Search results for ""Author Lawrence Rinder""

A revelatory volume on an occluded genre of Indian art, Tantra Song is a convergence of East and West, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern This collection of rare, abstract Tantra drawings was conceived when the French poet Franck André Jamme stumbled on a small catalogue of Tantric art at a Paris bookseller's stall. The volume included writings by Octavio Paz and Henri Michaux, and Jamme became fascinated by the images' affinity with modern art and poetry. He read voraciously and even journeyed to India, searching in vain for Tantric practitioners, until a bus accident on the road to Jaipur sent him home to France with serious injuries. When he returned a few years later, he met a soothsayer who proclaimed that Jamme had now paid sufficient tribute to the goddess Shakti and required him to take a vow: he must visit the tantrikas alone or only in the company of a loved one. Since then, Jamme has gained extraordinary access to very private communities of adepts and their intensely beautiful works. These contemporary, anonymous drawings from Rajasthan are unlike the more familiar strands of Tantric art--the geometric yantras, or erotic illustrations of the Kama Sutra. The progeny of seventeenth-century illustrated religious treatises, these drawings have evolved into a distinct visual lexicon designed to awaken heightened states of consciousness and are imbued with specific spiritual meanings (e.g. spirals and arrows for energy, an inverted triangle for Shakti). A revelatory volume on this occluded genre of Indian art, Tantra Song is a convergence of east and west, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern. Franck André Jamme is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. His translated workds (by John Ashbery, Charles Borkuis, David Kelley and others) include New Exercises, Another Silent Attack, The Recitation of Forgetting and Extracts of the Life of a Beetle. He has collaborated on books with a number of artists including Philippe Favier, Suzan Frecon, Acharya Vyakul and Hanns Schimansk. A specialist in Art Brut, Tantric and tribal art of India, he has participated in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Beaux-Art de Paris and The Drawing Center, among others.

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Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos accompanies the first museum exhibition dedicated to American artist Charles Houghton Howard (1899–1978) since 1956. Howard, part of a circle of artists that included Alexander Calder, Gordon Onslow Ford, Grant Wood and Ben Nicholson, had an active and distinguished career in midcentury America and England. His enigmatic, meticulous paintings, often intimate in scale, bridge figurative, Surrealist and abstract currents in modern art. Though his work evolved over his career, Howard said that all of his pictures “are closely related … They are in fact all portraits of the same general subject, of the same idea, carried as far as I am able at the time.” The first scholarly publication on Howard, this fully illustrated volume includes essays by Apsara DiQuinzio, Robert Gober and Lauren Kroiz, a reprint of one of Howard’s own essays from 1946, an illustrated chronology and exhibition history.

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Published on the occasion of a groundbreaking museum exhibition curated by Lawrence Rinder with Matthew Higgs, Create showcases work made at the three foremost centers for artists with developmental disabilities: Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Creativity Explored in San Francisco and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities in Richmond. These centers were founded between 1972 and 1982 by Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz, who today are recognized as pioneers of the art and disabilities movement. The husband-and-wife team created studios where disabled artists were integrated into the larger art community of the Bay Area, both influencing and being influenced by other artists. This richly illustrated catalogue offers an overview of the work being made at the centers, including works on paper, paintings and sculpture. Artists include: Mary Belknap, Jeremy Burleson, Attilio Crescenti, Daniel Green, Willie Harris, Carl Hendrickson, James Miles, Marlon Mullen, Bertha Otoya, Lance Rivers, Judith Scott and William Tyler.

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Entertaining, lyrical and informative, Art Life is a selection of essays by well-known contemporary art curator Lawrence Rinder, all written since 1991. Rinder's work is distinguished by a concern for art's role in reflecting and shaping daily life. Informed by history, philosophy and popular culture, these essays provide keys to understanding a broad range of contemporary practices--from painting and drawing to net art and video installation. In each of these texts, Rinder muses on how the intersection of material, image and idea creates meaning in some of the most compelling artworks of the past few decades. Among the many artists discussed are Luc Tuymans, Sophie Calle, Martin Creed, Ara Peterson, Jim Drain, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Lombardi, Jack Smith and Irit Batsry. All of the essays in Art Life are unified by Rinder's clear writing style--seamlessly interspersed with a selection of images--and his consistent engagement with the experience of art and art's relevance to our daily lives. Ideal for scholars and students alike.

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Hans Hofmann, a representative of Abstract Expressionism and American Modernism during the 20th century with European roots, had a fundamental influence as a teacher on the development of modern art in America. His brightly coloured paintings, watercolours and drawings can now be discovered in a European retrospective. From 1904 until 1914, the painter Hans Hofmann (1880 – 1966), who was a friend of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, the Fauves and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, witnessed and absorbed the new art in Paris, the centre of European art. In his art school, founded in Munich in 1915, he became a mediator of French modernism and achieved international fame as an art teacher. In 1932 he emigrated to the United States and two years later opened the Han s Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York. He influenced a new generation of American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman.

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This book investigates important and illuminating aspects of Al Taylor’s drawings, which numbered over five thousand at the time of his death. It includes a chronological survey of Taylor’s drawings from the mid-1980s, when he abandoned painting in favour of sculpture and drawing, and highlights the combination of technical refinement, humour, and sensuousness that characterises his works on paper. Stunning reproductions of the works, which were inspired by such ordinary things as tin cans, pet stains, and broomsticks, reveal the drawings’ minute details, nuanced shading, and playfully agile pencil lines. Lively texts explore how the rich and complex visual sensibilities of Taylor’s drawings resonate with that of late Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters. The book also examines Taylor’s innovative approach to process and materials, such as photocopier toner, with its intense black, and the extreme white of correction fluid. Created with equal parts humour and technical virtuosity, and informed by scientific models as well as everyday minutiae, Al Taylor’s magnificent drawings are meditations on form and structure that stand as testament to great draftsmanship.

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Combining studio, classroom, library, gallery and stage, The Possible offered a new model of museum exhibition. Rather than presenting existing artworks, artist/curator David Wilson hosted over 100 artists and collectives--with “artist” understood in the broadest sense. The BAM/PFA galleries were transformed into studios that were used by both guest artists and museum visitors. The exhibition made itself during its four-month run, as works created in the studios were exhibited in an adjacent gallery. The catalogue is conceived in a similar vein, as one of the experiments of The Possible created by guest artists Luke Fischbeck and Lauren Mackler of Public Fiction, a Los Angeles–based project space and journal. Created partially onsite, it is inspired by the exhibition’s spirit of improvisation and collaboration. It gathers essays, photographic documentation and printed artifacts generated in the exhibition itself.

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