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

Mark Godfrey

Tom Holert

Since the early 1990s, Wolfgang Tillmans has established himself as one of the most exciting and innovative artists working today. The first photographer to win the Turner Prize (in 2000), his practice is characterized by constant investigation into the boundaries of the photographic medium and a preoccupation with the process of photography itself.

This new publication, accompanying an exhibition at Tate Modern, will examine Tillmans’s evolving practice showcasing his photography but also his video, digital slide projections, publications, and recorded music. Mark Godfrey gives an overarching view of Tillmans’s practice, from the physical materiality of the work, to space and installation, to his use of abstraction. Tom Holert focuses on Tillmans’s relationship with politics and society, with particular emphasis on events of the last 15 years and the way Tillmans uses images and methods of distribution to examine global concerns such as migration and identity politics.

The book is designed by the artist, and has a strong visual identity with a collectible feel. Photography and video stills are beautifully reproduced in full color while, in keeping with the artist’s non-hierarchical approach to media, documentary material will also be highlighted.

Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017

An installation view of the exhibition, Suzan Frecon: recent paintings, oil and water, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2022.

Richard Shiff

The result of a deliberative process guided by careful attention to spatial relationships, Suzan Frecon’s large-scale oil paintings are composed of asymmetrical curves that result in minor and major measured areas of color.

Accompanying the artist’s solo exhibitions at David Zwirner, New York and London, in 2017, this publication features a selection of new monumental paintings carefully reproduced both as individual works and in installation views to best convey the experience of seeing the work. Depending on the viewer’s position and the time of day, the contrasts of matte and sheen, positive and negative, and immediacy and radiance combine to create an ongoing visual experience of always varying subtleties.

In contrast to the paintings, Frecon’s watercolors, also featured here, engage the relationship between paint and paper support. Each predetermined sheet—often from an agate-burnished old Indian ledger page—has its own innate character, properties, and irregular shape; its creases, holes, blemishes, and even faint writings become an integral component of the final watercolor.

“Their truth is the paint,” Frecon says, and in a specially commissioned essay acclaimed art historian Richard Shiff examines the new body of work in relationship to painting and the experience of looking.

Suzan Frecon: painting

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

Texts by K. Heymer, J. Heynen, and M. Kliege

The American artist Sherrie Levine realises in her works the artistic praxis of appropriating, repeating and varying famous earlier artworks. At the same time in doing so she creates her own new oeuvre. Beyond the mere copy she further develops the works conceptually and with historical clichés, presenting it to the viewer for reconsideration.

Sherrie Levine is a photographer, painter, and sculptor and is celebrated above all in the United States. When we first consider her works we think of the imitation and interpretation of the reference works, but our conclusions about the copy soon disappear in favor of a new, autonomous original. The volume shows over 50 works “after” artists like Duchamp, Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh, and Mondrian, from whose masterpieces Sherrie Levine has created something new. In addition art experts place her work in context, for example with regard to her choice of subject or her methods of reproduction.

Sherrie Levine: After All

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Gary Carrion-Murayari

Massimiliano Gioni

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Frances Stark

Lynne Tillman

Texts by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Frances Stark, and Lynne Tillman. Conversation with the artist and Massimiliano Gioni

This thorough, multifaceted assessment of Raymond Pettibon's entire career to date includes nearly 700 images, contributions from important figures in the art-historical and cultural fields, and a recent interview with the artist. Beginning with childhood drawings, the book moves through to his mature work, which embraces both high and low culture.

The book includes ink drawings, paintings, wall drawings, comics, videos, and more, spanning half a century, from the time Pettibon was a child to contemporary work, which takes inspiration from literature, politics, sports, art history, and sexuality. It also features a title on the front cover and spine that was hand lettered by the artist and nearly 200 never-before-published works and items of ephemera.

The book accompanies major survey exhibitions at the New Museum, New York and Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, The Netherlands in 2017.

Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work

Lucía Casani

Estrella De Diego

Raymond Pettibon

Introduction by Lucía Casani. Texts by Estrella De Diego and Raymond Pettibon.

 is published on the occasion of Marcel Dzama's eponymous exhibition at La Casa Encendida, Madrid. The exhibition proposes a tour of the artistic universe of Marcel Dzama while presenting for the first time much of his most recent production, in which the artist encourages activism through "revolution".

Through the Canadian artist's imagination, figures drawn from folk tales, the world of comics, and television coexist with twentieth-century terrorists, fictional animals, ballet dancers, and opera singers. The social and political questioning is therefore intertwined with a world of fables and complex narratives where carnival, war, mythological, and ironic make up an artistic vision that incites multiple readings.

Marcel Dzama: Drawing on a Revolution

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

Charles Gaines

Laurence Rassel

Greg Tate

Texts by Charles Gaines, Laurence Rassel, and Greg Tate

Alabama-born, Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall is one of the most exciting artists working today. Critically and commercially acclaimed, the painter is known for his representation of the history of African-American identity in Western art. Conversant with a wide typology of styles, subjects, and techniques, from abstraction to realism and comics, Marshall synthesizes different traditions and genres in his work while seeking to counter stereotypical depictions of black people in society. This is the most comprehensive overview available of his remarkable career.

Out of stock

Kerry James Marshall

Ingried Brugger

Heike Eipeldauer

Hal Foster

Martin Germann

Foreword by Ingried Brugger and Philippe Van Cauteren. Edited with texts by Heike Eipeldauer and Martin Germann. Conversation with the artist by Hal Foster

Marking the influential photographer’s first major European survey, this book features highlights from four decades of James Welling’s oeuvre.

Emerging out of the “Picture Generation”—a group of artists focused on a critique of photographic media—James Welling has gone on to experiment successfully in nearly every photographic genre. This monograph, designed by Joseph Logan in close collaboration with the artist, presents a selection of works from the early 1970s to today, demonstrating the artist’s conceptual foundations. Welling’s series are dialogues between image and matter, process and result, representation and abstraction. This volume includes, amongst other series, selections from 

, in which Welling matched the writing of his ancestors’ letters with Connecticut winter landscapes; 

 a meditation on Philip Johnson’s 1949 residence, shot using colored filters; 

, pure color photograms created in the darkroom; and 

, which track his early interest in painting and dance. The generous and vividly reproduced illustrations are accompanied by an extensive interview with the artist and critical essays that discuss Welling’s work in connection with American painting, post-modernism, and authorship, and the artist’s eloquently emotional photographic language.

James Welling: Metamorphosis

Lisa Lee

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In her first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.

Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, 

 is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.

Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver

Antonio Sergio Bessa

Jessamyn Fiore

Texts by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore

"Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing." — Gordon Matta-Clark

This revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York. There he employed the term “anarchitecture,” combining “anarchy” and “architecture,” to describe the site-specific works he initially realized in the South Bronx.

The borough’s many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark’s raw material. His series 

 dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of the ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with 

, a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of seventeenth-century row houses slated for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou’s construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark’s practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect

Max Wechsler

A tribute to the long collaboration between Franz West and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, this volume offers a comprehensive yet singular overview of the artist\s oeuvre. Gathering together extensive documentation and rare archive material on the numerous exhibitions they organized together since 1995, the book is designed by NORM (Zurich) and introduced by art theoretician and friend of the artist Max Wechsler, who followed the work of Franz West closely for many years. His illuminating foreword starts: "Without doubt, he was an odd bird, a gifted idler, a Vienna man sui generis and eccentric par excellence."

The relationship between Franz West and Eva Presenhuber began 20 years ago in Zurich. In 1995 West exhibited at the Galerie Walcheturm—"Franz West mit eine Geste von Raymond Hains. Telefonskulpturen. Sitz– und Liegegelegenheiten"—of which Eva Presenhuber was the owner from 1989 to 1997. This first collaboration was followed by many others, including 

 in 2002, and after the foundation of Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2002, 

 (2011). After West’s death in 2012 Galerie Eva Presenhuber presented the shows 

 (2015–2016) in cooperation with the Franz West Privatstiftung. This publication underlines the importance of the gallery space as an artistic laboratory, and highlights this particular relationship between an artist and his gallerist, especially when this one is a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue.

95–15

Franz West: Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Edward A. Vazquez

Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer.

Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.

Aspects: Fred Sandback's Sculpture

Wolfgang Tillmans: There were 30 years between 1943 and 1973. 30 years from 1973 was the year 2003.

1. Hamburg Süd part 1
2. MMMMM aah
3. Hamburg Süd part 2
4. HaHaHaHa
5. Hamburg Süd part 3
6. Nee IYaow eow eow
7. Hamburg Süd part 4
8. EEEEEEEhh
9. Hamburg Süd part 5
10. Device Control (intro)
11. Hamburg Süd part 6

12. It's Completely Changed
13. Throw A View
14. Mmmmeehh
15. Hihihi hee
16. Soda Streatm
17. Overdub (calm to chaos Jul28)
18. Morning Return
19. Make It Up As You Go Along
20. Device Control

Wolfgang Tillmans: Hamburg Süd / Nee IYaow eow eow

Albert Camus

Neil Cox

Francesco Stocchi

Michelle White

Texts by Albert Camus, Neil Cox, Francesco Stocchi, and Michelle White

Richard Serra: Drawings 2015–2017: Rambles, Composites, Rotterdam Verticals, Rotterdam Horizontals, Rifts

 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, this catalog is an in-depth look at the artist’s recent drawing practice.

The exhibition encompasses more than 70 works from five different series, 

, many of which have never been seen before publicly, as well as a selection of his notebooks and films. Examining the ways properties inherent to sculpture are brought onto paper, the drawings are epistemological adjuncts to Serra’s lifelong sculptural explorations.

Designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist, 

 features new scholarship by art historian Neil Cox and exhibition curator Francesco Stocchi, a chronology of the drawings by curator Michelle White, as well as a historical text by Albert Camus selected by Serra. This book introduces readers to Serra’s most recent series and reaffirms his innovation and contribution to the practice of drawing.

Richard Serra: Drawings 2015–2017

Featuring R. Crumb’s most outrageous sexual comics, Bible of Filth is possibly the dirtiest book around.

One of America’s most celebrated cartoonists, Crumb helped define cartoon and punk subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s with comic strips like 

. The open sexuality of his work, paired with frequent self-deprecation and a free, almost stream-of-consciousness style, has made Crumb into a global voice and a renowned contemporary artist.

Originally published in France in 1986 by Futuropolis, the first edition of 

 was never distributed in the United States because of its graphic sexual content, which included some of Crumb’s most explicit comics from underground magazines such as 

. This revised and expanded English edition, published by David Zwirner Books, contains all the original pieces from the 1986 volume, with over one hundred pages of additional material. Organized chronologically, there are comics from 1968 to 1986 that were omitted from the first edition and an entirely new selection of work from after 1986.

Printed on bible paper and bound in leather, with gold debossing and edging, this volume looks and feels like a traditional bible, with no outward suggestion of what it contains. This revised and expanded 

 is the perfect introduction for newcomers, while retaining its status as an important collector’s item for Crumb enthusiasts around the world.

R. Crumb: Bible of Filth

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Doro Globus

Karsten Schubert

Edited by Doro Globus and Karsten Schubert

The present volume includes the vast majority of significant essays on Bridget Riley written since 1999. This was a particularly fruitful period in the reception of her work, as the discourse broadened and her reputation as one of the most important painters of her generation solidified.

The essays range from biographical and career overviews to detailed analysis of specific aspects or themes that occur throughout Riley’s career. The selection reflects a rich body of work, which sustains the interest of important authors, as evidenced by multiple pieces by Éric de Chassey, Lynne Cooke, Robert Kudielka, Paul Moorhouse, and Richard Shiff. Together, this volume of essays tells the story of an artist whose art has continuously evolved over nearly six decades.

Most of the critical texts have been written in close consultation with the artist, the result of long conversations, studio visits and archive access. Largely commissioned on the occasion of particular exhibitions, these essays track and trace Riley’s focus and influences at different moments in time. Each essay builds upon the next, with more recent authors clearly responding and referencing earlier discourse. The result is a collection of great breadth and cohesion.

 represents a monumental body of research and analysis by some of the most important art historians of today. It also offers the opportunity for the reader and the viewer to approach Riley from a plethora of perspectives to form their own view, much reflecting Riley’s own particular approach to art history. As John Elderfield puts it: "Effectively, Riley makes a pact with the viewer, through the medium of the painting, that they will collaborate in eliciting from a particular painting a particular sort of mobile visual array. And, when the viewer stops looking at the painting, it will therefore be as if leaving something that continues to go on."

 Michael Bracewell, Nadia Chalbi, Eric de Chassey, Lynne Cooke, Jonathan Crary, John Elderfield, Lucius Grisebach, Martin Hentschel, Dave Hickey, Robert Kudielka, Anne Montfort, Paul Moorhouse, Marla Prather, Karen Serres, Richard Shiff, Frances Spalding, Barnaby Wright and Semir Zeki

About Bridget Riley: Selected Writings 1999–2016

Tom McDonough

 has been a fixed component of his exhibitions since he first showed a version of the multi-part tabletop installation in 2005. Often arising from local circumstances and current issues at the time of their creation, the 

 works mark an endeavor to establish a clear perspective in confusing times. The scope and complexity of this project become apparent for the first time through this book—the second, following 

Over the span of 320 pages (printed using a high-resolution technique), Tillmans presents an alternative chronology of the present. Far exceeding his original and main medium of photography, he juxtaposes a variety of contrary opinions, statements, and comparisons on recurring table formats. The dimensions of the wooden tables, which he designed himself, are not arbitrary: they are built using standard British door panels, 78 inches long, and with one of four different standard widths.

This book gives an overview, through lavish reproductions, of this new form of collage in which picture, text, and object “are only kept in place by their own weight,” as the photographer puts it. An essay by Tom McDonough, Professor for Art History at Birmingham University, New York, places Tillmans’s project within the context of 20th-century collage, from Hannah Höch to Robert Rauschenberg. This artist’s book, produced in Tillmans’s Berlin atelier, includes a Fresnel magnifying glass, making it possible to zoom in on the contents and read even the smallest of printed texts.

Wolfgang Tillmans: What's wrong with redistribution?

A1 Device Control
A2 Angered Son (live with Kyle Combs)
A3 Angered Son (W solo)

AA1 Make It Up As You Go Along SALEM Remix
AA2 Make It Up As You Go Along DANIEL WANG & J.E.E.P. Remix
AA3 Make It Up As You Go Along DANIEL WANG & J.E.E.P. Dub

Wolfgang Tillmans: Device Control EP

Alex Needham

, Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) chronicles East London’s art scene and nightlife of the early 2000s, as well as his friendship with collaborator and artist Conor Donlon. The book sees Donlon’s appearance and style changing, as well as his backdrops: a 2003 demonstration against George W. Bush’s state visit; a picnic at the park after an opening at Tillmans’s exhibition space Between Bridges; the bright yellow walls of Tillmans and Donlon’s home; long-gone LGBT clubs The Ghetto and The Joiners’ Arm; and quieter moments spent talking in the studio and around town.

Tillmans’s photographs are at once intimate and emblematic of a flourishing arts era, where both artists’ work gained momentum. 

 culture editor Alex Needham introduces the work with an essay about Donlon’s initial role as Tillmans’s assistant, contextualizing the artists’ collaboration and the inception of London independent bookstore Donlon Books in 2008.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Conor Donlon

Tracklist:
A1 Make It Up As You Go Along
A2 Triangle / Gong / What
B1 Fascinating This Time
B2 Stranger
B3 Time Flows All Over

How to introduce the first record by Wolfgang Tillmans? Now considered one of the most significant visual artists working today, his very first passion in life lay with music. This record features on its B-side three songs recorded in 1986 in his home town of Remscheid. The A-side features two pieces recorded in 2015/2016. The 29-year gap in between were marked by Tillmans exploring music, pop, and club culture from many different angles.

‘Make It Up As You Go Along’ is a pulsing dance track based on the recordings of a book printing press in a factory in Stuttgart. Morphed through various production stages, the press’s syncopations and Tillmans’s serendipitouspenditous vocals merge into an intoxicating track that could become a summer festival early a.m. favorite. ‘Triangle / Gong / What’ is an experimental offering, which combines the sounds of playing a special alloy triangle, a 999 fine gold gong, and a vocal, fused through a particular gain manipulation during the recording process.

The 1986 side features three songs which Tillmans wrote and recorded with collaborator Bert Leßmann. A single channel recording from the rehearsal room was all he had from back in the day. With the help of Tim and Klaus Knapp the recordings were filtered and equalized, and then supported with precise reconstructions of the original instruments. Out of this production process spanning 30 years, a unique time capsule emerged, which portrays a small-town teenager with some ambition. ‘Time Flows All Over’ is a haunting reminiscence of the angst and energy of the mid-1980s, infused with surprising contemporary relevance.

Wolfgang Tillmans: 2016 / 1986 EP

Alexander Nemerov

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston—often referred to as the “father of color photography”—has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition.

Eggleston has said, “I am at war with the obvious.” His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. Though criticized at the time, his now legendary 1976 solo exhibition, organized by the visionary curator John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—the first presentation of color photography at the museum—heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon and solidified Eggleston's position in the pantheon of the greats alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.

Published on the occasion of David Zwirner's New York exhibition of selections from 

 in the fall of 2016, this new catalogue highlights over sixty exceptional images from Eggleston's epic project. His photography is “democratic” in its resistance to hierarchy where, as noted by the artist, “no particular subject is more or less important than another.”

Featuring original scholarship by Alexander Nemerov, this notable presentation of 

 provides historical context for a monumental body of work, while offering newcomers a foothold in Eggleston\s photographic practice.

Selected Works

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Phillip Prodger

The eminent American photographer William Eggleston (b. 1939) was a pioneer in exploring the artistic potential of color photography. Eggleston made a name for himself with his eccentric, unexpected compositions of everyday life that were nonetheless rife with implied narrative, elevating the commonplace to art. This sumptuously illustrated book features Eggleston’s masterful portraits, including many familiar and beloved images as well as some previously unseen photographs from his long and productive career.

Many of Eggleston’s poetic photographs portray life in his home state of Tennessee, and the people he encountered there. Eggleston frequented the 1970s Memphis club scene, where he met, befriended, and photographed musicians such as fellow Southerners Alex Chilton and Ike Turner. He also photographed celebrities including Dennis Hopper, Walter Hopps, and Eudora Welty, and became a fixture of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, dating the Warhol protégé Viva. Over the past half century, he has created a powerful and enduring body of work featuring friends and family, musicians, artists, and strangers. In addition to the lavish reproductions of Eggleston’s portraits, this volume includes an essay and chronology, plus an interview with Eggleston and his close family members that gives new insights into his images and artistic process.

William Eggleston: Portraits

Portrait of Toba Khedoori, 1995. Photo by Rachel Khedoori.

Aruna D'souza

Ann Goldstein

Brenda Shaughnessy

Franklin Sirmans

Lucas Zwirner

Texts by Aruna D'souza, Ann Goldstein, Brenda Shaughnessy, Franklin Sirmans, and Lucas Zwirner

This book documents the artistic development of Toba Khedoori, a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient who skillfully combines precise draftsmanship with a meditative quality, and who manages to invite viewers inside her works, despite their two-dimensionality. Whether drawing on sheets of paper primed with wax and stapled directly onto the wall or using canvas as physical support, Khedoori creates delicate compositions that are at once intimate and expansive. Over the past decade, she has shifted toward smaller-scale works while continuing to engage elements of drawing, painting, and installation.

Toba Khedoori

The Legendary Tigerman

Filipe Costa

Composed by The Legendary Tigerman and Filipe Costa

A 12-inch LP: Theme & Five Variations
Recorded live at Clube Recreativo dos Anjos, March 2015
Mixed at Bandido Sessions Studio

 is Douglas’s adaption of the 1907 political novel of the same title by Joseph Conrad. Set in London in 1886, the book recounts an anarchist’s failed plot to bomb the Greenwich Observatory and is considered among the first literary portrayals of modern-day terrorism. Consistent with Douglas’s nonlinear treatment of historical events within his practice, his version sets the action within the context of Portugal’s so-called “Hot Summer” of 1975, which ended the turbulent period between the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 (a bloodless coup to end Europe’s longest dictatorship) and the ratification of a new constitution. During the transition to democracy, which hastened the decolonization of Portuguese colonies, numerous terrorist acts by extreme right- and left-wing groups rocked the country.

The Secret Agent: Music for a Film by Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas

Noam M. Elcott

Roxana Marcoci

Dragana Vujanovic

Louise Wolthers

Foreword by Louise Wolthers and Dragana Vujanovic. Text by Noam M. Elcott. Conversation between the artist and Roxana Marcoci

“Often people confuse photography with human vision but they’re very different things”, says Stan Douglas, winner of the 2016 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. “[What] happens to our sense of our selves, our sense of time when so much of our knowledge about the world comes through these mechanical media, these inhuman media?” Attending to such questions, The Hasselblad Award 2016, which presents three series entitled 

 (2016), accompanied by two texts, offer intricate meditations on the function, construction and consumption of contemporary forms of photography. From HD cinematic images to abstract manifestations of data, each series probes the relationship between human and mechanical memory, each employing a particular synthetic process supported, if not entirely constructed, by computer software.

In one of the neo-noir mise-en-scènes of 

, two single vehicles drive through the darkness over Vancouver’s Georgia Viaduct, their headlights glowing like the road lamps punctuating the panorama. Underneath the flyover in the southwestern corner of Strathcona, lived a predominantly African Canadian community for the better half of the 20th century, until the area was bulldozed in the early 70s to make way for the so-called inner-city freeway. Using 3D modelling software, Douglas reconstructs the neighborhood from the vantage point of a drone: in 

 (2014) we see multiple rooftops and luminous windows – an inhabited environment with no people in sight. Clouding the lines between real, imagined and remembered, the series attends to the shadows of history as it materializes the memory of a marginalized community.

 radically depart from the realm of representation. 

 is a collection of digital images composed of densely packed multi-colored streaks – each streak vying for our attention. Douglas built the series from files that were corrupted in the process of shooting his well-known projects 

, on the other hand, emerged from a rigorous attempt to ‘write’ images using tailor-made software that reverse engineers what happens in a JPEG encoding, producing hypnotic shapes and colors. In his interview with Roxana Marcoci published in the book, the artist places the series in the context of his recent photographic works. Noam M. Elcott’s thorough, art historical analysis of Douglas’ approaches to photography, further offers an illuminating reading of the artist’s practice. Pushing the limits of what we know and understand to be photography, the Hasselblad Foundation recognizes Douglas as an artist who has made pioneering achievements in photographic art.

Stan Douglas: Hasselblad Award 2016

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David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.