An introduction to the Viennese artist's work is accompanied by an interview, commentaries, and details about his most recent assemblies and sculptures.

Franz West (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Benezra, Neal

Curiger, Bice

Fleck, Robert

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

Peter Fischli and David Weiss are Swiss artists who first began working together in the late 1970s. Their sculpture, video and photographic works all generate a unique atmosphere of concentration and relaxed pleasure. The mood of the work ranges from the humorous - a clay figure group of 1981, for example, entitled Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' - to the banal - a photographic series devoted to Airports - and even the apparently invisible - their Untitled installation simulating, through minutely detailed polyurethane sculptures, an unfinished exhibition site. While Fischli and Weiss occupy the international art world's most prestigious levels - representing Switzerland at the 1995 Venice Biennale and returning eight years later to win the Leone d'Oro prize for their slideshow Will Happiness Find Me? - they remain an unpredictable force at the very cutting edge of new art. This is the first true monograph on this extraordinary pair, who have exhibited worldwide, and whose solo exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988), and Tate Modern, London (2006). In his Survey, French critic and curator Robert Fleck looks at Fischli and Weiss' ability to resist conventional artistic categories, crossing fluidly between sculpture, installation, photography and the moving image. In the Interview Swiss critic Beate Sontgen discusses with the artists notions of sincerity and illusion, and examines the question of how literally viewers are asked to read their work. Noted art critic and leading authority on Fischli and Weiss Professor Arthur C. Danto examines in the Focus the immensely popular The Way Things Go, offering a new perspective on this well-known film. For Artists' Choice Fischli and Weiss have chosen a text by Robert Walser on the pleasure of walking that mirrors their own meanderings. Artists' Writings include unpublished scripts from early video works and a 1996 interview with the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Peter Fischli David Weiss (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

DANTO, Arthur C.

Söntgen, Beate

Catalog of The Galleries at Moore exhibition Following the Second World War, art as contemplative object seemed irrelevant; the focus changed to a more process- and performance-based activity. The Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the burden of guilt associated with these horrors, sparked a monumental shift in consciousness. During the next fifty years artists in the United States, Europe, and Asia embraced almost every medium and every form. 
In the early sixties artists began to use their bodies as an extended medium, creating actions and performances that shocked the public into confronting the realities of sex, power, and social politics. VALIE EXPORT was a leader in this genre. She was born Waltraud Lehner, in Linz, Austria. In 1966, she took a new name (always in capital letters) as an artistic concept and as a logo. Using her own body in combination with the century's evolving media--photography, film, video, and digital technology--she has sought to demystify the female body, to transform the representation of woman from object to subject. EXPORT's oeuvre continues to evolve in response to new technologies, shifting artistic perspectives, and a post-apocalyptic world view. 
This exhibition surveys thirty-five years of EXPORT's career. On view in both the Goldie Paley and Levy Galleries, it features work that illustrates each of the artist's significant visual investigations: objects, posters, and photographic documentation of body performances; conceptual photography; expanded cinema; experimental film and video works; and sculptural installations; as well as a selection of short and feature-length films. Translations of texts by the artist accompany individual pieces to provide further explanation and context.

VALIE EXPORT: Ob/De+Con(Struction)

Indiana, Gary

Stiles, Kristine

Iles, Chrissie

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Goldie Paley Gallery

Chinese-born, French-based painter Yan Pei-Ming (born 1961) transforms contemporary media imagery and events into large-scale oil paintings and watercolors. This volume is published on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Yan Pei-Ming: Help!

Loyrette, Henri

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

This book is a brief and accessible popular science text intended for a broad audience and of particular interest also to science students and specialists. Using a minimum of mathematics, a number of qualitative and quantitative examples, and clear illustrations, the author explains the science of thermodynamics in its full historical context, focusing on the concepts of energy and its availability and transformation in thermodynamic processes. His ultimate aim is to gain a deep understanding of the second law--the increase of entropy--and its rather disheartening message of a universe descending inexorably into chaos and disorder. It also examines the connection between the second law and why things go wrong in our daily lives.&nbsp; Readers will enhance their science literacy and feel more at home on the science side of author C. P. Snow's celebrated two-culture, science-humanities divide, and hopefully will feel more at home in the universe knowing that the disorder we deal with in our daily lives is not anyone's fault but Nature's.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics: ... or Why Things Tend to Go Wrong and Seem to Get Worse

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Springer

We Are Stardust: Stellar Evolution and Our Cosmic Connection

Science & Math

Astronomy & Space Science

Observers of contemporary art associate the name Julian Schnabel with highly evocative, large-scale paintings. At the time of his early exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe in the 80s, the larger-than-life Schnabel was loudly hailed as a new milestone in the development of painting, the savior of an art form declared dead years before. Still painting some of the most massive canvases around, Schnabel is a virtually unrivalled master in the use of "bigness" and a broad range of materials. Fragmentation and overlapping play an important role in his art, in terms of both material and content. If his paintings don't exhibit a consistent style, why should they? Instead, they combine oil painting and collage techniques, classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art, Neo-Expressionist features, as well as figuration and abstraction, gesture and structure. This volume presents a broad selection of Schnabel's paintings in a survey of his diverse oeuvre, with emphasis placed on works from 1990 to the present.

Julian Schnabel: Malerei/Paintings 1978-2003

Hollein, Max

Pfeiffer, Ingrid

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

In his wonderfully ambiguous One Minute Sculptures, which are only humorous at first glance, the Vienna-based conceptualist, Erwin Wurm, takes a literal approach to sculpture while also taking the medium apart: anyone can be a piece of art for a minute by following his instructions. The non-human works by which he is best known, the overinflated and floppy Fat Car and Fat House, are likewise spirited, thoughtful critiques, in this case of consumer culture. Their strained poses, like those of his One Minute participants, raise immediate, simple questions concerning normality and the meaning or lack of it in both artistic conventions and human actions. Wurm's profoundly humane work is an eye-opener to social forces, and always playful. Those who know it look forward to each new piece. This informative monograph assembles many previously unpublished videos, sculptures, installations and performances.

Erwin Wurm: The Artist Who Swallowed the World

Kunde, Harald

Davila, Thierry

Hatje Cantz

Curator Robert Fleck, who selected Herbert Brand's work for the Austrian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, sees him as one of very few painters making significant contributions to the debate in both figurative and abstract art. Brandl, Fleck notes, "numbers among the most audible voices of a generation that abandoned the heritage of Minimalism in favor of a free iconographic vocabulary which contains traces of the visible environment as well as non-figurative forces, lines and color fields, visualizing the speed and spaces of life." Brandl, born in 1959, was given the entire Austrian Pavilion and presented some 20 new pieces, abstract and figurative, individual and in series, in varying formats; this book includes every piece shown, and a survey of the work that led up to it, from 2005 to 2007.

Herbert Brandl: Biennale Venezia Austrian Pavilion

Kaiser, Philipp

Jackson Pollock's pioneering "drip" technique provided the model for what Harold Rosenberg would term "Action Painting"--using the canvas as an arena for the emphatically physical, even balletic application of paint, and as a record of that engagement. Pollock also provided the credo for this approach: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess." Featuring works by 25 major representatives of this movement, Action Painting: Jackson Pollock and Gesture in Painting addresses the fundamental qualities of gestural abstraction from 1945 to 1965, assessing common traits as well as contrasts in practice between America and Europe (where it was known as Informel). Essays by acclaimed specialists, alongside introductions to each of the featured artists, make this volume a revealing presentation of one of the most important artistic movements in the twentieth century. Artists include Karel Appel, Lynda Benglis, Norman Bluhm, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hartung, Eva Hesse, Hans Hofmann, Gerhard Hoehme, Asger Jorn, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Morris Louis, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Jackson Pollock, Kazuo Shiraga, Pierre Soulages, Clyfford Still, Cy Twombly and Wols.

Action Painting

Boehm, Gottfried

Kaufman, Jason

Reference

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