Helen Molesworth

An illustrated reader featuring a collection of essays from trailblazing curator and writer Helen Molesworth – the first book of her collected writings

Over the past three decades, Helen Molesworth’s singular voice and lively curatorial vision has established her as one of the most dynamic and influential voices in the art world. This generously illustrated reader – the first ever collection of her writings – presents 24 essays from the past 30 years, gathered from exhibition catalogs and art publications such as 

The volume opens with a new essay that lays out Molesworth’s belief in art’s unique capacity for merging knowledge and feeling. It also includes new critical and reflective commentary on her past writing, an innovative approach that will position 

 as an indispensable volume for viewing and thinking about contemporary art for generations to come.

Helen Molesworth: Open Questions

Leo Amino

Edited with text by Genji Amino. Texts by Julie Amino, Aruna D'Souza, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lucy R. Lippard, Susette Min, Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Mary Whitten, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Karen Yamashita. Chronology by Genji Amino and Christina Hiromi Hobbs. Afterword by Jeff Arnal

The first monograph to be published featuring the work of the Japanese American artist, 

 introduces a vital revision into both the canon of 20th century avant-garde sculpture and the history of Asian American art.

The volume is published in association with the first significant museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s work since 1985, 

at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and shares a title with the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 1973, held at David Zwirner Gallery in 2020. Edited and written by the artist's grandchild, poet and curator Genji Amino, the book includes additional texts by a selection of writers, poets and scholars including Aruna D'Souza, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lucy Lippard, Susette Min, Neferti Tadiar, Mary Whitten, Ronaldo Wilson and Karen Yamashita. Richly illustrated with images from the BMC Museum and Zwirner exhibitions, the volume includes an extended chronology featuring never before seen archival images and ephemera from across the artist’s career.

Amino is the first artist in the United States to take up plastics as a principal material of sculptural composition, the innovator of cast plastics in American sculpture, and the most represented artist of color in the history of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s annual exhibitions for sculpture after Isamu Noguchi. He is the only Asian American artist to teach on faculty in the history of the Summer Art Sessions at Black Mountain College, where he taught alongside artists including Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and informed the education of students Ruth Asawa, Kenneth Noland, and Harry Seidler, among others. Recommended to the faculty at Cooper Union by Josef Albers, Amino taught there for twenty five years, introducing students such as Jack Whitten to sculptural concerns.

Across a breadth of media and compositional approaches often remarked during the artist’s lifetime for its inventiveness and versatility, Amino’s oeuvre brings into focus the dynamics of perception, articulating space, light, and color through an optics of encounter, interpenetration, and absorption. Almost exclusively self-taught, Amino drew on three months’ training in direct carving technique at the American Artists School in Greenwich Village in order to adapt the study of form latent in wood grain into a promiscuous and autodidactic material investigation. Beginning in the early 1940s, the artist’s experiments in new media emerged from his dissatisfaction with painting on the sculptured surface. In 1945, Amino became the first American sculptor to employ cast plastics in an exploration of the question of interior and exterior relation through the problem of integral color, introducing the newly declassified military and industrial material of polyester resin into a history of media experiment following the Plexiglas works of Bauhaus and constructivist artists László Moholy-Nagy and Naum Gabo. Amino envisioned a mode of sculpture for which the principal means of composition would be light and color as early as 1949, anticipating the concerns of the next generation’s Minimalist and Light and Space movements whose artists would take up his medium of choice two decades later. In 1965, Amino made the decision to abandon his other avenues of inquiry in order to dedicate himself exclusively to the new material, beginning a series of geometric, 

 compositions in resin that he would pursue until his passing in 1989.

Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Ruth Asawa with hanging wire sculpture, 1951. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Richly illustrated volume exploring the inseparable histories of modernist abstraction and twentieth-century textiles.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke, 

 offers a fresh and authoritative look at textiles—particularly weaving—as a major force in the evolution of abstraction. This richly illustrated volume features more than fifty creators whose work crosses divisions and hierarchies formerly segregating the fine arts from the applied arts and handicrafts.

 begins in the early twentieth century, rooting the abstract art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the applied arts and handicrafts, then features the interdisciplinary practices of Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and others who sought to effect social change through fabrics for furnishings and apparel. Over the century, the intersection of textiles and abstraction engaged artists from Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks to Rosemarie Trockel, Ellen Lesperance, Jeffrey Gibson, Igshaan Adams, and Liz Collins, whose textile-based works continue to shape this discourse. Including essays by distinguished art historians as well as reflections from contemporary artists, this ambitious project traces the intertwined histories of textiles and abstraction as vehicles through which artists probe urgent issues of our time.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction

Portrait of Neo Rauch, 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter.

His enigmatic, equivocal paintings require a long look to fully appreciate the complexity of their composition, their play on scale and the abundance of symbols. They weave unexpected links between periods and places, between history and the present, and draw on skilful references to the Italian Renaissance, German Romanticism and Socialist Realism. Neo Rauch invents a painting 'like a dream' that interweaves scenes and allusions, offering the viewer a wide range of open-ended reflections on history, heritage, the power of art, the role of the artist and the impasses of contemporary society.

In keeping with the ambition of the event, the exhibition at MO.CO. brings together hundreds of works by the artist, including over forty canvases, many of them of impressive size. Entitled Le songe de la raison (The Dream of Reason), after Goya's engraving El sueño de la razon produce monstruos (The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters), from which Neo Rauch sometimes drew inspiration, this retrospective retraces the painter's singular career from the early 1990s to the present day. After a vast selection of drawings and watercolours spanning the period from 1990 to 2021, the retrospective unfurls on the three floors of the MO.CO. an ensemble of major canvases borrowed from numerous foreign collectors and museums, never before exhibited in France.

This original, carefully produced work is the first French-language publication on Neo Rauch, and includes an interview with the artist and around sixty selected works.

Neo Rauch: The Dream of Reason

Edited by Kim Conaty and Edouard Kopp. Contributions by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Jordan Troeller, Scout Hutchinson, Kirsten Marples and Isabel Bird

A groundbreaking examination of how the act of drawing was a vital component of Ruth Asawa’s multifaceted art

“A revelatory exhibition. . . . [A] fine exhibition catalog.”—Nancy Princenthal, 

Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), widely known for her looped-wire sculptures, was an inveterate drawer. She filled sketchbook after sketchbook and even stated that drawing was central to her sculpture. This volume is the first to consider the significance of drawing in Asawa’s oeuvre throughout her career, featuring essays that examine the range of Asawa’s aesthetic maneuvers across materials and techniques; how Asawa’s drawing intertwined with the Bay Area arts community and her contributions to public education as a teacher and organizer; and the influence of Josef Albers’s pedagogy and Asawa’s lifelong adoption of his type of paper folding. Tracing Asawa’s artistic journey from her first formal art lessons in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II through her time at Black Mountain College and beyond, this comprehensive overview of the artist’s drawings includes reproductions of more than one hundred works—many of which have never been published—organized into eight thematic sections that cut through time, reflecting an art-making practice that was more circular or cyclical than linear.

Ruth Asawa: Through Line

A portrait of Gerhard Richter by Werner Bartsch.

Dieter Schwarz

Foreword by David Zwirner. Text by Dieter Schwarz

This highly anticipated catalogue, accompanying Gerhard Richter’s first exhibition with David Zwirner, presents Richter’s last paintings along with his recent explorations in drawing, printing, and sculpture.

This limited, exclusive edition is packaged in a luxurious cloth slipcase and is signed by the artist.

“[His last paintings] can feel almost like exquisite texts to be read. . . . Their freshness and spontaneity feels like a new beginning.” —Roberta Smith, 



Known for his abstract and realist paintings, Gerhard Richter has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to the medium and its formal and conceptual possibilities. This remarkable book celebrates the breadth of Richter’s newest bodies of work and archives a historical moment in the artist’s career.

Full-color plates and installation views showcase a selection of the artist’s final works on canvas—made just before he announced his retirement from oil painting in 2017—alongside an expansive suite of new drawings made with ink, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, a remarkable series of chromatic inkjet prints titled mood, and a stunning glass sculpture that debuted at the exhibition in New York. A newly commissioned essay by Dieter Schwarz, one of the foremost experts on Richter’s oeuvre, illustrates the artist’s path toward his newest bodies of work. Schwarz describes Richter in his studio, revealing the creative process behind his iconic practice.

Out of stock

Gerhard Richter: New York 2023 (Special Edition)

Portrait of Kerry James Marshall, 2018. Photo by Jason Bell

A complete survey of Marshall’s prints from the 1970s to the present, with many previously unseen works

Kerry James Marshall is famed for his beautifully executed paintings that address the under-representation of the Black figure in the Western pictorial tradition. Though best known as a painter, Marshall has throughout his career also produced a vast graphic oeuvre that has been seldom seen and rarely documented. Marshall spent his youth building his craft in drawing and painting, but also in wood engraving and printing; by his mid-twenties, he recalls, "I could do woodcuts, etchings, aquatints." Most of his prints have been produced not in professional print workshops but by the artist, working alone in his studio. They range from images the size of postcards to his 50-foot-long, 12-panel woodcut 

 (1998–99), to iterations of his ongoing magnum opus 

. And while some have entered prominent museum collections, many exist only in private collections or the artist’s archive and are unknown to the public. This catalogue raisonné offers the first public account of these important works and the first in-depth study of the role of printed images and print processes in Marshall’s work as a whole.

Kerry James Marshall: The Complete Prints

Luc Tuymans in his studio, 2022. Photo by Otman Q

This limited signed edition, only available as a complete set, includes the artist’s signature on the title page of each volume. Each volume is enclosed in its own slipcase.



Edited by Eva Meyer-Hermann

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. From his generative early work to his most iconic canvases, the catalogue raisonné charts the artist’s investigation into painting’s relationship to history and technology.

The three-volume catalogue raisonné of paintings surveys Tuymans’s oeuvre of nearly six hundred works, made between 1972 and 2018. Each painting is illustrated and features its full exhibition history and literature notations. Each volume includes a comprehensive illustrated chronology, highlighting major projects, public commissions, discussions and events, and exhibitions. The first volume includes an expansive bibliography and exhibition history through 2016, with a supplement in the third volume covering the years 2017 and 2018.

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 1–3 (Signed)

Katherine Bernhardt: Why is a mushroom growing in my shower?

Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection

Tiona Nekkia McClodden: MASK/CONCEAL/CARRY

David Zwirner Books: Fall 2023

Richard Shiff: Writing after Art, Essays on Modern and Contemporary Artists

David Zwirner Books: Spring 2023

Derek Jarman

Michael Charlesworth

ekphrasis

By Derek Jarman. Introduction by Michael Charlesworth

 weaves a sensory tapestry that serves as both a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love.

 there are no boundaries or solutions.” —Derek Jarman

Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s death due to an AIDS-related illness, 

 is a daring and powerful work of art. The film and its script, as reproduced in this volume, serve as an impassioned response to the lack of political engagement with the AIDS crisis.

Jarman's Blue moves through myriad scenes, some banal, others fantastical. Stories of quotidian life––getting coffee, reading the newspaper, and walking down the sidewalk––escalate to visions of Marco Polo, the Taj Mahal, or blue fighting yellow. Facing death and a cascade of pills, Jarman presents his illness in delirium and metaphors. He contemplates the physicality of emotions in lyrical prose as he grounds this story in the constant return to Blue—a color, a feeling, a funk. Michael Charlesworth's compelling introduction brings 

 into conversation with Jarman’s visual paintings.

Blue

Walter Price, 2024. Photo by Walter Price

“The paintings in Pearl Lines are a joyous combination of the carefree and the committed. Their sensibility is earnest, and their carnivalesque style engaging without looking labored.” – 

Everything starts with a line, says Georgia-born, Brooklyn-based artist Walter Price (born 1989). Indeed, this volume, published in conjunction with his first UK exhibition, celebrates drawing as the foundation of Price’s practice. Employing a highly developed sense of line and composition, Price expands the mark-making possibilities of colored pencil, graphite, marker and oil pastel in constantly varying gestures paired with collage and appropriated printmaking methods. Quotidien motifs such as bathtubs, sofas and automobiles float amid bright fields of color. Price’s work blurs the boundaries between collective history and individual memory, figuration and abstraction, depicting ambiguous urban and domestic landscapes populated by indefinite, almost spectral, figures and objects.

 compiles works made during Price's residency at the Camden Art Centre in 2020, as well as a selection of recent paintings and works on paper produced in New York.

Walter Price: Pearl Lines

Mamma Andersson, 2023. Photo by Pierre Björk

Edited by Lærke Rydal Jørgensen and Marie Laurberg. Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner and Marie Laurberg. Text by Barry Schwabsky, Karl Ove Knausgård, Magnus Florin. Conversation between Mamma Andersson and Marie Laurberg

Works from the past two decades and a new series from the Swedish master of the oneiric and the unsettling

Mamma Andersson (born 1962) ranks as one of the most important painters of her generation. The Swedish artist is an eminent interpreter of the unique language of painting. With a sharp sense of mood, color and materiality, she has developed a personal take on the classical genres of painting: still lifes, interiors and landscapes are at the crux of her work. Her signature aesthetic is the result of repeated applications and overpainting. Oil on canvas is covered in spray paint, paint is dragged in thin bands across the surface, producing a material fullness and variety.

This catalog accompanies the Louisiana’s exhibition 

, and contains contributions from the author Karl Ove Knausgård, the playwright Magnus Florin and the art writer and poet Barry Schwabsky, in addition to a conversation between Mamma Andersson and the exhibition’s curator, Marie Laurberg.

Mamma Andersson: Humdrum Days

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear book cover

Edited by Roxana Marcoci. With contributions by Quentin Bajac, Yve-Alain Bois, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Clément Chéroux, Durga Chew-Bose, Stuart Comer, Keller Easterling, Paul Flynn, Sophie Hackett, Michelle Kuo, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Phil Taylor, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Andrew Vielkind

Encompassing photography, installation, print media, video and more, this publication is the most comprehensive account of Tillmans's wide-ranging career to date

A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures and deepen the viewer's experience.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Tillmans's work at the Museum of Modern Art, this copiously illustrated volume surveys four decades of the artist's career. An outstanding group of writers offer diverse essays addressing key threads of his multifaceted practice, and a new text by Tillmans himself elucidates the distinctive methodology behind his system of presenting photographs. 

 fear grants readers new insight into the work of an artist who has not only changed the way photography is exhibited but pointed contemporary art in dynamic new directions.

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, The Museum of Modern Art, 2022

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear

Gwendolyn Owens

Philip Ursprung

By Gordon Matta-Clark. Edited by Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung

An essential reference that provides new understanding of the thought processes of one of the most radical artists of the late twentieth century

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) has never been an easy artist to categorize or to explain. Although trained as an architect, he has been described as a sculptor, a photographer, an organizer of performances, and a writer of manifestos, but he is best known for un-building abandoned structures. In the brief span of his career, from 1968 to his early death in 1978, he created an oeuvre that has made him an enduring cult figure.

In 2002, when Gordon Matta-Clark’s widow, Jane Crawford, put his archive on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, it revealed a new voice in the ongoing discussion of artist/architect Matta-Clark’s work: his own. Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung’s careful selection and ordering of letters, interviews, statements, and the now-famous art cards from the CCA as well as other sources deepens our understanding of one of the most original thinkers of his generation. 

Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook

 creates a multidimensional portrait that provides an opportunity for readers to explore and enjoy the complexity and contradiction that was Gordon Matta-Clark.

This collection celebrates Pettibon’s potent and dynamic artistic commentary, ranging from punchy and political to high literary and extremely poetic. His artworks take points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the do-it-yourself aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement.

Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves

“All this must be either surfed or painted”: This is the underlying sentiment behind Raymond Pettibon’s iconic works of surfers and waves in this quintessential volume dedicated to the motif.

This publication explores the intricate relationship between image and language that has long fascinated Pettibon.

Approaching high and low subject matter with equal appetite and comfort, Pettibon plumbs the depths of American sexuality, politics, subcultures, mores, and intellectual histories through themes including Shakespeare, Gumby, surfers, the Bible, baseball, and German Romanticism.

Raymond Pettibon Collection

The work of Donald Judd, one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, has come to define what has been referred to as minimalist art—a label to which the artist strongly objected on the grounds of its generality. This beautifully designed collection highlights the enduring influence and striking visuals in Judd's practice.

A sweeping selection of Donald Judd’s iconic and ambitious works alongside a diverse collection of newly commissioned writings.

With hundreds of pages of new and previously unpublished essays, notes, and letters,

 is the most comprehensive collection of the artist’s writings assembled to date.

presents sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and best-selling

Donald Judd Collection

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

By Charles Baudelaire. Illustrated by Marlene Dumas

After their successful collaboration in William Shakespeare's 

, Hafid Bouazza and Marlene Dumas decided to reunite. This time he would translate the fifty prose poems collected by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in 

 , and she would illustrate his translation.
Hafid Bouazza passed away on April 29, 2021. Marlene Dumas made paintings and drawings for the twenty prose poems of which he completed the translation. She was inspired by the atmosphere of the text and the specific timbre of Bouazza. The book thus became a posthumous ode to their friendship.

Charles Baudelaire is considered the poet of the spleen, a melancholy, an intense boredom that leads to weltschmerz. In 

 he paints portraits of grieving widows, rejected lovers, people who fight against the dark around them and within themselves. Anyone who reads this magnificent collection will realize that 

The French original has been recorded in its entirety in 

 , as has an English translation by Louise Varèse. The heart of the book is formed by the twenty translations of Hafid Bouazza, illustrated by Marlene Dumas.

Charles Baudelaire: Le Spleen de Paris

A gelatin silver print by Diane Arbus, titled Triplets in their bedroom, N.J. 1963, dated 1963.

Photographs by Diane Arbus. Texts by Doon Arbus, Sarah H. Meister, Sandra S. Phillips, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Neil Selkirk, and Elisabeth Sussman.

Aperture is proud to bring this best-selling and indispensable title back into print, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Diane Arbus’s groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 explores the origins, scope, and aspirations of this wholly original force in photography. Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and her faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Presenting many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images reveals a subtle yet persistent view of the world. The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career. It also includes a new contribution by Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture, alongside essays by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography, emeritus, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her photographs since her death. An extensive chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, is illustrated by more than three hundred additional images and composed primarily of excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, amounting to a kind of autobiography. An afterword by Doon Arbus precedes biographical entries on the photographer’s friends and colleagues, compiled by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

Diane Arbus: Revelations

Edited with text by Caroline Bourgeois. Text by Élisabeth Lebovici, Ulrich Loock

A concise and affordable overview of Dumas’s existential portraiture, with previously unseen works

An engrossing compendium of more than 100 works from 1984 to the present day by South African painter Marlene Dumas (born 1954), 

 offers a selective overview of her career to date, and a first look at pieces created over the course of the last few years.

Of her work, Dumas says: “I am an artist who uses second-hand images and first-hand emotions.” While in the early years of her career she was known for her collages and accompanying texts, today Dumas works chiefly in oil on canvas and ink on paper. The majority of her production is made up of portraits of people in states of suffering, ecstasy, fear and despair. A crucial moment in the development of Dumas’s style came with her use of images from newspapers and magazines, stills from films and Polaroids.

 brings together pieces from international museums and private collections to provide new insight into Dumas’ work and methods.

Marlene Dumas: Open-End

Edited by Manuel Fontán del Junco and María Toledo. Texts by Alex Bacon, Manuel Fontán del Junco, Pepe Karmel, Prudence Peiffer, Miguel Peña, Jordi Teixidor, María Toledo, José María Yturralde, and Lynn Zelevansky

The first retrospective in 30 years on the immensely influential abstractionist, theorist, art-world scourge and forefather of minimalism

The first monographic exhibition on the artist in Spain and one of the most complete surveys ever curated in Europe, 

Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else

 illustrates Ad Reinhardt’s tremendous influence on abstract expressionism as well as subsequent contemporary art styles. Reinhardt’s paintings are rarely representational and are instead composed of geometrics and eventually only color: canvases of all red, all blue, all black.

Organized with the institutional support of the Ad Reinhardt Foundation, this catalog includes a selection of approximately 50 paintings and works on paper, spanning Reinhardt’s career from early drawings, paintings and collages to later works characterized by a progressive reduction of color and form. Another focal point of the volume is Reinhardt’s passions and artistic pursuits beyond painting, including his slides, writings on art, illustrations in newspapers, books, magazines and pamphlets, and his comics satirizing the art world and politics.

Ad Reinhardt: Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else

David Zwirner Books: Fall 2022

A still from a film by Francis Alys, titled Children’s Game #26: Kisolo, Tabacongo, DR Congo, dated 2021.

The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.

 is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck. 

Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the Game

A painting by Michael Armitage, titled Enasoit, dated 2019.

Portrait of Michael Armitage, 2021. Photo by Tom Jamieson

Texts by Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Sean O'Toole

 is the artist’s first exhibition in Australia, presenting recent work with a suite of new paintings that reflect on the recent Kenyan elections and the political rallies and dissidence that followed. Sumptuous and explicit in their representation of the human body, Armitage’s paintings reconsider cultural traditions and stereotypes, spinning the exoticising gaze of Western art history into a different direction. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, edited by curator Natasha Bullock, features essays by Sean O’Toole and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and poems by Mukoma Wa Ngugi.

Michael Armitage: The Promised Land

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