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

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

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.

Out of stock

R. Crumb: Bible of Filth

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

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

Sigmar Polke, Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982

Elena Geuna

Guy Tosatto

The artist who dared put into question the parameters of ordinary vision. One of the main exponents of Capitalist Realism—a current that arose in the 1970s in opposition to both the Socialist Realism widespread in the countries of Eastern Europe and Western pop art—Sigmar Polke was a tireless experimenter of techniques, art materials, and chemical-alchemical processes. He created figurative paintings that drew on a vast iconographic repertoire, often inspired by everyday life, and abstract works with a powerful symbolic value, sometimes created by chance through reactions between paint and other products. The book reproduces over eighty-five of his works (including photographs and sculptures, along with numerous paintings), giving a full account of Polke’s reflections and studies made over his fifty-year career.

Sigmar Polke

Ulrich Loock

Raymond Pettibon

Foreword by Dirk Luckow and Sabine Breitwieser. Introduction by Ulrich Loock and Harald Falckenberg. Texts by Ulrich Loock, Raymond Pettibon, and Lucas Zwirner

Philosophically profound, deeply literary and biting in his satire, Raymond Pettibon is the foremost draftsman of his generation, and one of America’s most important contemporary artists. 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 ranging from Shakespeare to Gumby, surfers to the Bible, baseball to German Romanticism.

Published on the occasion of his major European traveling retrospective at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg – Sammlung Falckenberg, 

 presents over six hundred works from every part of the artist’s career, the majority of which have never been shown before. Arranged thematically in thirty-two chapters, this unique catalogue charts the appearance and development of the themes that have come to define Pettibon’s expansive oeuvre. Different sections are introduced with excerpts from interviews conducted with the artist, and are further discussed in a detailed appendix by curator Ulrich Loock. Beyond shedding valuable light on the genesis and cross-pollination of Pettibon’s thematic interests, this catalogue is the first to tackle the artist’s work as a whole—as a kind of hive mind of American culture whose various branches constantly address and reinterpret one another. Of particular interest are Pettibon’s own readings of individual works in the book. In excerpts paired with corresponding images, Pettibon guides readers through his complex, often meandering turns of thought; never condescending, they invite readers to enter more deeply into his thinking without sacrificing the intellectual rigor and sense of mystery that makes Pettibon’s work so compelling and challenging. The book includes a complete facsimile of his first artists’ book, 

—almost entirely unavailable for decades—in addition to numerous early drawings completed with his nephew, record covers, flyers, and sections dedicated to collages and drawings from the 1980s to today. Also featured are biographical notes compiled by Lucas Zwirner, offering a nuanced, insightful reading of Pettibon’s history, whose early life and work is often simplified and categorically tied to punk rock, and instead underscores the complexities surrounding the artist’s long-standing relationship with art, literature, and American culture. This unparalleled selection of Pettibon’s work is the definitive single volume for novices and experts alike.

Collected Works

Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus

Byron Coley

Jonathan Lethem

Kitty Scott

Robert Storr

Texts by Byron Coley, Jonathan Lethem, Kitty Scott, and Robert Storr

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this comprehensive collection of Raymond Pettibon’s work spans his early flyers for the influential band Black Flag through his most recent political work, and includes previously unpublished material, as well as zines, posters, and excerpts from screenplays. Perhaps unlike any artist of his generation, Pettibon best captured the discontent and counterculture spirit of the late 1970s and early 80s in America.

Immersed in the punk scene in Southern California, he devoted his earliest work to flyers for Black Flag and zines that he created and sold in local record stores. His distinctive style took shape in those early days: slyly sophisticated pen-and-ink drawings with cartoonlike flourishes. With biting irony and a searing wit, Pettibon let loose on the hypocrisies and greed of the capitalist political machine. His work captured the attention of the Los Angeles art scene and, eventually, the international art world.

Also included is a collaboration between Jonathan Lethem and the artist, commissioned specifically for the book.

 surveys the splenetic drawings of another disaffected son of Southern California.” –Bookforum

“Pettibon’s drawings are a world unto themselves, or rather a reflection of and reaction to the world as he sees it…It’s an impressive tome, heavy, beautifully printed, and slipcased.”

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Often understated, the emotional force of Raoul De Keyser’s cryptic and highly lyrical paintings is undeniable. Composed of very basic geometric shapes that hover between abstraction and figuration, many of De Keyser’s works seem to hint at forms just out of focus, spaces impossible to inhabit. Their power lies in their ability to suggest through simple gestures, and to compel intense contemplation. Since his death in 2012, De Keyser’s stature as a painter has only continued to grow, as has his influence on a younger generation of European painters.

 is published on the occasion of the eponymous show at David Zwirner, first presented at the London gallery in November 2015 and traveling to New York in 2016. Curated by Ulrich Loock, who contributes the catalogue’s text, the exhibition is organized around a group of twenty-two paintings that the artist completed shortly before his death. Collectively, these works have become known as 

. Imposing stark material and formal limitations, De Keyser was able to revisit in this body of work many of the major subjects and themes that occupied him throughout his nearly fifty-year career: the inconspicuous things close at hand, the landscape of the low lands where he grew up and lived all his life, and the partition of the picture plane. This elegant catalogue presents plates and details of a careful selection of paintings, beginning in the 1970s, that emphasizes the tentative way De Keyser chose to explore his themes—never approaching anything directly, hinting rather than demonstrating. Taken together, 

 reveals an uncompromising artist who continued to pose new aesthetic problems for himself—even at the end of his life—and managed to come up with original and deeply moving solutions.

Raoul De Keyser: Drift

Texts by Angela Lampe, Michael Baumgartner, Charles W. Haxthausen, Christine Hopfengart, Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy

Known for its whimsy and levity, Paul Klee’s art is often considered gleefully childlike. This groundbreaking volume argues that Klee’s style emerged from a philosophical school that originated with early German Romanticism and consisted of perpetual shifts between satire and affirmation of the absolute, finite and infinite, and real and ideal. Featuring approximately 250 works, this careful appreciation of Klee connects each stage of his career to the larger philosophical context.

Exploring the satires and caricatures of Klee’s youth, his experimentations in Cubism and “mechanical theater,”and the constructivist approach of the Bauhaus school, this book follows the trajectory of Klee’s oeuvre as a reflection of prevailing styles. It closes with the artist’s final years, in which he was labeled a “degenerate artist” by the Nazi regime and struggled with illness. Viewed through the many facets of irony as a complex theme, and against the backdrop of Europe’s seismic political and artistic movements, Klee’s body of work takes on a renewed significance as one of the most critical of its generation.

Paul Klee: Irony at Work

A painting by On Kawara, titled MAY 11, 1967, dated 1967.

On Kawara, One Million Years (Past), 1970-1971, Page 2001

Tommy Simoens

Jonathan Watkins

Texts by Tommy Simoens and Jonathan Watkins

On Kawara (1932–2014) is considered to be one of the most important and most radical modern artists of our time. His oeuvre is consumed with time and place, concepts that he used to try and map out the meaning of human existence.

 focuses on Kawara’s creations from 1966, which was a key year within his oeuvre as it was the birth of his world-famous date paintings—small paintings in which he inscribed the exact date on which he created the painting in white letters and numbers on a monochromatic background. If a painting wasn’t complete by midnight, it was destroyed. Since the start of the 

 series, as the entire collection is called, in 1966, he created more than 2,000 date paintings in more than 100 different cities. The artist used a folder to accurately record the days on which he created a painting and what the format was. He also kept a smear of the paint he used and the newspaper headlines for that day in this folder. This folder, in which he documented his 1966 creations, is fully portrayed in 

In 2015, Kawara’s date paintings from 1966 were displayed in the Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum in Deurle. This was the last project that the artist collaborated on, together with the museum curator and the editor of this book, Tommy Simoens, before his death in 2014.

On Kawara: 1966

14.08.041_mama-mummy-and-mamma-predecessors-2_splash_1

Portrait of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo by Stefan Ruiz

Texts by Cheryl Brutvan and Taiye Selasi

This catalogue is the first publication to focus on the work of Nigerian-born, L.A.-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. It accompanied an exhibition of the artist's work held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida in 2016. Contents include an introductory essay by exhibition curator Cheryl Brutvan, Taiye Selasi's text "Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What Is An Afropolitan?)", artist interview, artist's chronology, and select bibliography and exhibition history. With full color reproductions of all works in the exhibition.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: I Refuse to be Invisible

"This is a Book of Drawings that was made by me, Jason Rhoades over the time of the conception, production, erection and realization of a project / sculpture 'Perfect World'.”

 is a large-scale artist’s book consisting of over 400 single-sided reproductions of Rhoades’s drawings and handwritten notes, bound together by four aluminum screw bolts. Although originated by the artist during the presentation of his immense and critically acclaimed exhibition 

 at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 1999, 

 was not an actual catalogue for the show, but instead a stand-alone object produced as part of the preparation for, and creation of the piece. Intended as a sort of user’s manual, the book reveals the artist’s grappling with the enormity of the 

 exhibition, as well as the conceptual and physical challenges he was facing in his creative process more generally.

 on the occasion of the 2016 LA Art Book Fair. This numbered edition of 100 copies features all the original black and white reproductions as well as one of Rhoades’s original cover designs, a color photograph depicting his father’s garden.

Jason Rhoades: Xerox Book

Antoon Melissen

Over the course of nearly 40 years, Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven (1914–1994) produced works on paper and sculptural reliefs, while maintaining his job as a civil servant employed by the Dutch Post Office. This new monograph places the artist, one of the most important Dutch artists of the 20th century, in an international context, arguing for his role as an influential player in European art after the Second World War.

From his central position in the Netherlandish Informal Group, associated with Art Informel, to his later involvement with the Dutch Nul group, part of the international ZERO network, Schoonhoven participated in two of the most important currents of postwar European abstraction from his hometown of Delft. This volume features many hitherto unknown works and photographs and sheds new light on the work of the “master of white.”

Jan Schoonhoven

Elena Filipovic

Danh Vo

Carol Bove

Tino Sehgal

Texts by Elena Filipovic, Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form

 documents the groundbreaking retrospective curated by Elena Filipovic with the artists Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal that traveled to Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt in 2010 and 2011.

Organized by Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in collaboration with the 

, the exhibition offered visitors the possibility of finding a new interpretation of Gonzalez-Torres' work with each visit. Following the installation of a retrospective version of the exhibition at each institution by Elena Filipovic, an artist whose practice has been informed by Gonzalez-Torres’s work was invited to entirely re-install the show halfway through its duration. Danh Vo’s version was presented at Wiels, Carol Bove’s at the Fondation Beyeler, and Tino Sehgal’s at the Museum für Moderne Kunst. Through this structure, the exhibition evolved into several different forms—none being the definitive one.

The publication has been years in the making as Elena Filipovic and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation worked together to find the best ways to present the complexities and nuances of the exhibition. The book includes installation views of each version of the show and an illustrated checklist with images of the artworks in every instance of their installation. The structure of the publication allows the reader to see the immensely different ways the artworks can be installed, as well as how context acted on and through each piece during the cycle of exhibitions.

Amanda Cruz

Lewis Baltz

Roland Barthes

Carlos Basualdo

Bertold Brecht

David Deitcher

Marguerite Duras

Russell Ferguson

Rainer Fuchs

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

bell hooks

Miwon Kwon

Charles Merewether

Gerardo Mosquera

Bob Nickas

Virgilio Piñera

Rainer Maria Rilke

Tim Rollins

Susan Sontag

Nancy Spector

Wallace Stevens

Susan Tallman

Anne Umland

Simon Watney

Edited by Julie Ault. Texts by Amanda Cruz, Lewis Baltz, Roland Barthes, Carlos Basualdo, Bertolt Brecht, David Deitcher, Marguerite Duras, Russell Ferguson, Rainer Fuchs, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, bell hooks, Miwon Kwon, Charles Merewether, Gerardo Mosquera, Bob Nickas, Virgilio Piñera, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tim Rollins, Susan Sontag, Nancy Spector, Wallace Stevens, Robert Storr, Susan Tallman, Anne Umland, and Simon Watney. Chronology by Julie Ault

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of the most influential artists of his generation, lived and worked resolutely according to his own democratic ideology, determined to “make this a better place for everyone.” Combining principles of conceptual art, minimalism, political activism, and poetic beauty, Gonzalez-Torres’s ever-changing arsenal included public billboards, give-away piles of candy or posters, and ordinary objects (clocks, mirrors, light fixtures) often used to startling effect. His work challenged the notions of public and private space, originality, authorship, and—most significantly—the authoritative structure in which he functioned.

Now in its second edition, Gonzalez-Torres’s editor Julie Ault has amassed a comprehensive monograph of this important artist. In the spirit of the artist’s method, Ault rethinks the very idea of what a monograph should be. The book, which places strong emphasis on the written word, contains texts by Robert Storr and Miwon Kwon among other notables, as well as significant critical essays, exhibition statements, transcripts from lectures, personal correspondence, and writings that influenced Gonzalez-Torres and his work. Ample visual documentation adds another decisive layer of content. We see works not just in their finality, but often witness their transformation over a lifespan. This collection is a critical reference for the history of contemporary art.

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.

This timely publication includes Judd’s best-known essays, as well as little-known texts previously published in limited editions. Moreover, this new collection also includes unpublished college essays and hundreds of never-before-seen notes, a critical but unknown part of Judd’s writing practice.

Judd’s earliest published writing, consisting largely of art reviews for hire, defined the terms of art criticism in the 1960s, but his essays as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, published here for the first time, contain the seeds of his later writing, and allow readers to trace the development of his critical style. The writings that followed Judd’s early reviews are no less significant art-historically, but have been relegated to smaller publications and have remained largely unavailable until now. The largest addition of newly available material is Judd’s unpublished notes—transcribed from his handwritten accounts of and reactions to subjects ranging from the politics of his time, to the literary texts he admired most. In these intimate reflections we see Judd’s thinking at his least mediated—a mind continuing to grapple with questions of its moment, thinking them through, changing positions, and demonstrating the intensity of thought that continues to make Judd such a formidable presence in contemporary visual art.

Edited by the artist’s son, Judd Foundation curator and co-president Flavin Judd, and Judd Foundation archivist Caitlin Murray, this volume finally provides readers with the full extent of Donald Judd’s influence on contemporary art, art history, and art criticism.

Donald Judd Writings

All Books

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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.