André Kertész’s (b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary; d. 1885) career as a photographer, and the photographs he has made since 1933, have held a key position in art history. Kertész was born in Budapest in 1894 by Hungarian-Jewish origin. He studied at the economic school in Budapest, where he was a diploma student in 1912, the same year in which he got his first camera and he began to photograph with his younger brother.

In 1925, Kertész left Budapest for a three-month residence in Paris, but remained there until 1936. Here he regularly published his work in major journals depicting Paris as the capital of modern life. He made photo portraits on widely different themes, from depictions of artists’ studios to parishes in Paris, his images often combining with elements of experimental graphic design. The genre Kertész helped develop referred to in the literature as a photographic essay that gave Kertész fundamental impetus to photographers such as Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. Kertész moved to New York in 1936.

By the time Kertész passed away in 1985, his work was honored by artists and photographers, collected by major museums and galleries and studied by scholars. One of his first major exhibitions was In 1964, when John Szarkowski organized an exhibition of Kertész at the Museum of Modern Art. In the following decade he exhibited throughout the world; in Tokyo, Stockholm, Budapest, London, Helsinki. In 1976 he was appointed Commander of Arts et Lettres and in 1983 Légion d’honneur. In 1977 he had an exhibition at Center Georges-Pompidou. In 1984 he transferred all his negatives and correspondence to the French state. The archives are managed by the Mission du Patrimoine Photographique in Paris, now a department of Jeu de Paume; www.jeudepaume.org/. In New York, he founded the foundation of “The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation.” Throughout the exhibition “André Kertész of Paris and New York” shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York in 1984, his important historical position was consolidated. In recent times, the exhibition André Kertész of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts in 2005, with the accompanying publication, is the most important event and the beginning of a renewed international interest and publication of his works.

André Kertész

Distortions

Bruce Conner (b. 1938, McPherson, Kansas; d. 2008) worked with a variety of media throughout his career. In his early collages, he used found objects from landfills, the streets, and abandoned apartments, which became the fundamentals of his sculptural and “paper” collages. It was amongst other with these collages that Conner so quickly established himself as one of the leading artists on San Francisco’s art scene. His work with collage, his use of an compilation of found objects, in addition to his fragmented artistic expression, has been central to Conner’s works in general, but is particularly pertinent in his films.

Conner attracted great interest with his first film 

 (1958). Today, the film is considered a core work, both in Conner’s oeuvre and within the larger context of art film. His innovative approach to film as a medium was one of the reasons why he so quickly established a firm grip around the field, and why he was counted as its leading creator.

But the continuous recognition and importance his works with film have achieved is due to more than his ground-breaking technique. The significant role the films have played must be seen in relation to the films’ content, their aesthetic expression, and their capacity to move and entertain their beholder. Several of Conner’s films have a critical undertone directed at the political arena, social relations, and the meaning of popular culture in society. Many os his films can be concurrently be characterised as contemplative, poetic, and almost meditative.

Conner continued to produce films until the end of his life, parallel to his work with other media. This comes to underline the central importance his films have in his artistic output. His last film, 

, was finished in 2008, the year in which he died. The film is made up of a series of clips taken from an earlier unfinished project 

(1966). The film is composed of a series of clips that show images of plants, the San Francisco cityscape and surroundings, a woman in an apartment, and other abstracted pictures. The images change rapidly, in concurrence with the experimental minimalist composer Terry Riley’s “In C” performed with traditional Chinese instruments by the Shanghai Film Orchestra. Riley and Conner worked together on several of Conner’s films, amongst them 

, refers to the trancelike state one may experience with the use of hallucinogenic substances.

Bruce Conner

EASTER MORNING

 Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio) is considered one of the leading photographers of her generation and has over the past 20 years become one of the foremost documentarians of the American landscape. Central to Opie’s production are the notions of the individual’s relationship to community, and the place of the subcultural within the political and social norms and events of modern-day America. Opie’s success in seating the individual and the personal within the social groups in which identity takes shape was first explored in her portraits of transgendered friends and acquaintances from the lesbian and transsexual communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Concurrently, Opie began to document architectural, and through architectural, conventional, America with black-and-white film and an extra-wide angle panoramic camera.

Opie’s work confronts the apparent disparity between the subcultural and the traditional. In her series 

 (2004-05), Opie displayed her own domestic sphere – a household made up of a lesbian couple with their young son and two dogs. Alongside Opie’s pictures of the comfort of her own home, she documented the events that took place in her neighbourhood in the suburbs of South Central Los Angeles and in the national media on the occasion of the presidential elections in 2004. The series underlined the complexity of the American demographic and the presence of the highly individual within the borders of the ordinary. The series also questioned the extent to which the discrepancy between the seemingly abnormal and the seemingly conventional is as large as we assume. Her methodology to produce photographic series consisting of both portraiture and landscape emphasises that America’s diverse social groups share the same environment. Opie’s work remains highly aesthetic and technically masterful, whilst tackling both societal and art historical subject matters.

Opie received her B.F.A from San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and her M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1988. Catherine Opieʼs work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. In 2008, she was honoured with a mid-career survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and she has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2011); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2006); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2002); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1997). Her work is represented in the collections of a number of prestigious public institutions, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tate Gallery, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Opie is a tenured professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles (2001- ), and was a professor at Yale University from 2000 to 2001.

Catherine Opie

Only Miss The Sun When It Starts to Snow

Walls, Windows and Blood

Highschool Football

Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brâncuși (b. 1876, Hobita, Romania; d. 1957) pioneered the extreme simplification of forms. He was born in Hobitza, a village in Romania, and studied at Craiova School of Arts and Crafts, which is where he learned how to carve stone and wood. He began making wooden furniture before going on to study sculpture at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest between 1898 and 1902. He set out for Paris on foot in 1903 and continued his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1905-07.

Brâncuși began to photograph systematically at the end of World War I. From 1905 until the mid-1920s, the artist gradually incorporated photography into a very organic, changeable working process, where it occupied a shifting, but highly creative, position.

To Brâncuși, photography was thus an integral part of his artistic practice from an early stage on and one, which became his total artistic expression from the middle and towards the end of his life. Brâncuși’s photographs clarify how he saw his work and wanted it to be seen; they also show something of his working process. But the photographs’ distinctive emotional tenor, orchestration of form, and exploration with the photographic medium, qualify them as art in their own right. Assembling and reassembling his sculptures for the camera, Brâncuși transformed each unique work into multiples, which he termed 

Constantin Brâncuși’s work has been admired since the 1970s. His photographs have been shown at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover (

, August 23 – November 17, 2013), Centre Pompidou (

Brâncuși: Images, Film sans fin Photographie,

 June 29 – September 12, 2011) and as a central part of the group show 

The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture 1839 to Today,

 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (August 1 – November 1, 2010). The crowded studio views, with their complexes of overlapping sculptures and chunks of material, as well as their emphatic use of light and shadow, justify the critic and photographer John Coplans’s 1980 view of the photographs as a kind of Cubism, a style antithetical to the compressed, single wholeness of Brâncuși’s sculpture.

Constantin Brâncusi

Photographs - Constantin Brâncusi

Daido Moriyama

Vintage photographs from the 1960s and 70s

Dan Flavin (1933-1996) produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially-available fluorescent lamps to create installations, or “situations” as he preferred to call them, of light and color. Through the construction of light, Flavin was able to literally establish and redefine space. A major permanent installation of the artist’s work can be found in Marfa, Texas, and another long-term installation can be seen in Bridgehampton, New York, where in 1983 Flavin began renovating a former firehouse and church to permanently house several of his works and to serve as an exhibition space and printmaking facility for local artists. The building was named the Dan Flavin Art Institute, and is maintained by the Dia Art Foundation.

Flavin`s work was included in a number of key early exhibitions of Minimal art in the 1960s, among them Black, White, and Gray (Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, 1964); Primary Structures (The Jewish Museum, New York, 1966); and Minimal Art (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, 1968). Flavin’s work would continue to be presented internationally over the course of the pursuant decades at such venues as the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri (1973); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (both 1975); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1986); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1992), among others. A major museum retrospective devoted to Flavin’s work was organized, in cooperation with the Estate of Dan Flavin, by the Dia Art Foundation in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where it was first on view in 2004. The exhibition traveled from 2005 to 2007 to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hayward Gallery, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. In 2012, the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, presented a retrospective of the artist’s drawings and, in 2012-13, a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work traveled from the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, to the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland. In 2013-14, the exhibition Artist Rooms: Dan Flavin traveled from the Tate Modern, London, to Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, Scotland. In 2016, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK presented Dan Flavin: It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else.

Dan Flavin

Selected Works

Preoccupied with reinventing the process of painting, David Reed (b. 1946- ) manipulates the forms and associations of the brushstroke to foreground an unresolved tension between the gestural and the systematic. Reed’s work is characterized by fluid marks that reveal the viscosity of paint and the shifting of color in a deliberately flattened manner that can appear almost photographic. Sometimes employing extremely elongated formats, the artist makes concurrent reference to the mechanics of cinema, linking his work to the culture at large while remaining focused on the dynamics of a painterly practice that resists formalism.


David Reed was born in San Diego in 1946. His aunt and uncle, Rosemary and O. P. Reed, and his great-uncle August Biehle were all painters. Reed attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine, and Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating from the latter with a BA in 1968. In 1966 he arrived in New York on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, studying at the New York Studio School under the tutelage of Mercedes Matter and Milton Resnick, and attending a seminar led by Philip Guston.


Reed is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Roswell Museum and Art Center grant, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Ursula Blickle Foundation Art Award. His work has been exhibited widely in international institutions, among them the The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, NY (2019-2021); Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany (2019); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2018); Perez Art Museum, Miami (2016); Museum für Gegenwart, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2015); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2012); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2001); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (1998); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (1995).

David Reed

Dennis Oppenheim (American, September 6, 1938–January 21, 2011) was a conceptual artist, earth artist, sculptor, photographer, and performance artist, who was instrumental in the Performance Art and early Land Art movements. Oppenheim was born in Electric City, WA, and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA, in 1964. Oppenheim went on to study at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, where he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in 1965.

In 1966, the artist relocated to New York, where he taught nursery school and high school art. During this time, he worked to prepare for his first exhibition, which took place in 1968. Oppenheim also participated in the exhibit 

 in 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York, along with such artists as Michael Heizer (American, b.1944), Robert Smithson (American, 1938–1973), and Robert Morris (American, b.1931). In 1968, he became fast friends with Vito Acconci (American, b.1940) and began to work in body art, producing such works as 

By the early 1970s, Oppenheim was among the artists who combined video and film with their performances. One of his solo exhibitions took place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1979. By the early 1980s, he had started to work on his 

, which were immediately followed by the 

. By the 1990s, Oppenheim was commissioned to create large public pieces in many major cities all over the world. He received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was included in the Johannesburg Biennale and the Venice Biennale in 1997. The Vancouver Sculpture Biennale recognized him for Lifetime Achievement in 2007. Oppenheim’s final work was 

 (2011), which is located on the campus of Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, CT. The swarm of birds consists of tinted cast acrylic birds on rolled stainless steel frames with a misting system. Oppenheim died of liver cancer in 2011.

Dennis Oppenheim

Broken Record Blues

When Diane Arbus (b. 1923, New York, New York; d. 1971) died, she was at the top of a career that had taken her from relative success as a fashion photographer in the 1950s to becoming one of the most esteemed contemporary art photographers of her time. She gained legendary status shortly after her death. The prevalent understanding of Arbus’s works as a form of biographical documentary can be ascribed to the status documentary photography gained in an American context through the endorsement of John Szarkowski (1925-2007), and his work as Director of the Photography Department at MoMA.

Arbus got her start with commercial photography, but stopped taking fashion photographs in 1956, and continued her career as an independent photographer in genres such as photojournalism, reportage and portraiture. By working with a conceptual approach to photography with predetermined parameters for each image, Arbus deviates from the impulsive snapshot aesthetic of her time. The random cutting of frames that gave the impression of an authentic and brute reality, typical amongst street photography, which continued to influence Arbus’s photographic practice. She replaced her small format camera and 35-millimetre films with large-format cameras such as Rolleiflex, Mamiya and Pentax around 1962. As a consequence, her compositions became quadratic rather than rectangular, which contributed to underline the strict, almost iconic quality of many of her photographs.

Diane Arbus was the the subject of a major survey at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017, which toured to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition set out to redefine the artist’s work and featured more than 100 of her photographs. In 2003, Arbus’s work received renewed attention through the exhibition 

 held at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The show was later shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and toured until 2006. The Arbus Estate endorsed the exhibition and contributed material that had not previously been shown. In 2007, The Estate of Diane Arbus donated her archive to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A retrospective exhibition of Arbus’s work, entitled 

, was organised by Szarkowski and on view at MoMA in the autumn of 1972. The exhibition was an enormous success was seen by seven million people as it toured the United States until 1975. The publishing house Aperture published the book 

 in 1972, which included a selection of quotes and photographs by Arbus. At the same time, the exhibition 

, curated by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, toured internationally between 1973 and 1979. The exhibitions, publications and reception in the period 1967-73 have to a large extent moulded the later reception of her photography.

Diane Arbus

Dieter Roth

Reykjavik Slides & Collages, Material works, Drawings, Prints

For more than two decades, Doug Aitken (b. 1968, Redondo Beach, California) has produced work that transgresses boundaries and exhibitions that break with tradition exhibition formats. The artist places his work in the context of modern civilisation and poses topical existential questions. Recurring themes such as how the individual perceives collectivity and displacement, and the modern relationship to nature and geography, are explored through a broad range of artistic approaches, often using advanced technology. His photographs, films, installations, sculptures, light boxes and performances have been widely exhibited across the world, and he also produces happenings and book publications. His innovative, site-specific art installations that combine architecture, sound and multichannel videos have been commissioned by prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. 

Aitken explores modern technology’s coexistence with nature, and how it both isolates and engages the individual. Light (its motion and the patterns it creates) is often used as a visual tool. With each artwork, Aitken forms a complex space where the viewer becomes one with the experience, and time, space and memory become fluid concepts. He resists working with static images and experiences.

Doug Aitken has had numerous screenings, solo and group exhibitions, most recently a major survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017) and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015). Previous solo presentations include the Seattle Art Museum (2013); Tate Lliverpool (2012); LUMA Foundation, Arles (2012); Museo d’Art Contemporanea di Roma (2009); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007). He was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. His work is included in the permanent collections of numerous important institutions worldwide.

Doug Aitken

twilight

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska) is a contemporary master and one of the most recognised and influential artists working today. Ruscha is widely celebrated for his pioneering use of myriad media, including conceptually driven artist’s books, drawing, printmaking, film, photography, and painting. He has redefined our vision of American scenery through his landscapes and text-based works that explore the formal elements of printed text and its fluid relationship to the visual image. Ruscha defies the traditional expectations and developments in the recent history of the medium.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937, Ruscha moved to Oklahoma City in 1941. In 1956, he relocated to Los Angeles, in a Jack Kerouac-style road trip along Route 66. In LA, he attended Chouinard Art Institute (1956-60) with the intention of becoming a commercial artist. Like most art students in America at the time, Ruscha had a fling with Abstract Expressionism, but soon found himself attracted to the work of Jasper Johns, whose symmetrical aesthetics went against everything Ruscha had been taught in art school. Although for Ruscha, the lure of a possible career as an illustrator working for Walt Disney and the film industry was an equally great opportunity as the life of a painter, by the early 1960s, he had become well known for his paintings, collages, and printmaking, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group, which also included the artists Robert Irwin, Edward Moses, Ken Price, and Edward Kienholz.

Ed Ruscha has had major exhibitions across the world, most recently at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, organised by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (2016); The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2013); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2013); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012); and Tate Modern, London (2009), to mention only a few. His work is included in the world’s most prestigious institutional collections, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Ruscha represented the United States in the 51st Biennale di Venezia in 2005, and was featured in the 2015 Biennale de Lyon’s exhibition, “La Vie Moderne”. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ed Ruscha

Los Angeles. Then and Now

Spied Upon Scene

L.A. Restaurants

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the most important figures in the history of modern art. His inventive practices as an abstract painter and sculptor were accompanied by a lifelong passion for objective drawing. Through his persistent interest in the perception of the natural world, the artist created an impressive and truly unique body of work.

Kelly was born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York and raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. From 1948-1954, the artist lived in Paris, before he returned to his birthplace New York. In 1970, he moved into his studio in Chatham, New York and purchased a home in nearby Spencertown, where he lived with his long-time partner, the photographer Jack Shear, until the end of his life. Ellsworth Kelly died in 2015.

Major solo exhibitions have been dedicated to the artist by renowned institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (1973), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1979), The Whitney Museum of American Art (1982), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1996). 

In 2002, his plant drawings were shown alongside those of Henri Matisse, whom Kelly had long admired, at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. A major retrospective of his plant drawings took place in 2011 at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and traveled in the same year to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Kelly’s works are owned by the major artistic institutions of Western Europe and America, including the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and many others. Additionally, he created numerous important artworks for public spaces. During his lifetime, Kelly was honored with several awards, including the Praemium Imperiale award for painting, which he received in 2000 from the Japan Art Association, the title of Commandeur des Arts des Lettres, which he received in 2009 by the French government and, in 2013, the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Barack Obama.

Ellsworth Kelly

Plants – Forms, Lines and Curves

Postcards

Since 1979, Peter Fischli (b. 1952, Zürich, Switzerland) and David Weiss (b. 1946, Zürich, Switzerland; d. 2012) have been collaborating on a body of work that combines, rearranges, or otherwise manipulates their daily experiences into something new and unexpected. Executed in a variety of media, including unfired clay, polyurethane, photography, and video, their work playfully ignores the distinction between high and low art. The duo is perhaps best known for the 1987 film 

, in which an improbable, Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events unfolds involving household objects and detritus in their studio.

The work of Fischli and Weiss has been exhibited at major museums and biennials around the world. The artists represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and were awarded the 2003 Golden Lion for 

 (1981-2002), an installation of more than a thousand existential queries collected over several years. Fischli and Weiss also took part in Documenta 8 (1987) and 10 (1997). Their retrospective 

 was organized by the Walker Art Center in 1996 and traveled to San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. In 2006 Tate Modern presented another retrospective, 

, which traveled to the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. They participated in Venice’s 2012 Architectural Biennale and 2013 Art Biennale and have had exhibitions at the Art institute of Chicago (2011) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2013). In 2016 the Guggenheim presented 

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better

, their third career retrospective, which traveled to Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Peter Fischli lives and works in Zurich.

Fischli + Weiss

Airports

The Austrian sculptor Franz West (b. 1947 Vienna, Austria, d. 2012) began his artistic career in the aftermath of the neo-avant-garde and performance tradition of the 1960s. In his hometown Vienna, the Vienna actionists performed brutal happenings in the mid-1960s, as they tried to rid themselves of art’s media, and the material, technical and formal filter that they argued created a distance between art and life. They did so by using the body and objects from everyday life as their means of expression. West reacted to this by reworking impulses from contemporaneous American art on the boarder between happenings, junk sculpture and pop. Two of West’s obvious predecessors are Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, as well as Allan Kaprow’s sculptures and happenings, which are found to be an important tone-setting basis.

The forms in West’s sculptures, whether it is the early plaster-, wood- and metal sculptures he gives the generic term Paßstücke (in English: Adaptives or Fitting Pieces), or the more recent, painted, welded aluminium sculptures, seem like something in between the biological/ bodily and the quite random and strange. This ambiguity gives the works a tension that enriches their emotional register and potential for interpretation. In many of the Passstücke, a small fragment of applicability can be found, something that can be seen in sculptures such as the handle of a compass saw that sticks out of a rather shapeless lump of plaster (wherein the saw blade has been baked) or as two steel loops that are reminiscent of the handles on a handbag, where ”the bag” is a compact plaster form moulded at the bottom of a pot, but not to call it a large handbag, a lump of plaster, that occupies all free space. This is typical of both the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde in its many occurrences the last 50 years – that an object’s utilitarian and beneficial aspect is discarded. Art becomes something that is meaningless for all practical purposes, by being completely without function.

Franz West has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently a major survey that opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 2018 before travelling to Tate Modern, London in 2019. His works are included in numerous important institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and MUMOK, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, in the artist’s hometown of Vienna.

Franz West

Paßstücke

New York-born artist Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) developed his personal photo- graphic style as a freelance photojournalist. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented the first major show of Winogrand ́s works, which was later fol- lowed by two exhibitions, “The Animals,” in 1969, and “Public Relations,” in 1976.

Garry Winogrand’s photographs catch the pulse of urban American post-war society and social diversity, portraying popular culture and life of consumption led by many Americans. With predecessors such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Winogrand and his contemporaries Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston and Diane Arbus left an indelible mark on the history of photography.

Winogrand is generally credited with having established “street photography” as a genre, and with his much copied use of the wide-angle lens and tilted picture-frame, he exerted considerable influence over contemporary and later photographers. The images are often laden with visual puns, disquieting juxtapositions and uncomfortable confrontations, often with an element of the tragicomic.

Winogrand was the recipient of numerous grants, including several Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has been the subject of many museum and gallery exhibitions, and was included in the 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.


In 2013 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective exhibition including over 160 of Winogrand’s photographs. The exhibition traveled to venues including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; Fundacíon MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain.

Garry Winogrand

Photographs - Garry Winogrand

With his characteristic colour-vibrating and pastose paintings, Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932, London, England; d. 2017) was considered one of the most important living painters. A classic Hodgkin painting, of the kind that secured him international recognition in the 1980s, is relatively small, powerful, composed of dense brushstrokes and stippling, and saturated with intense, bright colours. Paintings from this period were the result of several decades of work with painting and graphics. According to Hodgkin, his paintings were representational, meaning that they are not non-figurative. These are paintings whose forms and colours refer to something beyond their mere presence on the wooden panels they are painted on. They represent, or correspond with, other paintings, and they correspond to emotions experienced in real situations and with memories of those. The paintings are concurrently in dialogue with contemporary art and art history. The freedom and naturalness that we observe in Hodgkin’s last pictures are the result of over sixty years of artistic practice.

Hodgkin received The Turner Prize in 1985, was knighted in 1992 and was made a Companion of Honour in 2003. His paintings have been exhibited at some of the most influential museum institutions in the world. In 2010-2011 the travelling exhibition Time and Place, 2001-2010 was shown at Modern Art Oxford, De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg and at the San Diego Museum of Art. In 2007, the exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1992-2007 was shown at Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven and later at the Fitzwilliam Museum of the University of Cambridge. A large retrospective was held in 2006-2007 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Tate Britain in London and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh exhibited Howard Hodgkin: Large Paintings in 2002 and in 1995 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited 

Howard Hodgkin

New Paintings

Ida Ekblad (b. 1980, Norway) is one of the most recognized contemporary artists of her generation working today. Her artistic practice comprises a variety of mediums such as painting, sculpture, performance, filmmaking, and poetry. Her work is inspired by a multitude of sources and one can recognize sub-cultural and pop-cultural influences. Art historically, Ekblad’s oeuvre is influenced by a variety of artists such as Odilon Redon, Paula Modersohn Becker, Paul Thek, Harriet Backer, Edvard Munch, Florine Stettheimer, and Helen Frankenthaler. Her style is signified by a genre-crossing approach and incorporates, for example, the aesthetics of graffiti, manga culture, arts and crafts, old master paintings, deviant art, and meme culture. Ekblad’s practice is focused on our hyper-retinal culture which she tries to visually record and comprehend. “Whatever sense I find,” she says, “is primarily an aesthetic sense. In painting, sculpture, and via material twists and turns, I am striving to make a personal and decent pattern of what happens to come my way.” (Ida Ekblad, Artist Statement, “A mansion for all lovely forms,” 2018)

Ekblad lives and works in Oslo. She is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2007) and the Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles, USA (2008). She participated in the Venice Biennale (2011, 2017), as well as in numerous solo and group exhibitions, besides her most recent solo show in 2021 at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, her work was presented at a variety of institutions in solo exhibitions, among them 2019 at Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland and Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (2018); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2017); National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, Oslo, Norway (2013); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2010); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2010). 

Her work is owned by a multitude of important public and private institutions and collections around the world.

Ida Ekblad

SLICE OF THE INACCESSIBLE

ACTIVATED SLUDGE

Isa Genzken was born in 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, a small town outside Hamburg, Germany. While studying at the renowned Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in the 1970s, she created large-scale stereometric wooden floor sculptures, which gained her international acclaim early on. In the 1980s, she began making sculptures in plaster and concrete, which have a wide range of sizes – some are small maquettes, while others are monumental in scale. Later, her practice included also painting, and from the 1990s on, she started to experiment with architectural forms in several mediums such as collages, assemblages, and artist books. Genzken began exhibiting her work in 1976 when she was the youngest woman to have a solo presentation at the influential Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf.

The most recent solo exhibition of her works opened this year at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. In 2015, the exhibition 

 was first on view at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and travelled in 2016 to the Martin- Gropius-Bau, Berlin. In 2014, the exhibition 

 was displayed at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. In the same year, 

 was presented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in Austria and subsequently travelled earlier that year to the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt. In 2013, The Museum of Modern Art, New York organized Genzken’s first American museum survey, making it the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date, encompassing all media from the past forty years. The show travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Dallas Museum of Art in 2014. Her work has been the subject of major traveling museum surveys, including those organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2009 (travelled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, 2002 (travelled to Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland 2003); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1992 (travelled to Portikus, Frankfurt, 1992; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Städtisches Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, both 1993). Other venues which have hosted important solo exhibitions include the Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2014); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2010); Camden Arts Center, London; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Secession, Vienna (all 2006); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2002, organized by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst on the occasion of the artist receiving the Wolfgang Hahn Prize); and Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2000). Additionally, her works have also been chosen repeatedly to be presented at the Venice Biennale (2015, 2007, 2003, 1993, and 1982) and she also took part three times at documenta (2002, 1992, and 1982) and the Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007, 1997, and 1987).

Works by Genzken are held by major museums and public collections worldwide, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. The artist lives and works in Berlin.

Isa Genzken

The performative events, sculptures, drawings, installations, and wearable art of James Lee Byars (b. 1932, Detroit, Michigan; d. 1997) has been widely exhibited internationally. Up until his death at the age of 65, Byars had remained in constant pursuit of the concept of perfection and truth.

Byars shaped his persona and career into a continuous performance in which his life and art merged. Through what he called “the first totally interrogative philosophy”, Byars attempted to make the limits of human knowledge visible, alleging that questions appeared to be the only possible knowledge and “the ultimate statement of reality”. Over the span of sixteen years, he sent hundreds of “letters” to various public figures as well as friends and acquaintances. His 

 consisted of impossibly long scrolls of illegible text, ornamented with stars. Byars’ reflections on death, another recurring topic in his art, emerge in one of the few performances documented on video titled 

 Here the artist is seen dressed in his usual gold-lamé suit slowly rolling a ball made of lava through the empty streets of Amsterdam.

James Lee Byars’s work been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide, including Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia; Castello di Rivoli/Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and Fundaçao de Serralves, Porto. Important posthumous exhibitions include The Arts Club of Chicago (1998); 

The Epitaph of Con. Art is which Questions have disappeared?

, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (1999); 

, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (2004); 

, Whitney Museum of American Art (2004); 

, Musée d’art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, and ARoS Kunstmuseum, Århus (2012-2013). In 2013, 

The Figure of the Interrogative Philosophy

 were included in the 55th Venice Biennale exhibition 

 curated by Massimiliano Gioni. In 2014, MoMA PS1 in New York presented 

, the most comprehensive survey of Byars organised in North America since the artist’s death.

James Lee Byars

Sphere Is a Sphere Is a Sphere Is a Sphere

Jay DeFeo (b. 1929, Hanover, New Hampshire; d. 1989) is best known for her magnum opus 

 (1958-66), a painting she worked on incessantly for eight years, adding and subtracting layers of oil paint on a 3,3 x 2,4 m canvas positioned in a bay window in her studio. The work weighed nearly a tonne when it was removed with a forklift in 1965. More recently, DeFeo has been recognised for the diverse and experimental range of works in drawing, photography, painting, collage and sculpture that she produced over more than four decades. The works she created between 1972 and 1988, she revisited a number of core subjects throughout her career, approaching them with different techniques and materials. They resonate with her centrepiece 

 in form and composition and include images that reveal the texture of hair and fur, the use of linear perspective, and those that offer an expression of psychological nuances in objects she observed in her immediate surroundings. The images reveal how DeFeo abstracted the objects she depicted by retaining their form, but obscuring their identity.

DeFeo was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 and subsequently travelled through Europe and North Africa on a fellowship from the university. Upon her return, she became a central figure in the Bay Area community of artists, poets and musicians, later labelled the Beat generation. DeFeo had several solo exhibitions and was included in the seminal show 

, organised by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1959. There, DeFeo’s emotive and allusive paintings were highly distinguishable from the exhibited work of her East-Coast counterparts, who included Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Jay DeFeo’s work has received widespread posthumous recognition and is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2012, the Whitney Museum of American Art organised the comprehensive exhibition 

 in the context of DeFeo’s larger body of work. The exhibition opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012 and travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013.

Jay DeFeo

A Rose Is a Sun Is a Flame Is a Star Is a Dove

Joe Bradley (b. 1975, Kittery, Maine) shifts confidently through disparate styles and media: arranging monochrome paintings into Pac Man-like figures, scrawling primeval symbols on raw canvases, and painting large abstractions. More recently, he has included sculpture in his practice, presenting both figurative pieces in wood and bronze, and monumental, rectangular aluminium works in vibrant colours that can be shown both indoors and outdoors. Along the way, and across these expressions, Bradley has become one of the most closely watched artists of his generation.

Bradley was born in Kittery, Maine in 1975. After receiving his B.F.A. in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, he moved to New York City. He continuously painted, and had his first solo show in Boston in 2002, where he exhibited landscape paintings. These were never straightforward landscapes, but sunsets and tropical scenes derived from found postcards that he would inject a bit of irony into, a cartoon-like feature that has remained in his work ever since. He quickly became a part of the New York art scene, and it did not take long before he was included in a number of solo and group exhibitions in the city.

Bradley’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at ConTEMPorary, New York (2003); P.S.1 Contemporary Art, Long Island (2006); and Le Consortium, Dijon (2014). Recent group exhibitions include “EXPO 1: NEW YORK (curated by Klaus Biesenbach)”, P.S.1 Contemporary Art, Long Island (2013); “The Inevitable Figuration”, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2013); “The Forever Now: Contemporary Paintings in an Atemporal World (curated by Laura Hoptman)”, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014–15); and “New York Painting”, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015). Bradley’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008). His work is included in public and private collections including The Saatchi Gallery, London; Hall Art Foundation, Reading; De La Cruz Collection, Miami; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. In the autumn of 2017, Bradley will have a major solo show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Bradley currently lives and works in New York.

Joe Bradley

Jonathan Lasker ( b. 1948, Jersey City, New Jersey) attended the School of Visual Arts in New York in the mid-1970s before he enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1977. The California-based art school, where the Professors John Baldessari and Michael Asher taught at the time Lasker attended, was a bulwark for Conceptual art, where the medium of painting was both discouraged and regarded to be dead. Ready to tackle this rejection of painting as a viable art form, Lasker re-introduced elements including figure / ground relationships and pictorial depth in his work. Lasker was inspired by highly individualist artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in whose work he saw a distanced approach to mark-making, and also by the visiting Professors Susan Rothenberg and Richard Artschwager, who were interested in the re-introduction of image after Minimalism. Although Lasker did not fully reject the self-contingency of modern art, he rejected the reductionism of Greenbergian Formalists. Lasker began to find a way to synthesise objecthood and metaphor; and although this seems oxymoronic, Lasker has, through his individual technique and his paintings’ titles, successfully re-established painting’s relationship to both physical reality and metaphor.

Lasker’s thick and colourful impasto brushstrokes on flat monochrome backgrounds demonstrate his conscious approach to art through the inert quality of the brushstrokes. They ground Lasker’s works as real objects, and yet metaphorically re-introduce figure forms into abstract painting, as well as the symbol of picture making 

 lost in Minimalist art. The conception of Lasker’s paintings is established in small oil studies, in which the painter’s creativity is formalised by combining colours, layers, figures and vacant space. These studies are later remade on large-scale canvases; but the preliminary works are never directly copied and Lasker allows himself to improvise throughout the entire working process.

Jonathan Lasker’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe since the 1980s, including solo exhibitions at Cheim & Read, New York, NY; the retrospective 

 travelled from Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (1997) to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland (1998) and to Kunstverein im St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Switzerland (1998). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain held a retrospective of Lasker’s work in 2003, which travelled to K20, Kunstsammlung Nordhrein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2003). Lasker’s work has also been featured in numerous major group exhibitions throughout his career. His work is to be found in some of the most prestigious public institutions worldwide, including Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, to mention only a few. Lasker’s work is currently part of the exhibition 

, which opened Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, April 16, 2014. Lasker. Lasker’s work was exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne, St.Étienne, France in 2015. The artist lives and works in New York, New York.

Jonathan Lasker

Recent Paintings

Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008) was born in Amagasaki west of Osaka, in Hyogo prefecture, west Japan. Due to the insecurities of the war, including the scarcity of food and the danger of air raids, Shiraga was unable to move to Tokyo to study at the prestigious Tokyo School of Fine Art [Tokyo Nijutsu Gakkō; now Tokyo University of the Arts]. As an alternative, he enrolled at the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting [Kyoto Shiritsu Kaiga Senmon Gakkō; now Kyoto City University of Arts]. The school did not offer training in Western painting techniques [

], but only in traditional Japanese painting [

]. During the time he spent at the school, Shiraga found the traditional Japanese disciplines restrictive and inhibiting to his freedom. After finishing his training, he gravitated towards Western art. In 1954 he founded the artists’ collective Zero-kai, together with Kanayama Akira, Murakami Saburō and Tanaka Keiko. In December 1954, this collective was invited to merge with another group, Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai, in Osaka. The Gutai group was led by the more established artist Yoshihara Jirō. The core of the group consisted of the artists Murakami Saburō, Shimamoto Shōzō, Tanaka Atsuko, Kanayama Akira, Motonaga Sadamasa and Shiraga. The name Gutai is related to the Japanese word 

, meaning ‘concrete’, ‘specific’. The group’s objective was to create a new, unique art that had never been seen before. Yoshihara Jirō gave the group the task: “Never imitate others! Make something that has never existed!” 

He wanted to initiate a new artistic movement.

Shiraga’s art is physical and masculine. His pictures are often large, thus conveying a clear sense of the activity involved in their making. Each picture is the result of a 

. In his studio, Shiraga danced while suspended from a rope. His entire artistic output illustrates his physical vigour. His work effuses an impression of health. The painting process was rapid, and the pictures reflect the artist’s exertions and stamina. An artist’s collective output is often described as his 

. In Shiraga’s case, this designation takes on a further dimension, in that his works are also the product of very real 

 work. It is almost as if one can hear Shiraga catching his breath in his paintings. Shiraga himself once said, “I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion.” This attitude was perhaps most evident in his famous performance 

 can be translated as ‘sin’, or it can denote a sinful action and bad karma. Recalling Shiraga’s background as a Buddhist monk, it is tempting to view this in conjunction with the physical work involved in creating the picture. 

 was painted in 2000 and comes across as an inferno of red. Shiraga’s late paintings are full of striking vitality and freshness. But at the time it was painted, the artist was 76 years old. His age must have affected the way he approached his work. With such a demanding working method, it is reasonable to assume he reflected on his own mortality and karma.

Kazuo Shiraga

Paintings

Lee Freidlander

The Little Screens

Since the 1980s, Larner has explored and expanded the possibilities of sculpture by combining geometric formalism with notions of movement and change. Her use of line, color, and shape work to modify and reinvent the formal language of Minimalism, producing new relationships between viewer, sculpture, and the surrounding environment. An inventor of new forms, Larner’s sculptures are not easy to categorize. Larner’s work evokes an exquisite tension through the use of unconventional materials, the manipulation of space, the presence of unexpected color, and the destabilization of monumentality and volume.

Working with both analog and digital tools, Larner’s materials change from work to work and can include fiberglass, crystals, paper, clay, aluminum, steel, rubber, epoxy, mirror, cloth, as well as champagne, caviar, sour cream, and even bacteria, as in her early work where Larner examined issues of transformation and decay in a series of petri dish cultures which she also documented through photography. Indeed an important example from Larner’s oeuvre, 1987’s 

, owned by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, appears at first to be a sculpture adhering to a Minimalist tradition: one wax cube sits atop of a sheet metal cube of roughly the same size. It is only upon a careful reading of the work’s label that it is revealed that the wax cube contains all of the ingredients that comprise a bomb – a makeup that has now made the work all but impossible to transport. Although in all practicalities, the work would not and cannot explode, there lies within it a powerful tension and subtle threat to any institution which houses the work.

 from 1989, which was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Larner wove two curving planes of fibers that define the space around them in different ways, depending on where the viewer stands. The tensile structure has no real weight or solid mass, however, a constant friction is maintained between the object and the space of presentation. The force of the object is such that if the tension of the fibers is too strong, it is possible to rip out and destroy that part of the building, while if the tension is too loose, the lines of the piece would droop causing a complete loss of buoyancy to the work. There is a perfect, tentative balance that must be achieved between what will hold the ropes tightly and what the institutional structure can handle to maintain that tension. A similar investigation into such tensions was explored by the artist in her work 

, 1992 which was installed on the occassion of her survey exhibition in 2006 at Kunsthaus Graz.

Larner began including ceramic sculpture in her artistic practice in the late 1990s. During these early years, Larner was able to audit classes by Ken Price (1935-2012), a revered Los Angeles sculptor whom Larner had long-admired. Through his tutelage, Larner was able to explore slab building, glazing, firing, and the history of ceramics. Fascinated by the autonomy of this ancient medium, Larner experimented with various compositions and forms, pushing the limits of the material. In her work, Larner exploits the process of firing and glazing which, through each step, harbors a moment of unpredictability and chance that is significant for the final object. As Larner has remarked, “As I worked with different clays and ceramics more of the extreme malleability and ubiquity of it sunk in along with the sense that it comes from underground. It is such an old material and métier, it has so much history, but for me, it seems still wide open and very emotionally resonant in its more unperfected states.”

Liz Larner (b. 1960) received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1985. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Larner’s work will be the subject of a solo museum exhibition at Sculpture Center, Long Island City in 2021, which will travel to The Contemporary Austin and the Walker Art Center. A solo presentation of her work will be held at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2021, as well. She was featured in 

The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection

, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019 – 2020). Selected solo museum exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum (2016); Art Institute of Chicago (2015); 

Two or Three or Something: Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner

, Kunsthaus Graz, (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001-02); MAK, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (1998); and Kunsthalle Basel (1997). She has been included twice in the Whitney Biennial (2006, 1989). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Nancy Graves Founda- tion Grant (2014); Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award (2002); Anonymous Was a Woman (2000); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1999). Work by the artist is held in prominent international collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Collecion Jumex, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Liz Larner

New Works

Until her death at the age of 98, Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris, France; d. 2010) continued to create new bodies of work with her characteristic visual language. Throughout her 70-year-long artistic career, she cultivated a consistent vocabulary of forms and motifs, expressing aspects of her own personal history and recurring themes such as marriage, motherhood, sexuality, femininity, and domesticity. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, Bourgeois produced work in media including drawing, painting, textile, sculptures in numerous materials, as well as installations and performances.

The female body and motherhood were themes that occupied Bourgeois unrelentingly, and the pregnant woman became a key figure in her devotion to transform her thoughts and emotions into form and colour. Drawing and printmaking were also an important part of Bourgeois’ practice, and she considered her graphic works a natural extension of the three-dimensional objects and forms she sculpted.

Louise Bourgeois studied Mathematics at the Sorbonne University, Philosophy at the University of Paris, Art History at the École du Louvre, and Fine Arts at the École des Beaux Arts. Her 1982 retrospective 

 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was the museum’s first ever retrospective of a female artist. Since then, Bourgeois has been considered the most important female artist of our times. An extensive retrospective of her work opened at Tate Modern, London, in 2007, and travelled to Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., through May 2009. In 2011, the exhibition 

Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed

 opened at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, and travelled to Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paolo, and Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. Bourgeois’ work has been exhibited extensively, and is to be found in the world’s most important public collections, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, and Bilbao; Kunstmuseum Basel; Kunstmuseum Bern; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; Tate Modern, London; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Uffizi Museum, Florence; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. The retrospective 

Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back

 opened at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 2015.

Louise Bourgeois

Late Work

Personages

Woven Memories

Lucas Blalock (b. 1987, Asheville, North Carolina) set out as a photographer in the 1990s, finding himself discontent with the quality of digital photography, deciding to continue to work with an analogue camera. He favoured the 4 x 5 format, and started scanning his pictures into Photoshop, where he post-produced them through colour spacing and by removing dust from the negatives. His subjects are cheap everyday materials bought at ¢99 stores, or found materials, which are set up as still-lives in his studio. He also produces portraits, and photographs familiar outdoors surroundings.

Central to Blalock’s practice are the theoretical questions that a new generation of photographers occupy themselves with. They contest what image making has become in an age of mass-produced images circulating online, particularly through social media, taken by anyone with their hands on a pocket-sized camera or a mobile phone. Similar to how fin-de-siècle artists began the long-lasting dialogue on the role of representation in the age of photography, this new generation of photographers reflects on how the medium of digital photography can separate the art photograph from that of amateurs through self-reflexivity. Likening his work to that of Bertholt Brecht, the 20th-century creator of Epic Theatre, Blalock is concerned with how art photography as a medium reveals how digital manipulation both alters and adds to reality by removing the photographed further and further away from the original. By using familiar objects, and digitally altering them through obvious manipulation, Blalock manifests photographers’ attempts to strip their subjects of their identity by moving the subject away from veracity. Both the photographing, and the subsequent work in Photoshop, is part of a machine, which Blalock calls the assisted camera. Both processes make up contemporary picturing, entailing that both the straight photograph, and its manipulated sibling, are means to represent and reflect on the world. Blalock’s work in Photoshop is poorly executed and not in the least satisfactory. In this way, he points to the changing role of the art image – no longer focused on the social commentary of the 20th Century – and instead adding to that reality it seems impossible to present through realism. The viewer is invited to reflect on his or her perception of the world and how it is conveyed through imagery.

Peder Lund

Artists