnicolor paintings.Josh Smith: Emo Jungle looks at the artist’s vigorous repetition of particular motifs, illuminating his approach to painting as an exploratory medium for image production. Published on the occasion of Smith’s critically acclaimed first exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue features a new body of work that marks an important evolution for the artist. In these paintings, Smith sets the stage for a new mode of self-reflective commentary on image making, acknowledging that “the meaning perhaps arises in the making.”A new essay by Bob Nickas treats the Reaper, Turtle, and Devil figures from Emo Jungle as ciphers through which to understand Smith’s work. Nickas demonstrates how these new paintings restage and personalize the artist’s more abstract earlier works and illuminates the ways in which repetition functions within Smith’s practice. With more than one hundred illustrations, this book serves as the ideal introduction to Smith’s disruptive oeuvre.

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A comprehensive look at the thought-provoking, eye-catching and mind-expanding work of this visionary West Coast artist.

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In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker about the exhibition No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984–1989 at David Zwirner in New York, “the show’s cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era.” With an eye to canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of international art scenes that were based in Cologne—arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time—and New York. While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner, and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler, and Monika Sprüth showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. The works of these German artists were exhibited along with the latest contemporary art from the US by artists like Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the works of German artists were presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring, Augustine & Hodes, and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work being produced and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this ongoing dialogue, among them Europa / Amerika (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1986) and A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland (New Museum, New York, 1986). Big, bold, and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color over one hundred immensely varied artworks by the twenty-two international artists included in this massive exhibition—one of the largest in David Zwirner’s history. Beyond its stunning visual components, the book features crucial new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, and an illustrated chronology of the decade by Kara Carmack. The book also includes an arsenal of compelling archival material, from documentary photographs from the period to reproductions of Cologne’s culture magazine Spex. Taken as a whole, this ambitious exhibition catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart, and “dissonance of styles”—in the words of Schjeldahl—embodied by this fascinating and fecund moment in global art history. Artists featured in the book include Werner Büttner, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Günther Förg, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Albert Oehlen, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, and Christopher Wool.

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The first major publication dedicated to one of Norway's most important photographers Working in a signature modulating gray scale, the late Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg spent decades rendering the world according to an exacting vision, training his eye on the shapes and forms of the everyday—dark abstractions of asphalt and sea, the hard edges of an automobile, an ominously curved tunnel, an anonymous figure casting a shadow—to plumb the nature of photographic seeing. His pictures are subtle yet transformative, studies of stillness that radiate mystery. A perfectionist in the darkroom, Sandberg was acutely sensitive to the rich spectrum of black and white, and his handmade prints, at times printed on aluminum and canvas, project a powerful physical presence. Although Sandberg is esteemed in his native Norway and throughout Scandinavia and Europe, his oeuvre is less known in the United States and other parts of the world. This monograph, produced in close collaboration with the Tom Sandberg Foundation in Oslo, is a long-overdue celebration of this distinguished artist.

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In the Belgian artist Harold Ancart’s rich new body of work, he turns an immersive landscape of trees, mountains, and seas into a meditation on painting itself. Harold Ancart often paints subjects that naturally invite contemplation, such as the horizon, clouds, flowers, flames, and icebergs. His newest body of work captures the experience of landscape seen in motion or from a distance: trees blurred while driving past, an inky-black sea seen from a distance, an evocative Martian mountain range. Recalling René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart blurs form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction. Reproduced here in magnificent foldouts, two multipanel canvases situate the viewer between a mountainscape and a seascape, both monumental in scale. Ancart segments the seascape with a stark horizon line, dividing sky and ocean. Like other comparable motifs within the artist's oeuvre, the vividly colored cloudy sky functions in an anthropomorphic way, alluding to the endless possibilities and personalities of organic forms. Including an interview with Bob Nickas, this catalogue offers insight into Ancart’s frank reflections on painting, writing, nature, and more. The publication also features a new essay by Laura McLean-Ferris. Taken together, the works in Harold Ancart: Traveling Light meditate on the expansive possibilities of painting.

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Recent abstractions from the organizer of the landmark 1971 De Luxe Show New York-based American painter Peter Bradley (born 1940) is known for his pioneering and influential use of acrylic gel paint in the 1960s. This volume presents nine recent paintings from Bradley, which depart from the thick impasto textures of his early work, instead favoring a flatter and cleaner aesthetic.

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