Search results for ""Author Karen Marta""

In the “St. Petersburg gamble,” the house offers to flip a coin until it comes up heads. The payoff doubles each time tails appears. By conventional definitions, the St Petersburg gamble has an infinite potential return; nonetheless, most players feel that they should not risk more than a few dollars each time. Explaining why people offer such small sums for something with infinite potential remains contentious in both economics and philosophy. The St. Petersburg Paradox embodies Swiss Institute’s longstanding dedication to producing inventive group exhibitions, putting artists across a century (Marcel Duchamp, Ericka Beckman, Hans Arp, Amalia Ulman, Tabor Robak) in dialogue with each other to explore the precarious nature of gaming and the impulses that underlie the way risk is calculated. Embracing the conceptual framework of an exhibition at Swiss Institute and its related public programs, each book in the SI Series adds retrospective context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts. Each book in the series assumes a unique format to delve into the work of an artist, an artistic movement or a philosophical conundrum.

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Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's (born 1979) work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

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Through painting, performance, sculpture and design, New York–based artist Kerstin Brätsch (born 1979) depicts the mutation of images over time, and the volatility of data consumption. This book includes an essay by Massimiliano Gioni on her engagement with the social lives of images.

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For Los Angeles–based sculptor, painter, filmmaker and installation artist Kaari Upson (born 1972), possessions are the gateway into the human psyche. Contained within them are all the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of their owners. Like a shaman, Upson creates her own gateways, using unorthodox techniques to imbue everyday objects such as mattresses and bags with an arcane magic. The result is auratic works that act as powerful symbols of absence, failed aspirations and loneliness. Part of the 2000 Words series conceived by Massimiliano Gioni and published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, this monograph contains an essay by Ali Subotnick that examines Upson’s pseudoscientific approach to her art that allows her to create confounding work that is simultaneously familiar and foreign.

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An oral history of the Latin American artists who moved to New York in the late 1960s and pioneered a new conceptualism informed by their migrant experiences In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a time of global cultural and social upheaval, a key group of Latin American artists migrated to New York. Part of the generational shift toward Happenings, Minimalism and Conceptualism, the group worked in conversation with experimental practices while exploring topics of migration, identity, politics, exile, and nostalgia. Drawing from both American culture and the cultures of their countries of origin, their works reflect the unique perspectives—both as insiders and outsiders—that these artists had as newcomers. Conceived as a visual reader with newly sourced and existing testimonies, This Must Be the Place is the first book of its kind to highlight this generation of artists in interviews and primary source material. Organized by themes and illustrated with artworks, photographs and other archival material, the testimonies of these artists offer the reader a dynamic, candid and historically rich memoir of 1960s and 1970s New York.

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Work Hard, the curatorial debut of celebrated Swiss artist Valentin Carron (born 1977), presents a creative discourse between a surprising group of artists: Edmond Bille, Vittorio Brodmann, Marguerite Burnat-Provins, Luciano Castelli, Claudia Comte, Sylvain Croci-Torti, Latifa Echakhch, Frédéric Gabioud, Mathis Gasser, Fabrice Gygi, Andreas Hochuli, Trix and Robert Haussmann, David Hominal, Bernhard Luginbühl, Urs Lüthi, Fabian Marti, Méret Oppenheim, Simon Paccaud, Mai-Thu Perret, Ugo Rondinone, Denis Savary, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely. In this book Carron suggests an imaginary time and place in art history while conjuring mythologies of labor and exploring the very personal approach that he took to understanding the narrative of national identity. Essays by Mai-Thu Perret and Balthazar Lovay plus an annotated walkthrough by Carron evoke the vernacular poetry of quirky Swissness.

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An artist's photographic portrait of domesticity, steeped in luminosity and eroticism Brazilian artist Marcos Chaves (born 1961) uses photography, installation, video, texts and sound to alter the way we view the world around us. Here Chaves explores his domestic surroundings through seemingly casual snapshots with plays of light and involuntary eroticism that reveal playful references to art history.

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Key textile works by Feliciano Centurión, combining folk art and queer aesthetics in 1990s South America Through the embroidery and painting of vernacular objects such as blankets and aprons, Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión (1962-96) rendered poetic readings of his youth in the tropics, his experiences of love in the metropolis and his reflections prior to his untimely death from AIDS-related illness. Since his death, Centurión’s work has been largely overlooked, only recently receiving recognition. This book traces the short but vibrant career of a remarkable artist. With essays and reproductions, it attends to Centurión’s stories of the self—his love life, his disease—but also stories of a cultural body searching for a new political expression in a changing world. The book reproduces over 80 key works by the artist, accompanied by numerous details and archival material.

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Critical insight into the gesturing hand piece from Kara Walker's monumental sugar sphinx Kara Walker’s (born 1969) Figa, a sculpture monumental in both size and symbol, was installed at the DESTE Foundation’s Hydra Slaughterhouse in 2017. Once a part of Walker’s colossal 2014 installation A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, Figa is made up of the hand piece from the anamorphic sphinx that gestures a “fig sign,” at once both a symbol of fertility and a “fuck you.” In making a return to the site of the Sugar Factory work and the work’s progeny in Hydra, this book offers critical insight on A Subtlety and Figa. Through extensive photographic documentation of the installation of the hand sculpture in Hydra by Ari Marcopoulos and seven fables written by Walker illustrating the power of folklore, mythology and black identity across the history of the United States, Figa in book form captures a blockbuster exhibition in two parts.

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A monograph exploring Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerability The art of Kiki Smith (born 1954) confronts what it means to be human. Her sculptures are often feminine figures that become personifications of sexuality, trauma and abjection. This monograph contains an essay by Margot Norton examining Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerability.

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Palmer's work blends word and image, anticipating Raymond Pettibon and David Shrigley New York- and Florida-based artist Roger Clay Palmer (born 1947) has been painting, drawing, and writing for over 50 years. Inspired by the Southern oral tradition of his youth, his experiences in the army as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and Japanese haiga and Zenga, Palmer blends word and image, anticipating artists like Raymond Pettibon and David Shrigley, to a darkly humorous, sometimes difficult effect. Palmer’s witty, grisly animals, figures and cityscapes are paired with phrases like “a lightning storm while buried with your cat” or “there was a time of day when the bulls and I got real bad ideas at exactly the same time.” Together they reveal, in the artist’s words, the “anger, rage, longing, sadness, courage and grace” in American culture. With a focus on recent work, Roger Clay Palmer brings together 60 exemplary paintings on paper and organizes them thematically, with sections focused on his depictions of animals, eyes, landscapes and war. Including an essay by curator David Norr, this long-overdue monograph is an invitation into Palmer’s intense and unruly world, full of idiosyncratic insight and biting wisdom.

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