Search results for ""author hans ulrich obrist""

Idolatry, illusion, glitz and greed in Damien Hirst’s seminal sculpture and painting cycles In 2010, Gagosian Gallery staged a seminal exhibition of Damien Hirst’s (born 1965) paintings and sculptures. Titled End of an Era, it addressed concepts of illusion and reality, myth and idolatry, and took its name from the central sculpture in the exhibition: a severed bull’s head in a gold vitrine. The work served as a sequel to Hirst’s 2008 sculpture The Golden Calf, a formaldehyde-preserved bull. Alongside this sculpture, the exhibition showed Hirst’s Diamond Fact Paintings for the first time—a series of photorealist depictions of the world’s most illustrious jewels—as well as two Diamond Cabinets. This catalog collects these pieces and includes a catalogue raisonné of each series (Gold Tanks, Diamond Cabinets and Diamond Fact Paintings). The publication also features a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hirst.

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Giosetta Fioroni is considered one of the most important figures in Italian painting of the postwar era. Her work is commonly associated with the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo group in Rome – which also included Mario Schifano, Tano Festa and Franco Angeli, among others – as well as with the advent of Pop art in Italy. Yet Fioroni’s practice differs from those of her immediate contemporaries and from the overarching notion of Pop as it came to be understood in the English-speaking world. The divergences are most clearly pronounced in her persistent exploration of femininity, rooted in both her personal experiences and her interpretation of the category in popular culture. ‘I have worked a lot, not on feminism but on femininity’, Fioroni once explained. ‘I would like to maintain a distinction. In a period of lively feminism, I was interested in the look, in the atmosphere tied to femininity.’ Giosetta Fioroni: Alter Ego is the first publication to focus on feminist perspectives in the work of Fioroni. It includes an exclusive interview with the artist conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist and a scholarly essay by Anna Dumont on the subject of gendered looking in Fioroni’s portraits of women.

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I Can Make You Feel Good, is a 206-page celebration of photographer and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell’s distinctive vision of a Black utopia. The book unifies and expands upon Mitchell’s body of photography and film from his first US solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Each page of I Can Make You Feel Good is full bleed and bathed in Mitchell’s signature candy-colored palette. With no white space visible, the book’s design mirrors the photographer’s all-encompassing vision which is characterized by a use of glowing natural light and rich color to portray the young Black men and women he photographs with intimacy and optimism. The monograph features written contributions from Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries), Deborah Willis (Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University), Mirjam Kooiman (Curator, Foam) and Isolde Brielmaier (Curator-at-Large, ICP), whose critical voices examine the cultural prevalence of Mitchell’s reimagining of the Black experience. Based in Brooklyn, Mitchell works across many genres to explore and document a new aesthetic of Blackness. He is regularly published in avant- garde magazines, commissioned by prominent fashion houses, and exhibited in renowned art institutions, Mitchell has lectured at many such institutions including Harvard University, Paris Photo and the International Center of Photography (ICP), on the politics of image making.

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The oeuvre of the Albanian artist and prime minister Edi Rama is inseparable from his political career. During telephone con-ferences and meetings, he does drawings and watercolors on the copies of his schedule, his work notes, on minutes, faxes, and other pieces of correspondence. The art he produces in the environs of national power forms an abstract journal, a vivid recording of political life and the everyday tensions be-tween power and art. Work is the first publication to present the drawings, ceramic sculptures, and a tapestry, which was inspired by a similar tapestry in Rama’s office in Tirana. Made up of more than seven hundred of Rama’s drawings, the tap-estry runs throughout the entire book, creating an immanent connection between his works. Besides essays on Rama’s work, the book also features a conversation with the artis

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Anri Sala (b. 1974) creates hauntingly simple videos that explore the roles language and vision play in fractured contemporary society.Anri Sala is represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris), Hauser & Wirth (Zurich/London) and Marian Goodman Gallery (New York).

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The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world from Antarctica to the Mojave Desert in order to photograph continuously living organisms that are at least 2,000 years old. The result is a stunning and unique visual collection of species unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before. She begins at "year zero," and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. The ancient subjects live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter per century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, and an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. She journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, which are organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that's the last of its kind. These portraits reveal the living history of our planet-and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world's most extreme environments, yet climate change and human interaction have put many of the species presented here in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with an untimely death. Alongside the photographs, Sussman combines tales of her worldly adventures tracking down these subjects with informative insight from the scientists who are studying them and their environments. The result is an original index of millennia-old organisms that provides a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future. Sussman's work is both timeless and timely, and the book spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. Underlying the work is an innate environmentalism driven by Sussman's relentless curiosity.

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The latest in Karma's acclaimed series of overviews, this 424-page clothbound volume is the first comprehensive survey of New York–based minimalist painter Paul Mogensen (born 1941). Born in Los Angeles, Mogensen arrived in New York in 1966 already associated with such peers as David Novros and (through Novros) Brice Marden. His first solo exhibition at the Bykert Gallery came the following year. Since that time, Mogensen has created often colorful works that follow rule-based progressions (such as the “n + 1” method) to generate sharply executed geometric abstractions. In a text for this volume, the artist Lynda Benglis usefully summarizes the special character of Mogensen’s art: “Paul is a colorist who is measured in his method. It may be said that he is a decorative painter as well a painter of a philosophical disposition. He is stringent in his approach, as stringent as a mechanic might be with a Ferrari. There are no accidents.”

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Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is predominantly known for his paintings and drawings, which strike a playful balance between photo-realism and abstraction, while at once delving into often controversial political commentary. His works have explored a multitude of media, from photo-based, monochrome and brightly colored paintings to ink-doused papers and thin, multicolored strips of pure pattern. Beyond his artistic works, and particularly in recent years, Richter has published extensively on his vision of art and artistic values: in letters, interviews, public statements, excerpts and articles, Richter has established himself as a brilliant advocate of contemporary painting. Richter has also increasingly explored the possibilities of the book as medium in a series of extraordinary artist's books. Gerhard Richter: Books takes an in-depth look at his work in this medium. It features a book-length interview with the artist by internationally renowned art critic and historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, who walks us through the Richter archive and discusses the work with the artist himself, affording the reader an entirely new perspective on his works. The book also includes a new text by Kunstmuseum Winterthur director Dieter Schwarz.

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The Visual Candy paintings were made between 1992 and 1994.The works showcase the ways in which Damien Hirst used the signifier of candy during the early 1990's, exploring questions of pure aesthetics. Hirst says they were created as a direct riposte to an art critic who had dismissed Hirst's Spot Paintings as "just visual candy.' Addressing the viewer on a deliberately emotionaland instinctive level, these works, abetted by their exuberant titles, among them Some Fun (1993) and Dippy Dappy Dabby (1993), set out to question the implication that aesthetically pleasing art is inherently insignificant.While ostensibly abstract, the paintings in fact depict medicinal pills, and can be seen as a stylised depiction of the psychological effects of happy, mood-enhancing drugs. Hirst once described how, "in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease… the colours project so much joy it's hard to feel it, but it's there. The horror underlying everything," In this context, the Visual Candy paintings, despite their surface optimism, posses a disquieting undercurrent of tension and darkness - born from an awareness of the inevitable low that follows any high. Hirst once said that "art is about life - there isn't anything else.'

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Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is itThe future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would and this book explains whyFifty years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture The Medium is the Massage, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'.The Age of Earthquakes is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.Welcome to The Age of Earthquakes, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

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The Chinese artist Liu Ye’s meticulous, colorful canvases convey his love of literature in the first publication dedicated to his paintings of books. The Beijing-based artist Liu Ye is known for his precise, deftly rendered representational paintings. Drawn equally from contemporary culture and old master painting, Liu’s wide-ranging visual touchstones include Piet Mondrian, Miffy the Bunny, and Prada advertisements. In this new publication devoted to his book paintings, the artist examines the book as both a physical object and cultural totem. Playing with geometry and perspective, Liu creates extraordinary and disorienting portraits of this most familiar subject. Liu’s Book Painting series, begun in 2013, depicts close-up views of books that are turned open to reveal empty pages, an approach that emphasizes the object’s form over its content. Rendering books’ material structure—endpapers, binding, spine—in sensual detail, these paintings indicate an obsession with the book as an object and a lifelong love of literature. Liu’s father was a children’s book author who introduced him to Western writers at a young age, fueling his curiosity and imagination. Many of the books in Liu’s father’s collection were banned in Cultural Revolution–era China and the artist read them secretly throughout his childhood. This formative experience figures in his popular Banned Books series and in his book paintings in general. Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020, this catalogue includes new writing by the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu, who traces the evolution of the book form in Liu’s work, as well as an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

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When Benedikt Taschen asked the most important portrait photographer working today, Annie Leibovitz, to collect her pictures in a SUMO-sized book, she was intrigued by the challenge. The project took several years to develop and when it was finally published in 2014, it weighed in at 26 kg (57 pounds). This incredible collection is now available in an accessible XXL book format. Leibovitz drew on more than 40 years of work, starting with the photojournalism she did for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s through the conceptual portraits she made for Vanity Fair and Vogue. She selected iconic images—such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono entwined in a last embrace—as well as portraits that had rarely, if ever, been seen before. The Annie Leibovitz SUMO covered political and cultural history, from Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon to Laurie Anderson and Lady Gaga. “What I had thought of initially as a simple process of imagining what looked good big, what photographs would work in a large format, became something else,” Leibovitz says. “The book is very personal, but the narrative is told through popular culture. It’s not arranged chronologically and it’s not a retrospective. It’s more like a roller coaster.” Fans of Leibovitz and her many celebrated subjects can now enjoy that same roller coaster ride for themselves with this unlimited edition.

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"Cosmos" offers new approaches on the stunning art works of Eduardo Terrazas (* 1936). Four well known authors present a multidisciplinary vision on the artists ongoing series "Possibilities of a Structure". Which suggests at once a curiosity in the fabric of our universe and a profoundly human hope for an underlying rationality behind the chaos of the world. Eduardo Terrazas has explored a lifetime’s worth of questions about the nature of the universe through the microcosm of his images. He derives his visual reflections with a basic geometric structure and a technique that is inspired by the Huichol tablas from Mexican indigenous tribes. His highly colourful and playful series "Possibilities of a Structure" – of which Cosmos is a subseries – has been an ongoing project since 1974 and comprises over 650 works until today: an artistic exploration of the boundaries of the infinite.

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The first book to explore the fascinating career and fantasy-driven worlds created by the acclaimed Argentinean artist Adrián Villar Rojas's works concoct imaginary realms. Usually made from clay, his colossal installations are transitory and so cannot be collected, as they disappear or decay over time. His practice confronts the public with ideas of obsolescence and extinction, but also with the possibilities of humankind and its endless imagination. This is the first book to include all of Villar Rojas' most significant projects, featured in international biennials such as Venice, Documenta, Shanghai, and others.

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Cosmos: Silence and Infinite offers new approaches on the stunning art works of Eduardo Terrazas’s (1936) art works. Four well known authors present a multidisciplinary vision on the artists ongoing series Possibilities of a Structure. Which suggests at once a curiosity in the fabric of our universe and a profoundly human hope for an underlying rationality behind the chaos of the world. Eduardo Terrazas’s has explored a lifetime’s worth of questions about the nature of the universe through the microcosm of his images. He derives his visual reflections with a basic geometric structure and a technique that is inspired by the Huichol “tablas” from Mexican indigenous tribes. His highly colourful and playful series Possibilities of a Structure – of which Cosmos is a subseries – is ongoing since 1974 and holds over 650 works until today: an artistic exploration of the boundaries of the infinite.

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As seen in Design Matters with Debbie Millman, PRINT Magazine, The Slowdown, and Design Boom Stefan Sagmeister’s newest project encourages long-term thinking and reminds us that many things in the world are improving Initially conceived in 2020 as the world entered pandemic lockdown, Stefan Sagmeister has created a book that looks at the state of the world today, illuminating, through collected data, how far we’ve come, and encouraging us to think about where we can go from here. Statistics are vividly brought to life, as numbers are transformed into graphs, inlaid into nineteenth-century paintings, embroidered canvases, lenticular prints, and hand-painted water glasses. The book includes a foreword from psychologist and leading authority on language and the mind, Steven Pinker; a featured essay by graphic designer and historian Steven Heller; and a conversation between Sagmeister and Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator and artistic director of Serpentine Galleries in London and will appeal to all visually minded readers, providing a positive reaction to the tumultuous news cycle of recent years. Published in softcover with flaps Now is Better is contained within a die-cut slipcase and accompanied by a lenticular print designed by Sagmeister. Now is Better is an intriguing and thoughtful visual meditation on our daily lives.

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