This publication catalogues and explores the latest sculptural installation by Robert Gober, one of contemporary art's most highly regarded figures and one of our best storytellers. Unlike anything that has been seen before, this new work explores questions of sexuality, religion, relationships, nature, and memory, all informed by the current political climate. Loosely following the floor plan of a church, the installation brings together many of Gober's known sculptural motifs and introduces new ones as he continues into uncharted artistic territory. The first of the two volumes includes a comprehensive essay by Brenda Richardson written over the course of the two years of the installation's development. Richardson spent hours in the studio in conversation with Gober, and her Lexicon provides an unprecedented glimpse at the working process and multiple layers of meaning in Gober's complex work. The lavishly illustrated second volume reproduces 50 full-color photographs of the completed work.

ROBERT GOBER LEXICON

Brenda Richardson

Reference

Steidl/Matthew Marks Gallery

After completing the installation of his 1996 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Jasper Johns retreated to his studio in Connecticut to wipe the slate clean, beginning a body of work that was a dramatic departure from anything he had made before. This volume reproduces for the first time the complete series of those magnificent works that Johns, one of our greatest living artists, has made over the last eight years.The first painting in this new series included a string hanging from upper right to lower left, generating a curve called a "catenary," and this curve became the compositional backbone of the entire series. Johns produced a total of 61 paintings, drawings and prints based on the catenary theme, all of which are reproduced in this volume. The work is saturated with autobiographical references, both transparent and opaque, while it simultaneously encourages multiple layers of meaning. Sensual surfaces, fragile constructions, and formal rigor meet allusions to key moments in the history of modern art and motifs from Johns's earlier work. The poetry of Johns's catenary series is explored in an illustrated essay by the scholar Scott Rothkopf, published alongside the catalogue's 51 color plates.

Jasper Johns: Catenary

This volume provides a rare glimpse into the most intimate works of the internationally acclaimed artist Brice Marden. Twenty years ago, Marden produced a series of small and virtually unknown paintings on the Greek island of Hydra, which the artist first visited in 1971. Inspired by the island's ancient marble quarries, Marden created these private paintings in oil on marble fragments as tokens for friends and family. Between 1981 and 1987, the artist made a total of 32 paintings on marble, gathered together here for the first time in a single volume. The period coincided with changes in his publicly exhibited paintings. In 1987, the date of his last painting on marble, Marden presented the first public exhibition of his calligraphic paintings, as opposed to his earlier monochrome work. An essay by Lisa Liebmann here helps to contextualize that shift: according to the artist, the diagonal in the marble fragments helped serve as a stepping stone from rectilinear to more organic form.

Brice Marden: Paintings On Marble

Liebmann, Lisa

Between 1960 and 1980, the year of his death, sculptor Tony Smith produced 47 large-scale outdoor works that were both revolutionary and vastly influential. This publication is the first to bring together all of Smith's monumental outdoor works in a single volume, chronologically exploring the developments that were taking place within them over the course of these pivotal years.

Tony Smith: Not an Object. Not a Monument.: The Complete Large-Scale Sculpture of Tony Smith.

Arts & Photography

Smith, Tony

Individual Artists

When asked to organize an exhibition on a theme of his choice, the Los Angeles artist Charles Ray chose that of moral and amoral space, which he took from sculptor Alberto Giacometti's description of one of his own works. A four dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures is the title Ray gave to both the exhibition, which took place at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, and this small, beautifully-produced volume, which accompanies it. Key artworks include Giacometti's 1948 "Standing Woman;" an untitled stack piece by Donald Judd; an ancient Greek kouros from roughly 600 B.C.; a sculpted piece of island marble from Attica; Mark di Suvero's 1960 "Hankchampion;" Jeff Wall's 1990 "A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947;" and a series of 1969 sculptures entitled "The Fall of Man" by the American folk artist Edgar Tolson.

Charles Ray: A Four Dimensional Being Writes Poetry On A Field Of Sculpture