To accompany William Kentridge's (born 1955) Notes Towards a Model Opera project in China, the artist's personal notebooks--filled with annotations, drawings and ideas--were meticulously reproduced in this eponymous publication to allow the reader into Kentridge's own thought process. With an in-depth profile of Kentridge by author Andrew Solomon, and essays by China art historian Alfreda Murck and UCCA director Philip Tinari, Notes Towards a Model Opera is a personal exploration of the layered meanings behind the aesthetics and ideals of socialist China as well as an exploration of the artist himself.

William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Koenig Books

Review\nFrederic Tuten overflows with visionary scenes right out of a fecund and ungovernable imagination. Done in an awkward, assured, cartoonish hand with undertones of Arshile Gorky’s teeming amorphic graphic fields, this is pigment, shape, and scene as abstract language. -- Jerry Saltz ― New York Magazine: Vulture\nCharming, riotous paintings from the celebrated, multitalented author of My Young Life and Tintin in the New World 
Working on cardboard and canvas, the acclaimed New York–based novelist, short story writer and essayist Frederic Tuten (born 1936) creates dream-like landscapes in places as far-flung as Tangier and Tuscany. His works, which use recurrent motifs such as sombreros and inverted cups, play host to a parade of characters, objects and shapes that converge in fascinating, often mysterious compositions. 
This book compiles a vibrant selection of Tuten’s recent paintings and drawings alongside short stories written by the artist to accompany each and every picture, in addition to an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. In Tuten’s world, rendered in ink, colored pencil, crayon, pastel and, more recently, oil paint, imagination reigns supreme.

Frederic Tuten: On A Terrace In Tangier - Works on Cardboard

TUTEN, Frederic

In the years following the Second World War, artists across the world began to attack the most basic premises of painting, in ways that were both aggressive and playful. The creative act itself was deemed as important as the painting that resulted from it, creating an energetic interzone between painting and performance in which chance procedures, the movement of bodies and the participation of spectators were all recruited as tools. Explosion! Painting as Action explores the connections and cross fertilizations between painting, performance and conceptual art from the late 1940s to the present. Examining painting, photography, video, performance, dance and sound art, this volume includes works by Lynda Benglis, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cai Guo-Qiang, the Gutai Group, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Alison Knowles, Ana Mendieta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Shozo Shimamoto, Lawrence Weiner and many others.

Explosion! Painting as Action

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

British artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd's (born 1973) long-running Bat Opera series of paintings is documented in its entirety in this new volume. Best known for her freewheeling and quixotic performances, Chetwynd has been working on these paintings, which exuberantly plunder the depths of high and low culture, for over a decade.

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd: Bat Opera

Artist Dan Graham and writer Jessica Russell's playful Architecture/Astrology considers some of the most important and innovative figures in the world of architecture from an angle few would expect: their star signs. Originally published as a column for Domus magazine, Graham and Russell's book integrates critical analysis with astrology and mythology to offer alternative perspectives on the work and personalities of artist/architects including Frank Gehry (a restless, dreamy Pisces), Frank Lloyd Wright (a romantic Gemini with one foot in the past and the other in the future), Eero Saarinen (a dynamic, dramatic Leo) and Le Corbusier (a logical, balanced Libra). With accompanying illustrations by Mieko Meguro, Architecture/Astrology itself resembles the best sort of architect, one who is at once rigorous and whimsical, with his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds.

Architecture/Astrology: By Dan Graham and Jessica Russell.

New York–based artist Cory Arcangel (born 1978) is a leading exponent of technology-based art, drawn to video games and software for their ability to rapidly formulate new communities and traditions and, equally, their speed of obsolescence. His work bridges the highbrow and the lowbrow, popular culture and art. With All The Small Things, Arcangel presents media and cultural references that are widely accessible and known to the masses, in novel and unorthodox ways. Arcangel is a firm believer in making his work available and freely shares many of his video and code-based works on the Internet. His practice has gained him an immense online presence and following that is both independent of and outside the mainstream fine art world. This first comprehensive monograph was designed in close cooperation with the artist.

Cory Arcangel: All The Small Things (Heart Future Ixhibition Program)

Secret Life, a collaboration between the celebrated artists Jonathan Horowitz (born 1966) and Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965), revolves around the broad theme of flowers and plants. Through painting, print, drawing, sculpture and photography, the artists delve into the history of floral symbolism in art and literature.

Jonathan Horowitz & Elizabeth Peyton: Secret Life

The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg was selected to host Manifesta 10 because of its intellectual and historical relationship with Eastern and Western Europe--a principle that is also central to Manifesta, as the single roving European biennial. Over 50 artists were invited by editor Kasper K nig to illustrate their sections in the catalogue.

Manifesta 10

History & Criticism

Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years is the first monograph on the work of Bernadette Corporation, the New York–based collective founded in the early 1990s. The book extends from their retrospective exhibition of the same name held at Artists Space in 2012, constituting a further site to reframe the Corporation's activities and identity of the past 20 years. The book is structured chronologically, loosely following the year-by-year timeline of the group's history that also formed the backbone of their Artists Space exhibition. The publication gathers a vast array of visual and textual material. It includes the Bernadette Corporation's operations within the realm of fashion; their interventions into the magazine culture of the 1990s, as well as the group's own short-lived periodical, Made in USA; the fragmented output of Pedestrian Cinema during the group's Berlin years; and the fusion of poetics, branding and meta-commentary within their gallery shows of the 2000s.

Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years

Conceived and designed by Sterling Ruby (born 1972) himself, Softwork is generously illustrated with dozens of full-page photographs of works from the artist's last four exhibitions, as well as many images from Ruby's studio that provide insight into the artist's working methods. Ruby makes urethane and bronze sculptures, hallucinatory color-field canvases and handmade ceramics, addressing the conflict between individual desire and social structure, and the influence of institutional architecture, both literal and figurative, on human behavior and psychology. "'Soft Work' is only a didactic term. It's not hard, it's not solid, it's malleable," Ruby told ArtInfo. "In America, there is a domesticity that is not associated with masculinity―or if it is, it's usually associated with a difference, a contradiction." Some of the works in Softwork also point to the influence of the late Mike Kelley, to whom Ruby was both studio assistant and close friend.

Sterling Ruby: Softwork

Myers-Szupinska, Julian

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