Ruff has always had a fascination with astronomy. His attempt at photographing night sky failed due to the lack of detail captured in the pictures he had taken. Ruff’s equipment could not render the detail he wanted as well as air and light pollution added to the difficulties of capturing the beautiful constellations. His solution was to take observation shots from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) based in the Andes in Chile.

Thomas Ruff: Sterne

Robert Bean

Edward Burtynsky

Jane E. Nokes

Dieter Roelstraete

Introduction by Edward Burtynsky and Jane E. Nokes. Texts by Robert Bean and Dieter Roelstraete

 is the third annual publication celebrating the winner of the 

, Canada’s largest contemporary photography award for an established Canadian artist.

During the celebrated career of this year’s award winner Stan Douglas (starting in 1983), photography has played a vital role in his artistic development. This publication highlights the significance of the photographic image in the critical and historical reception of Stan Douglas’s approach to art and media. The stories, sites, and events that Douglas explores are populist, literate and timely. Frequently, his photographs describe the overlooked histories of cultural identity, displacement, and injustice that reveal an uncanny resemblance to present-day events. This is achieved through an insightful attention to photography as both medium and subject. Folding the spectator into the visual culture of memory and oblivion that photographs evoke initiates profound observations about the ubiquity of photography in contemporary culture. The photographs of Stan Douglas affirm the validity and volatility of the photographic medium at this decisive moment in the history of art and photography.

Stan Douglas: Scotiabank Photography Award

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Kasper König

Jef Van Eynde

Barbara Weiss

Afterword by Barbara Weiss, Kasper König. Photographs by Jef Van Eynde.

In the summer of 2012, the acclaimed Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) was preparing a show with David Zwirner, planned for March 2013. His friend, the photographer Jef Van Eynde, visited him that summer. “We were allowed to take a look at a new series of small paintings in his studio,” Van Eynde recalls in his postscript to this volume. “In their startling simplicity, these had been reduced right down to the essential. Some of them just had an oversized hook for a hanger, with the canvas simply wrapped around a wooden board.” De Keyser died in October 2012, and Van Eynde’s photographs of the paintings and the titular wall upon which they were arranged are the only documentation of his intentions for the Zwirner show. This intimate volume gathers these alongside portraits of De Keyser at home and in his studio.

Raoul De Keyser: The Last Wall

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

Norman Rosenthal

This publication is currently backordered.

The richly textured, seductive paintings of German artist Neo Rauch are marked by a “distinctive Pop-Surrealist-Social Realist style,” as described by 

 art critic Roberta Smith in 2002. Incorporating disjunctive references to disparate eras, techniques, and aesthetics, they evoke “avant-garde theater stage sets from an earlier time ... both buoyant and tamped down, comic and earnest.” In many of his compositions, human figures engaged in manual labor or indeterminable tasks work against backdrops of mundane architecture, industrial settings, or bizarre and often barren landscapes. Scale is frequently arbitrary and non-perspectival, which adds to an overall dreamlike atmosphere; spatial relationships seem to construct an imaginary realm all of its own, one which both defies logic and feels somehow familiar.

, produced to coincide with the 2014 exhibition of Rauch’s new works at David Zwirner in New York, brings together small and large format paintings that expand the artist’s unique iconography of eccentric figures, animals, and hybrids within vaguely familiar but imaginary settings. This oversized catalogue—designed in close collaboration with the artist—is anchored by sixteen stunning plates and numerous 1:1 details that bring to life, and give viewers intimate access to, these compelling compositions. Themes of rebirth and new beginnings abound: Rauch consistently creates characters who appear to be in the process of transformation, literally on the brink of renaissance. These figures, though squarely centered in his paintings, often have the appearance of being part of still lifes: collaged, anachronistic elements belonging to different time zones and eras offer a contemporary take on the storied tradition of visual and psychological pastiche.

 features an illuminating essay by art historian and curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, who presents a careful reading of Rauch’s new work, including its relationship to fairy tales; the influence of the German Democratic Republic on his development as an artist in the 1980s; and the overarching sense of alienation that is present within his narratives. The book also includes a reprint of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Young Giant,” specifically chosen by Rosenthal to further expand his analysis.

Neo Rauch: At the Well

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

Leontine Coelewij

Colm Toibin

Theodora Vischer

Text by Leontine Coelewij, Colm Toibin. Interview by Theodora Vischer

Marlene Dumas is one of the most prominent and influential painters working today. In an era dominated by the mass media and a proliferation of images, her work is a testament to the meaning and potency of painting. Dumas draws on her expansive visual archive and the nuances of language to create intense, psychologically charged works which explore themes such as sexuality, love, death, and guilt, often referencing art history and current affairs. Her paintings and drawings are characterized by their extraordinary expressiveness and sometimes controversial subject matter. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies a major exhibition at the Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Fondation Beyeler. Surveying the artist’s oeuvre from the mid-70s to the present, it features over 100 of her most important paintings and drawings alongside lesser-known works from the early period of her career. 

 also includes a new interview with the artist; extracts from previously published but lesser-known texts (some available in English for the first time); and a new short story from prize-winning author Colm Tóibín written in response to the paintings. Essays and texts from a wide range of contributors examine the key themes and motifs in her work and reflect on Dumas’s entire career.

Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden

Jane McFadden

Nigel Prince

Anthony Spira

Jan Tumlir

Miguel von Hafe Pérez

James Welling

With contributions from Jan Tumlir, Jane McFadden, Anthony Spira, James Welling, Nigel Prince, and Miguel von Hafe Pérez

Bringing together important experimental works and ephemera, this volume documents a watershed moment in James Welling’s photographic career.

A seminal figure in the “Pictures Generation”—a group of artists working in 1980s New York—James Welling is best known for his pioneering use of photography and for engaging questions about art and the nature of representation. This book focuses on a particularly fecund period in Welling’s life, charting the works, influences, and shifting ideas that he has been pursuing ever since. Chronologically arranged, it features works from the 1970s and 1980s interspersed with never-before-seen watercolors, collages, notes, production stills, music, and other ephemera that provide insights into the working process of one of America’s most innovative and significant photographers.

James Welling: The Mind on Fire

Matthew S. Witkovsky

For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. 

—the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist—set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England.

In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans—a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling’s close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction.

A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, 

reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. The book is published to accompany the first-ever complete 

 of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Welling: Diary/Landscape

Dieter Schwarz

From the beginning of his career, Fred Sandback (1943–2003) used drawing to formulate his ideas of sculptural volume. In pictures of existing rooms, Sandback explored the possibilities of spaces and planes by drawing his famous horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in colored pencil. In the 1980s, he expanded his drawing repertoire to include acrylic, the pochoir technique, and pastel. In these late drawings–considered to be more pictorial than his pencil sketches–Sandback elaborated on the experience of space, mass, and volume in ways impossible in a coherent space: many of these sculptural ideas are absolutely boundless. Only a specific section of the whole is intimated in the drawing, for which Sandback invented unusual techniques: actual incisions instead of drawn lines, for instance, or painterly traces on transparent film. Superbly produced and edited, 

 assembles works from a thirty-year span, supplemented by sculptural works.

Fred Sandback: Drawings

Amanda Cruz

Matthew Drutt

Introduction by Amada Cruz. Text by Matthew Drutt

In celebration of its 15th anniversary in 2010, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, mounted an ambitious state-wide exhibition of 336 seminal billboards created by Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996). Developed with special permission from the artist's estate, this presentation was the first-ever comprehensive survey of Gonzalez-Torres's billboard works in the US. Situated deliberately in the public's path in four cities (Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio), these artworks gracefully interrupted daily routines with poignant reflections on life, love, and humanity. The transcendent quality of Gonzalez-Torres's work was magnified in the Texas landscape, and the project garnered international attention for its unprecedented commemoration of this remarkable body of work. This book covers all the billboard pieces and serves as a mini-retrospective of this critical part of Gonzales-Torres's career.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Billboards

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Massimiliano Gioni

Glenn Ligon

Minna Moore Ede

Alicia Ritson

Matthew Ryder

Robert Storr

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, Minna Moore Ede, Alicia Ritson, Matthew Ryder, Robert Storr, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

A major survey including new and celebrated works by Turner Prize–winning artist Chris Ofili. Set to accompany the first major museum show in the United States of contemporary British artist Chris Ofili, this richly illustrated volume surveys two decades of artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration to yield hybrid juxtapositions of high and low culture. Best known for intricately constructed works featuring beadlike dots of paint, elephant dung, and images culled from popular media, Ofili’s unique lexicon combines African culture, Western art history, and hip-hop music, spanning a wide variety of sources which include the Bible, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Blaxploitation films, and William Blake’s poems. Animated by exotic characters, outlandish landscapes, and folkloric myths, Ofili’s most recent work resonates with references to the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. This compelling new book offers a fresh perspective on the artist’s vital practice, which both celebrates and calls into question the power of images and their ability to address fundamental questions of representation.

Chris Ofili: Night and Day

Sigmar Polke, Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Paul Chan

Christophe Cherix

Tacita Dean

Barbara Engelbach

Mark Godfrey

Stefan Gronert

Kathy Halbreich

Rachel Jans

Erhard Klein

Jutta Koether

Christine Mehring

Matthias Mühling

Marcelle Polednik

Christian Rattemeyer

Kathrin Rottmann

Magnus Schaefer

Lanka Tatersall

Texts by Paul Chan, Christophe Cherix, Tacita Dean, Barbara Engelbach, Mark Godfrey, Stefan Gronert, Kathy Halbreich, Rachel Jans, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Christine Mehring, Matthias Mühling, Marcelle Polednik, Christian Rattemeyer, Kathrin Rottmann, Magnus Schaefer, and Lanka Tattersall. Bibliography by Erhard Klein. Interview with the artist by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Working across an unusually broad range of media, including painting, photography, film, drawing, and sculpture, Sigmar Polke is widely regarded as one of the most influential and experimental artists of the post-war generation. His irreverent wit and promiscuous intelligence, coupled with his exceptional grasp of the properties of his materials, provided the foundation for his punishing critiques of the conventions of art history and social behavior. Experimenting wildly with materials and tools as varied as meteor dust and the xerox machine, Polke made work of both an intimate and monumental scale, drawn from sources as diverse as newspaper headlines and Dürer prints. Polke avoided any one signature style, a fluid method best defined by the word “alibi,” which means “in or at another place.” This also is a reminder of the deflection of responsibility which shaped German behavior during the Nazi period, compelling Polke’s generation to reinvent the role of the artist. Published in conjunction with 

, the first exhibition to encompass the artist’s work across all media, this richly illustrated publication provides an overview of his cross-disciplinary innovations and career. Essays by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director of The Museum of Modern Art; Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern; and a range of scholars and artists examine the full range of Polke’s exceptionally inventive oeuvre and place his enormous skepticism of all social, political and artistic conventions against German history.

Sigmar Polke: Alibis 1963–2010

Mamma Andersson, 2023. Photo by Pierre Björk

Stig Claesson

Paolo Colombo

Marcel Dzama

Anders Krüger

Texts by Paolo Colombo and Anders Krüger. Interview with Nordström by Marcel Dzama. Poem by Stig Claesson

The Swedish artist couple Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström have been at the forefront of contemporary figurative art since the late 1980s. Updating Vuillard for a post-Hitchcock age, Andersson paints beguilingly eerie interiors and landscapes. Nordström’s detailed collages, watercolors, and drawings occupy a more folkloric realm peopled by historical and contemporary characters enacting sexual and social roles across broad narrative panoramas.

Originally published on the occasion of the 2010 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, 

marked the first time Andersson and Nordström presented their work in concurrent solo shows. The book showcases their work from the late 1980s to 2010 in over two hundred full-color plates, as well as numerous reproductions of family snapshots and source material. Also included are texts by Paolo Colombo and Anders Krüger, a poem by Stig Claesson, and an interview with Nordström by Marcel Dzama. As Colombo notes in his accompanying essay, “The miracle is that Jockum and Mamma spent more than half of their life together, and that over the years their complicity has guided them into the artists they are, each the complement and the best sounding board for the other.” The publication was reissued to coincide with Nordström’s 2014 exhibition, 

, at David Zwirner in London, and Andersson’s 2015 presentation, 

Mamma Andersson & Jockum Nordström: Who is sleeping on my pillow

Martha Buskirk

Chris Kraus

Linda Norden

Ingrid Schaffner

Paul Schimmel

Texts by Ingrid Schaffner, Martha Buskirk, Chris Kraus, Linda Norden, and Paul Schimmel

This volume examines the remarkable legacy of Jason Rhoades’s complex body of work. The Los Angeles–based sculptor Jason Rhoades was widely celebrated for sprawling, ambitious, and daring installations, editions, and events prior to his untimely death in 2006. Although he was far better known in Europe than America, many of Rhoades’s peers considered him to be one of the most important artists of his generation. In his work, cultural touchstones ranged from high to low, including the artists Marcel Duchamp, Donald Judd, and Paul McCarthy, race-car driver Ayrton Senna, actor Kevin Costner, the big bang, Swedish erotica, and the California gold rush. This volume, accompanying the first US survey of his works, centers on four highly sensory, large-scale pieces that incorporate neon, radio, smoke rings, and even a model train into large environments that engulf the viewer. These four canonical installations are navigated via five critical essays that help unify Rhoades’s labyrinthine, often overwhelming methods into the single overarching project he envisioned. The book also features illustrations of each major work dating from 1991 to 2006, accompanied by explanatory texts that illuminate Rhoades’s materials and methods as both highly accessible and artistically complex.

Jason Rhoades, Four Roads

Over the course of his thirty-five year career, Christopher Williams has produced photographs that engage the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery—often through a wry combination of parody and homage—and explore their sociopolitical contexts and implications. Using the process of reproduction as a point of entry, the artist questions the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality.

 is the second volume in an ambitious series of books developed by Williams in conjunction with his first major museum survey, 

, a critically acclaimed exhibition co-organized for 2014-2015 by The Art Institute of Chicago with The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Whitechapel Gallery, London

Following the first publication, an exhibition catalogue that relied more heavily on text than image, 

was conceived to exist as a stand-alone visual object and extend the artist’s conceptual and aesthetic concerns into book form. A perfect companion to the first publication, it reproduces a carefully curated selection of Williams’s painstakingly constructed photographs and features striking graphic design in the near-complete absence of language, with no essay, captions, or even a title page. Through clever manipulations of cropping, ordering, and pagination, 

offers readers an original aesthetic experience and comprehensive insight into the practice of one of today’s most thought-provoking artists, while—through pure visual splendor—pushing the boundaries of the artist’s book into new realms. As with all publications in the series, it has been produced in three colors—yellow, red, and green—each of which features subtle differences in layout.

Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany (green)

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

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this beautifully designed publication features works on paper created over the past decade by Suzan Frecon. Large-scale reproductions and gatefold pages reveal the extraordinary details: watercolors are on agate-burnished old Indian ledger paper, found or salvaged old Indian paper, agate-burnished double-weight Indian jute paper, Chinese Yumei, Japanese handmade paper, Fabriano hot press paper, and Arches hot press paper.

Also included are excerpted texts by Sarah Eckhardt from her 2008 essay “Portio Minor: Suzan Frecon’s Watercolors,” reproductions of books from the artist’s library, and intimate photographs of the artist’s studio.

Suzan Frecon: paper

Created by Pascal Dangin in collaboration with the artist, this large-scale publication presents the now iconic 

Between 1990 and 1992, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, made multiple trips to Los Angeles to scout locations, invent scenarios, and ultimately find male prostitutes that would agree to pose for photographs. DiCorcia used his fellowship money to pay the men whatever price they charged for their most typical service, and ultimately prompted a complaint of misuse of government funds. The titles of these encounters amplify the facts: Ralph Smith, 21 years old, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and $25.

 marks the beginning of diCorcia’s engagement with street photography. Many of his works appear to depict random events in public settings, yet rarely involve chance. Knowing precisely what he wanted from each photograph, diCorcia would first try out his idea for a composition with his assistants, and then return to the location with the hustlers he had approached (usually around Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood), such as a motel room, a vacant lot, a fast-food restaurant, in between and inside cars. The narrative was always deliberate, and the result is a series of carefully composed, yet loaded works which revolve around a tension between the subject’s unique presence in front of the camera and the artist’s predetermined idea for the shot.

 at David Zwirner, New York (September 12 – November 2, 2013).

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Hustlers

Katharina Dohm

Geoff Dyer

Christoph Ribbat

Texts by Katharina Dohm, Geoff Dyer, and Christoph Ribbat

The photography of Philip-Lorca diCorcia achieves a marvelous balance of artifice and the everyday. Over the past three decades, diCorcia has developed a unique and influential style, in which a realistic, almost documentary style of representation is subverted or countered by visibly staged composition. This combination of seemingly opposite qualities endows his images with a mysterious eeriness. In his 

 series (1990–1992), diCorcia made portraits of male prostitutes in minutely composed settings, and for 

 (2000–2001)–probably his most famous series–he depicted passersby on the street in New York (who were oblivious to his photographing them) as though they were film stars. Alongside the series 

(1975–1999), this volume, published for a major European retrospective and produced in close collaboration with diCorcia, also features works from his new and ongoing 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Clara Dublanc

Oscar Murillo

Olu Odukoya

Published in an edition of 500 copies on the occasion of Oscar Murillo’s solo exhibition,

 if I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator

This publication features images of Murillo’s exhibition alongside photography taken at La Paila in Colombia and in the artist’s studio in London in 2013. There is an accompanying essay by Clara Dublanc, entitled 

Us, Them and the In-Between: Migrants’ Hidden Identity

Marcel Dzama SOLO

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

Madeleine Grynsztejn

Brice Marden

Helen Molesworth

Peter Schjeldahl

Tommy Simoens

Lynne Tillman

Interviews with Brice Marden, Peter Schjeldahl, Robert Storr, Madeleine Grynsztejn, and Helen Molesworth by Lynne Tillman. Interview with the artist by David Zwirner

Belgian artist Luc Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice, and are typically painted from pre-existing imagery which includes photographs and video stills, exploring diverse and sensitive topics including the Holocaust, the effects of images from 9/11, the ambiguous utopia of the Disney empire, the colonial history of his native Belgium, and the phenomenon of the corporation. Since 1994, Tuymans has committed himself to showing a new series of works at David Zwirner once every two years—a promise that he kept, and continues to keep, twenty years on, as his tempered style and political content have steadily garnered him worldwide acclaim.

Luc Tuymans: Exhibitions at David Zwirner 

includes additional visual material, as well as an updated appendix that features an exhibition history and bibliography. Striking color reproductions of the artist’s major works are contextualized by brief commentary, photographs, and archival documentation, as well as installation views, exhibition checklists, and personal photographs. Other texts include an interview between the artist and David Zwirner, as well as individual interviews conducted by Lynne Tillman with art critic Peter Schjeldahl; artist Brice Marden; art historian and academic Robert Storr; and together with Helen Molesworth and Madeleine Grynsztejn, co-curators of Tuymans’s major US retrospective.

Luc Tuymans: Exhibitions at David Zwirner

Detail of an oil on linen painting, titled Clear Message, dated 2019.

Anne Pontégnie

Edited by Karen Marta and Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Anne Pontégnie

Through painting, collage, artist books, sculpture and ceramics, Josh Smith's work is dominated by spontaneous, gestural brushstrokes and vibrant colors and characterized by systematic processes, replication, and serial repetition. Using his signature to structure the space of the picture, Smith investigates notions of authorship, authenticity and originality. Part of the 

 series, conceived and commissioned by Massimiliano Gioni, and published by the Deste Foundation, 

 presents the entirety of the American artist\s works in the Dakis Joannou Collection and includes an essay by Anne Pontegnie that examines how the artist explicitly seeks to open up a different pictorial space.

Josh Smith: 2000 Words

Edited by Nicholas Fox Weber. Texts by PierCarla Delpiano, Nicholas Fox Weber, Nick Murphy, Paolo Papone, Marco Pierini, Colm Tóibín, and Julie Agoos

The spiritual elements in Josef Albers’s work are considered in this beautifully illustrated catalogue for an exhibition. The book includes large-scale reproductions of rare early drawings, photographs, stained-glass assemblages, 

, and a range of abstract paintings, including examples from his 

 series. Essays by Nicholas Fox Weber, Paolo Papone, Marco Pieri, Colm Tóibín, and Julie Agoos provide context for Albers’s relationship to Catholicism (in which he was raised) and his sense of the mystical.

Josef Albers: Sublime Optics

Thomas Seelig

Text by Mark Godfrey and Thomas Seelig. Interview by Eva Respini

Published to accompany a career-spanning survey at the 

 synthesizes Welling’s various photographic series, which range from abstract photograms to documentary-style portrayals of the New England landscape. The exhibition traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (through January 2014).

Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture, and traditional photography for the past 35 years, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. This book provides the most thorough presentation of the artist’s work to date.

Since the mid-1970s, Welling’s work has explored realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. The artist has been the subject of numerous catalogues addressing his more than 25 bodies of work, yet no previous book has attempted to link these works and examine the primary threads that run through them all. Sumptuously produced and created in close collaboration with the artist, this volume presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, interspersed with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades.

James Crump, former Chief Curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum who organized the exhibition, contributes an extensive introductory essay. Also included are text contributions by Mark Godfrey, Curator, Tate Modern and Thomas Seelig, Curator, Fotomuseum Winterthur, plus an interview with Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

 from the book: a conversation between Welling and by Respini.

James Welling: Monograph

James Lawrence

Known for sculptures that outline planes and volumes in space using the humblest of materials, Fred Sandback (1943–2003) was an American artist whose work is informed by a minimalist artistic vocabulary. Though Sandback employed metal wire and elastic cord in his earliest works, the artist soon dispensed with these materials and began using acrylic yarn to create sculptures that produced perceptual illusions while addressing their physical surroundings—the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. Throughout the course of his career, yarn enabled the artist to elaborate on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity. 

 is the third in a series of illustrated hardcover monographs on the artist published by David Zwirner. Documenting the eponymous exhibition held at the gallery in 2012, this award-winning publication covers a selection of Sandback’s work dating from 1968 to 2008, thus spanning five decades of production. With ninety reproductions in color, this beautifully produced catalogue includes a fully illustrated chronology with selected biographical and bibliographical material, as well as new scholarship on Sandback by art historian James Lawrence.

Fred Sandback: Decades

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