Search results for ""Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago""

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.

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In 2019, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University co-organized an exhibition of a newly commissioned body of work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor. The accompanying publication, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, is the artist’s first US catalog in ten years, and it features thorough photographic documentation of the new work, commissioned texts by Mitch Speed and Sheila Heti, and a conversation between the artist and curators Dan Byers and Solveig Øvstebø. For more than four decades, Magor’s practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects, and she describes this body of work as “a collection of tiny and intense narratives.” Each written contribution responds in its own way to Magor’s new installations, which feature altered stuffed toys, bits of paper, and rat skins—sculptural “agents,” in the artist’s words—suspended in transparent Mylar box forms, and thirty-two pairs of secondhand shoes, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments.

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A catalog for an exhibition of the latest chapter in Miriem Bennani’s CAPS film project. Meriem Bennani is a Moroccan artist who lives and works in New York. Life on the CAPS is the final chapter in her film trilogy of the same name. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future surrounding a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is rooted in Bennani’s research and reflections on the histories of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film. Enacting a variety of cunning shifts, Life on the CAPS moves fluidly from the imaginary to the geopolitical and ranges from the microscopic scale of DNA to the global eye of surveillance. At the same time, it engages with the power of individual experience as well as the power of collectivity while building on an emotive, formal experimentation that refutes boundaries. This volume includes transcripts of conversations between Meriem Bennani and Omar Berrada, Fatima Al Quadiri and Bidoun, Amal Benzekri, and Aziz Bouyabrine.

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Los Angeles-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp has developed a painting practice characterized by its rigorous process and attentiveness to the medium’s possibilities. Using layers of black watercolor pigment, she builds up delicate surfaces, producing subtle variations in density and a powerful sense of atmosphere. Otto-Knapp’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society, In the waiting room, presented a new group of large-scale free-standing paintings in that evokes a multidimensional stage set. Some depict silhouetted bodies while others introduce scenic elements reminiscent of painted backdrops. Offering a close look at the exhibition, this volume includes an array of illustrations, a conversation between curator Solveig Øvstebø and the artist, and four newly commissioned essays by Carol Armstrong, Darby English, Rachel Hann, and Catriona MacLeod, grounded in art history and performance studies.

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Alongside each of his exhibitions, David Maljkovic translates his work into the form of a book, which becomes another medium in the practice of this interdisciplinary artist. For Also on View, he collaborated with designer Toni Uroda to channel the themes and methods of his 2019 solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society. In the book, a rendition of Maljkovic’s public artist talk from the opening night of the exhibition is accompanied by a dynamic array of images. While embracing a wide range of media—including photography, painting, video, sculpture, and various hybrids—the Croatian artist has developed distinctive methods of incorporating and refiguring his own earlier works in new installations. For his exhibition and corresponding publication at the Renaissance Society, Maljkovic revisited elements that originated from previous projects, and gathered them together in a presentation of works tailored to the unique architectural space. Altered photographs, paintings directly on the gallery walls, videos, and sculptures accumulate into a rich and varied collection of works.

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Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, Let me consider it from here features color reproductions of artworks by Saul Fletcher, Brook Hsu, and Tetsumi Kudo and transcriptions of the audio works of Constance DeJong, alongside newly commissioned poems by Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Simone White, and Lynn Xu, and an epilogue by Solveig Øvstebø. These artists frequently draw from their own histories, humors, and instincts as they grapple with or reimagine what’s happening in the world around them. Across a range of mediums, their works open up spaces that oscillate between strange and familiar, registering deeply personal experiences as well as more ambient cultural and political pressures. Their practices are all similarly anchored in solitude and stretch outward to meet the world, guiding us to the liminal realms between the public and the intimate, the concrete and the fantastical.

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In 2015 the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of newly commissioned works by Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna. Coinciding with the museum’s centennial, it marked the final show in the institution’s first hundred years. For this project Poledna used the notion of iconoclasm and its various historical contexts as a conceptual backdrop for two new works: a 35-mm film installation, co-produced with and premiering at the Renaissance Society, and a substantial alteration to the gallery space: the demolition, dismantling and removal of the gallery’s ceiling structure, a steel truss grid that had horizontally bisected the double-height gallery since 1967. This catalog—featuring a cover designed by artist Peter Downsbrough—documents the exhibition and its installation, and in doing so celebrates a century of the Renaissance Society.

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Considers two parts of a project by artist Jill Magid that centers around flows of currency. Conceived as a story in multiple chapters, this book focuses on two parts of a larger project by artist Jill Magid in which she explores the circulation of pennies against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through Tender, a public artwork in New York City produced by Creative Time, and Tender: Balance, an exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Magid both observes intimate financial and social transactions and delves into economic systems that are harder to see, intervening in the flows of currency in subtle, poetic ways. Along with visuals from these two parts of the project, the book offers insights into Magid’s extensive research process and three new essays that provide greater social and art historical context for her work. In their contribution, Claire Bishop and Nikki Columbus consider how Magid’s process makes wide-ranging connections to create a constellation of ideas. Jamilah King addresses the ongoing shift toward a cashless economy and who is left behind, and Aden Kumler explores histories of modifying currency. The book culminates in a conversation between the artist and curators Justine Ludwig and Karsten Lund, in which they reflect on the project’s conceptual touchstones and on events contemporary to the work.

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Unthought Environments brings together art influenced by the forces that are integral to our daily lives, yet are easily forgotten or overlooked, such as the ancient elements of air, fire, water, and earth; weather systems; geopolitics; and the hidden physical components of our virtual world. Informed by media studies, ecology, and philosophy, these multi-media artworks explore the elemental sphere as it intersects with the human-made. This exhibition catalog brings together images from the exhibition alongside texts that engage directly with the works as well as the larger issues that drive them. Essays by Karsten Lund, John Durham Peters, Keller Easterling, Ina Blom, Marissa Lee Benedict, Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, and Peter Fend are included, as well as a conversation with Lund, Nicholas Mangan, Robin Watkins, and Nina Canell.

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This richly illustrated volume offers an in-depth look into artist Sadie Benning’s exhibition Shared Eye, presented at the Renaissance Society and the Kunsthalle Basel. The forty mixed-media panels in Shared Eye defy easy categorization: they include collage, painting, photography, and sculpture. The seriality of the installation also nods to the artist’s history with the moving image. Throughout the 1990s, Benning created an extraordinary body of experimental video work, improvising with materials at hand and a toy camera. More than two decades later, in Shared Eye we see the handmade aesthetic, grainy imagery, and durational logic of Benning’s early videos take on different forms to correspond to our current moment. The catalog documents the exhibition in full color, and it features an interview between the artist and Julie Ault, essays by John Corbett and Christine Mehring, and an introduction by the Renaissance Society’s executive director, Solveig Øvstebø, and Elena Filipovic, director of Kunsthalle Basel. These texts provide illuminating framework for the exhibition and key insights into how Benning pushes the limits of abstraction in response to our present political climate.

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Catalog for an exhibition of Matthew Metzger’s paintings at the Renaissance Society. Published on the occasion of Matthew Metzger’s exhibition Heirloom at the Renaissance Society, this is the first book dedicated to the artist’s paintings, which echo and explore various kinds of abstraction. Anchored by the new paintings Metzger made for this exhibition—a set of works conceived as an installation for the Renaissance Society’s space that also serve as the subject of an essay by curator Karsten Lund—the book also features four other series of paintings by the artist, each of which further charts his evolving aesthetic and conceptual strategies. For this publication, Metzger has also invited six writers—including Kris Cohen, Fumi Okiji, Hamza Walker, Jan Verwoert, and Anna Zett—to reflect on how abstraction functions more broadly, whether as a psychological tendency, a social phenomenon, or a technological side effect, among many other possibilities.

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Alejandro Cesarco: Song, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Renaissance Society, brings together both new commissions and existing works. In the exhibition, Cesarco creates rhythm by incorporating silences and withholdings. The works form an installation drawing on the poetics of duration, refusal, repetition, and affective forms. This presentation, as in the artist’s broader practice, represents a sustained investigation into time, memory, and how meaning is perceived. Centering on two related video works, the exhibition engaged deeply with histories of conceptual art. This catalog features an introduction by Solveig Øvstebø, a conversation between Alejandro Cesarco and Lynne Tillman, an essay by Julie Ault, and new short fiction by Wayne Koestenbaum in response to the exhibition.

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Over a fifty-year career, Robert Grosvenor has produced a body of work that is at once solidly physical and conceptual, muscular and fluid. Grosvenor frequently uses industrial materials and found objects as he experiments with texture and scale, resulting in sculptures that reveal a handmade quality and subtle vein of humor. In 2017, the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of the sculptor’s untitled work from 1989 to 1990. Re-contextualized within a spare architectural installation, this assemblage of materials and found objects eludes interpretation at the same time as it asserts its form and construction. Such nuances, combined with its ambiguous scale, evoke what critic John Yau has suggested is the labor of an “anonymous worker.” Grosvenor has made significant contributions as a sculptor over the past fifty years, but relatively few books have been published about his work. This monograph documents the Renaissance Society show and also features new scholarship considering Grosvenor’s work with a broad scope. The text includes contributions by Yves-Alain Bois, Bruce Hainley, Susan Howe, John Yau, and Renaissance Society executive director and chief curator Solveig Øvstebø.

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Published on the occasion of Nora Schultz's exhibition Parrottree-Building for Bigger than Real, January 12 – February 23, 2014. It was Schultz's first solo museum show in the US and the first show curated at the Renaissance Society by new Chief Curator and Executive Director, Solveig Øvstebø. Nora Schultz: Parrottree is a unique and ambitious hybrid between exhibition catalog and artist’s book. Along with photo documentation of the Renaissance Society installation and an essay by the curator Solveig Øvstebø, the publication also includes The Parrot Magazine by Nora Schultz, a 64-page magazine "made by parrots for parrots and for all birds that need to integrate into human society under aggravated circumstances." Additionally, experimental writing pieces by Keren Cytter and Seth Price, and a visual art project by John Kelsey were all commissioned specifically for this book.

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The title of Richard Rezac's Renaissance Society exhibition, Address, plays on the multivalent quality of the word. As a noun, it refers to a unique identifier of a precise location. As a verb, it refers to a form of communication crafted for a specific people, time, and place. This exhibition drew upon both elements of the word's two meanings: the artist deliberately created and selected works in response to the architecture of the Renaissance Society's gallery space, and the title also nods to the sculptures' relationship to their presumptive audience. This book showcases twenty pieces featured in the exhibition that are made of a wide range of materials including cherry wood, cast bronze, and aluminum and that span Rezac's career--including newly commissioned pieces.s Through the concept of address, the exhibit and book explore the artist's ongoing engagement with both tangible, mathematical ordering systems and the elusive mechanisms of memory and interpretation. This publication continues Rezac's address, extending it to a greater audience of readers through a generous selection of images, a conversation between the artist and curator Solveig vsteb , and new texts by Matthew Goulish, Jennifer R. Gross, and James Rondeau.

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I conoclast and artist Pope.L uses the body, sex, and race as his materials the way other artists might use paint, clay, or bronze. His work problematizes social categories by exploring how difference is marked economically, socially, and politically. Working in range of media from ketchup to baloney to correction fluid, with a special emphasis on performativity and writing, Pope.L pokes fun at and interrogates American society's pretenses, the bankruptcy of contemporary mores, and the resulting repercussions for a civil society. Other favorite Pope.L targets are squeamishness about the human body and the very possibility of making meaning through art and its display. Published to accompany Pope.L's wonderfully inscrutable exhibition Forlesen at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, William Pope.L: Showing Up To Withhold is simultaneously an artist's book and a monograph. In addition to reproductions of a number of his most recent artworks, it includes images of significant works from the past decade, and presents a forum for reflection and analysis on art making today with contributions by renowned critics and scholars, including Lawrie Balfour, Nick Bastis, Lauren Berlant, and K. Silem Mohammad.

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