An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

The Artist Journals

Featuring lush, powerful paintings by Noah Davis, this blank book—the latest in 

 series—offers the ideal forum to energize the inner artist or writer.



The late American artist Noah Davis made his mark both as a painter of ethereal figurative works and as a pillar of the Los Angeles creative scene. With Karon Davis, his wife and a fellow artist, he founded the Underground Museum in 2012, a generative cultural institution and arts space in Los Angeles. His first Artist Journal celebrates his singular approach to delicate rendering, unexpected brushwork, and subjects surrounded by potent emotional luminescence.

Each journal is beautifully crafted in Verona, Italy.

Noah Davis: The Journal

Martin Bailey

Émile Bernard

Vincent Van Gogh

ekphrasis

By Émile Bernard. Letters by Vincent van Gogh. Introduction by Martin Bailey



An intimate testament to the power of friendship between two creative forces



“I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but I still don’t invent the whole of painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made—but to be untangled—in the real world.” —Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard

The painter and poet Émile Bernard’s firsthand account of the beloved painter Vincent van Gogh’s life offers deep perspective into the Dutch artist’s process, artistic preoccupations, and difficulties. In the 1890s, Bernard penned prefaces for collections of letters from Van Gogh, some of which were published while others were not. In 1911, Bernard gathered together these prefaces for a new publication, to which he also contributed a new introductory text, of the artist’s letters and sketches which he enclosed in his correspondence. This volume comprises these prefaces, published in English for the first time, as well as a selection of letters from Van Gogh to Bernard. In addition to including biographical details and reflections on art and friendship, Bernard chronicles his attempts to have Van Gogh’s work recognized after his death. Shedding light on the artistic community they inhabited, he also discusses notable figures such as Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.

Letters written by Van Gogh to a young Bernard further highlight the significance of the friendship between the two men. Van Gogh’s words of advice to Bernard as well as ruminations on his own practice, inspirations, and creative struggles are revealed in these pages.

Introduced by Van Gogh specialist Martin Bailey, these texts present a sensitive and discerning portrait of the artist that goes beyond his reputation as a troubled genius.

My Friend Van Gogh

Spotlighting the narrative and mythical imagery of Marcel Dzama’s work, this one-of-a-kind blank book holds a unique space for creative play and contemplation.



“Enjoy what you are making, people can feel it in the work. . . . I feel that art has been a good escape from the reality we are in.” —Marcel Dzama

Drawing inspiration from folklore and fairy tales and incorporating art-historical influences, Marcel Dzama’s work has secured a cult following of musicians and artists and the general public alike. His celestial imagery, masked characters, and aquatic scenes resonate with viewers of all ages and backgrounds. The vibrant and fantastical work featured on the cover and endpapers of Dzama’s first 

 enchants the mind and encourages unbridled expression.

Each journal is beautifully crafted in Verona, Italy.


Marcel Dzama: The Journal

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

Éric de Chassey

Joshua Cohen

Jonathan Crary

Lynne Tillman

Su Wei

Texts by Éric de Chassey, Joshua Cohen, Jonathan Crary, Lynne Tillman, and Su Wei

Stunning translations of images from the internet and the artist’s iPhone to canvas, Luc Tuymans’s quiet paintings belie an underlying moral complexity.



“Once Tuymans’s muted compositions felt fatalistic; now they appear as committed assaults on our digital fragmentation and the lies that thrive in its cracks.” —Jason Farago, 



One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive figurative style beginning in the 1980s that has proven singularly influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously convey and conceal meaning. Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources.

This monograph of recent work reveals how Tuymans’s paintings grasp the mystery, strangeness, and possibilities of contemporary image making. It highlights a body of work that Tuymans has been working on since 2020, bringing together three exhibitions: 

, at David Zwirner, New York. For this trilogy, Tuymans has heightened the contrast and saturation in his paintings, underscoring the urgency of our contemporary global moment. With texts by the novelist Joshua Cohen, the art historians Jonathan Crary and Éric de Chassey, the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, and the writer Su Wei, this publication offers an in-depth, dimensional understanding of both Tuymans’s outlook and his assertion of the relevance of painting in our digitally saturated world.

 signed by the artist and featuring a slipcase is available in a limited run of 250 copies.

Luc Tuymans: Nice

Doro Globus

Rose Blake

Text by Doro Globus. Illustrated by Rose Blake

 offers young readers exciting insights into the many ways artists work and the reasons why they make art.

Geared to children ages 4 to 8, but with appeal for all ages, this colorful and playful book asks: Who are artists? Why do they make art? What materials do they use? What tools do they work with? What forms do their artworks take?

Structured around a tour of an artists’ studio complex, the book introduces readers to street artists, ceramicists, conceptual artists, textile artists, photographers, glassblowers, and more! The artists share their working spaces and their techniques while explaining why they make art.

Rose and Doro’s first publication,

 for “demystifying the art world and making it accessible to budding young artists,” and lauded by the renowned author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers, who wrote, “If this book helps shed light to just one kid that [art] is a viable career option, then it has done its job, as art is indescribably important!”

Now Rose and Doro have teamed up for a second time to bring their experiences with and love for the world of art to a young audience.



I Am an Artist

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Hilton Als

Alex Fialho

Evan Garza

Wayne Koestenbaum

Texts by Hilton Als, Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum

Alice Neel's unstinting, visionary engagement with the lives of those around her resulted in an inclusive oeuvre. This aspect of queer representation in her work is explored for the first time in this new catalogue.

Curated by Hilton Als and organized in collaboration with the Estate of Alice Neel, 

 highlights the artist’s vibrant involvement with the human condition. Within a lifetime of work, Neel painted many people from many walks of life—this catalogue is the first to focus on queer communities, those who were part of their circle, as well as allies and others with whom the artist was in broader conversation—together forming a collective portrait that both embodies and complicates an understanding of the queer world of Neel’s moment and the artist’s place within it.

This collection of paintings includes rarely seen works depicting individuals including Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich, as well as writers, artists, friends, and advocates. As Als notes, this book includes “not just portraits of gay people but those of theorists, activists, politicians, and so on who would qualify as queer by virtue of their different take in their given field and thus the world. So doing, they reflect Alice’s own interest in and commitment to difference.”

The catalogue accompanies Neel’s first significant exhibition in Los Angeles, at David Zwirner in 2024. Edited and with a text by Als, the volume includes newly commissioned contributions by Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World

Larry Neal

Allie Biswas

By Larry Neal. Introduction by Allie Biswas

A collection of seminal essays on the arts by Larry Neal, a founder of the Black Arts Movement



“The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.”
—Larry Neal, 

, 1968

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to produce work that was politically oriented, rooted in the Black experience, and written for the Black community. Engaging with fiction, music, drama, and poetry in his texts, he challenged the dominance of the Western art-historical canon and charged Black artists and writers with reshaping artistic traditions according to their own history. As he proclaimed in his essay “The Black Writer’s Role,” written in 1966, “Black writers must listen to the world with their whole selves––their entire bodies. Must make literature 

, the way our music makes them feel.”

The writer Allie Biswas, who selected the texts Neal wrote from 1964 to 1978 included here, introduces the volume, illuminating the rich and varied context in which he produced his work.

Any Day Now: Toward a Black Aesthetic

Karl Ove Knausgaard

This collection of Mamma Andersson’s latest paintings spotlights the beauty and mystery of nature and the erasure of time

"What Mamma Andersson does in some of these pictures is on the one hand depict the illusions, the one thing which is another thing—masks, theater, statues, paintings—and on the other portray that which is only itself, potted plants, tree trunks, trees, landscapes. Everything is motionless, these rooms are located out of time." —Karl Ove Knausgaard, 

In a series of oneiric paintings inspired by interiors and the landscape of her childhood, the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson muses on the line between reality and illusion. She introduces thoughtful warm hues into an otherwise cool, muted color palette, lending an otherworldly feeling to the everyday scenes and subject matter that populate this new body of work, painted between 2020 and 2021.

, this publication features a commissioned essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a meditation on childhood memories of carefree exploration and the portal art creates between the world we live in and the worlds Andersson conjures with her brush.

Mamma Andersson: A Storm Warning

A celebration of the representation, figuration, and classical antiquity in Mamma Andersson’s newest paintings.

"When I look at this collection of pictures, . . . what strikes me first is the image-making capacity itself and the endless stream of images it brings forth and always has brought forth into the world.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard, 

The Swedish painter Mamma Andersson draws inspiration from a wide range of photographic source materials, art history, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden. The paintings and works on paper collected in this volume explore atmosphere and mood through representations of masks, statues, and figurines, which take on a dreamlike, mythical quality in stark silhouettes. While recalling classical genres of still life, landscape, and interiors, this body of work, painted in 2021 and 2022, blends our sense of the past, present, and future.

A companion to the artist’s previous books 

, this limited-run publication features a new essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard. The text considers the history and evolution of the human desire to depict our surroundings, placing Andersson’s doubled renderings—“pictures of pictures”—within a tradition of painting not from life but from representations of life.

Mamma Andersson: Sleepless

Frank Walter

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Barbara Paca

Charlie Porter

Introduction by Hilton Als. Texts by Barbara Paca, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, and Charlie Porter

Explore Frank Walter’s relationship to Antigua and Dominica through a range of works and writings that express his intimate connection to Caribbean nature, landscape, and place.

“Nothing seems to be reworked—it is as if each piece drew or painted itself without being adjusted, revised, or fussed over.” —



“One gets the sense,” writes Hilton Als on Frank Walter, “in looking at [his] rivers and sky, that his perspectives were hard-won: he doesn’t just look at a bank and water, he pulls back, rather like a cinematographer . . . to get at the poetic essence of a scene.” Walter’s visionary encounter with the visual and natural world around him is the focus of the selection of paintings in this volume. Tender, quiet, and lush, the works were inspired by his thoughts, knowledge, journeys, and surroundings. Depicting vistas from Antigua to the rugged Scottish Highlands—painted, in some cases, years later from memory—Walter’s work offers a transporting visual journey and a meditation on the act of engaged observation.

Published on the occasion of the 2022 exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue includes an introduction by the show’s curator, Hilton Als. Barbara Paca, the leading expert on Walter, writes a text detailing her personal experience meeting Walter. An essay by Charlie Porter takes readers on a walk through Walter’s London as he muses about the artist’s life and art. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro travels to Antigua and Dominica to explore the history of the islands and Walter’s lasting impact there.

By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter

Contributions by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau, Benjamin Thorel, and Lynne Tillman

"Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in 

 ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings." 

, the acclaimed collection of writings by Amy Sillman, comes as an expanded edition, with the addition of new essays, including recent texts on Paul Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray, and Louise Fishman. The previously unpublished text from a lecture on drawing complements Sillman’s views on color and shape. New drawings from 2020–22 include a selection of works on paper that were part of the artist’s installation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, 

Since the 1970s, Sillman—a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene—has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.

Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, 

 gathers a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews, and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.

 aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman’s reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor.

Amy Sillman: Faux Paus

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

Texts by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Luis Pérez Oramas, and Lorna Scott Fox



An updated archive of Alÿs's long-term study of children’s enduring need for play

Since 1999, Belgian multimedia artist Francis Alÿs has been producing videos that document the games that children play on the street and in courtyards around the world. 

 is an ongoing archive of the urban practices that modernity has banished from everyday life, as the concepts of public space and free time have grown increasingly distorted by the domination of motor vehicles and electronic diversions. Many of these videos were shot in economically underdeveloped regions of the world, where the strength of tradition and community have allowed the shared life of a childhood on the street to survive. The children’s games that Alÿs captures gesture toward a threatened underground culture crossing generations and borders. Their rules, images, and references suggest an ancient, potent substrate underlying our shared experience.

Francis Alÿs: Children's Games

An oil on canvas painting by Dana Schutz, titled The Arts, dated 2021.

Edited by Malou Wedel Bruun, Anders Kold. Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner, Anders Kold. Text by Jarrett Earnest, Lauren Groff, Anaël Pigeat. Interview by Anders Kold.



With a vast selection of works from the last two decades and Polaroids of the artist's studio, this mid-career catalog provides unique perspective on Schutz's oeuvre and methods

Dana Schutz is one of the great figurative painters of our time—an eminent storyteller who depicts people in complex and often gigantic compositions. For two decades now, Schutz has distinguished herself with her tremendous narrative power, vigorous sense of color and ability to merge the gruesome, grotesque, absurd and comic.
This richly illustrated catalog presents paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture, providing an overview of Schutz's entire career to date. Alongside a thorough analysis of Schutz's work by curator Anaël Pigeat, it presents a studio visit described in detail by art critic (and friend of the artist) Jarrett Earnest, whose text is accompanied by Polaroids of the studio that unfold Schutz’s working methods. Also featured is a conversation between curator Anders Kold and the artist, and a poetic essay by award-winning author Lauren Groff.


Dana Schutz: Between Us

Heimarbeit. Adapted for Use. IKEA Küchen Ensemble

., Christopher Williams’ 2023 exhibition at Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. The exhibition included six hand-painted signs, four new photographs in full colour, five new wall treatments, two new films, one new sculpture, one new publication in full colour, and one unique arrangement. This book, designed by Petra Hollenbach, includes documentation of this project and a panel discussion from ‘Theater in der Kritik’ on Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play Oberösterreich which has been buried in the ZDF archive since 1972. It includes four full colour plates and four technical drawings describing the adaptable kitchen set IKEA Metod Küchenkombinationen.

Christopher Williams: Blocking Templates

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Friends in a Field: Conversations with Raoul De Keyser

Texts by Douglas Fogle, Hanneke Skerath, and Ilse Roosens

A dialogue of sensibility and attention: artists from Forrest Bess to Amy Sillman juxtaposed with the delicate paintings of Raoul De Keyser

Over the course of his nearly five-decade career, Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser created paintings that bridge the mysteries of the everyday and the intangible world of abstraction. 

 takes the artist’s radical painterly practice as the beginning of a conversation with a diverse group of artists—both living and dead—whose works share a sensibility and attentiveness to the fragile intangibility of the world. In their paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, these artists join De Keyser in presenting the world back to us as a kind of abstract visual poetry. 

 presents works by Richard Aldrich, Forrest Bess, Matt Connors, René Daniëls, Raoul De Keyser, Vincent Fecteau, Maysha Mohamedi, Rebecca Morris, Betty Parsons, Amy Sillman, Ricky Swallow, Patricia Treib, Luc Tuymans, and Lesley Vance.

Text by Phong Bui, Leopoldine Core, Torkwase Dyson, Brian Greene, David Grubbs, Alteronce Gumby, Wayne Kostenbaum, Dorothea Lasky, Lucy Lippard, Rebecca Oppenheimer, Lynne Tillman

A critically acclaimed encounter between two American masters of threshold perception and color nuance

This book brings together the work of abstract painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–67) and key figure of the Light and Space movement James Turrell (born 1943). Turrell first encountered Reinhardt at a lecture at Pasadena Museum in 1962, and paid homage to the influence Reinhardt had on his own work through the exhibition 

, held at Pace Gallery in early 2022. As curator, Turrell designed the presentation and lighting concept to illuminate his chosen works from Reinhardt’s geometric, monochromatic “red,” “blue” and “black” paintings. This book documents this immersive exhibition through numerous installation photographs taken under different lighting conditions, accompanied by prose and poetry from a wide range of contributors, written in direct response to the visual experience of seeing the exhibition. Contemporary artists, writers, scientists and poets explore the experiential nature of both Reinhardt and Turrell’s work.

Ad Reinhardt: Color Out of Darkness

Texts by Gottfried Boehm, Vincent Broqua, Fritz Horstman, Raimer Jochims, Donald Judd, Heinz Liesbrock, Amy Jean Porter, Jeannette Redensek, and Margit Rowell

The essential account of Albers’s enormously influential proto-Minimalist series, featuring studies and archival materials

Made over the course of a quarter century between 1950 and his death in 1976, Josef Albers’s groundbreaking series 

 comprises 2,000 oil paintings. His quest for continuous reflection and refinement inspired numerous young Minimalist and Conceptualist artists in their search for a reduced formal language. This outstanding volume explores the secrets of Albers’s subtle aesthetic and the questions it poses: what is the significance of the square? How did Albers’s thoughts on color and its use as a material evolve over this span?

Featuring studies on paper, archival materials and essays by Albers aficionados Margit Rowell and Donald Judd, among others, this richly illustrated publication sheds light on the various inspirations that influenced Albers early on in Europe and later in America, and illustrates the lasting impact of his art and thinking.

Out of stock

Josef Albers: Homage to the Square, 1950–1976

Dynamic and forward thinking this unconventional retrospective monograph takes its cues from Alice Neel’s life and work— at once intimate, powerful, and bursting with color.

Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century and a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. “One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by,” she explained, “right hot off the griddle.” This beautifully designed volume takes a unique approach to the exhibition catalog, highlighting Neel’s understanding of the fundamentally political nature of how we look at others, and what it means to feel seen. Long a favorite of portrait lovers, Neel has recently gained an even wider 21st-century audience appreciative of the searing candor with which she viewed the world, the depth of her humanity, and her championing of the underdog. This beautifully produced catalog features a thoroughly modern design, as well as an essay by renowned critic Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge.

Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle

Helen Molesworth

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

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

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

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

Helen Molesworth: Open Questions

God Made My Face: A Collective portrait of James Baldwin

Edited with text by Hilton Als. Text by Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, and Darryl Pinckney

Baldwin’s life and legacy as remembered by a pantheon of artists and writers: from Jamaica Kincaid and Barry Jenkins to Richard Avedon and Alice Neel

When author James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work: novels, poems, film scripts and, perhaps most indelibly, essays. A friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was a critical voice in the civil rights movement. After reaching acclaim in his early career as a writer, he struggled to retain the author’s “I,” while taking on the “we” of the people.

Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als and growing out of his landmark exhibition at David Zwirner in 2019, 

 brings together an impressive assembly of contributors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and 

 director Barry Jenkins, to create a memorial mosaic: one that not only mirrors Baldwin’s various tones but also closely examines his singular contributions to cinema, theater, the essay and Black American critical studies. These essays are illustrated by artwork from modern and contemporary artists who were either personal contemporaries of Baldwin or directly inspired by his work. In each piece assembled here, the authors speak from a personal, informed perspective, illuminating Baldwin’s deeply anguished and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately—because we are human—we share the potential to love, connect and live together in all our glory.

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

An installation view of Rirkrit Tiravanija's work, Untitled 1992 (Free), dated 1992-2007, at David Zwirner New York, in 2007.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, 2021. Photo by Daniel Dorsa

Edited by Ruba Katrib, Yasmil Raymond, Jody Graf, Kari Rittenbach. Contributions by Ruba Katrib, Yasmil Raymond, Jörn Schafaff, David Teh, Mi You, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Liam Gillick, Hou Hanru, Karl Holmqvist, Pierre Huyghe, Arthur Jafa, Eungie Joo, Pamela M. Lee, Glorimarta Linares, Arto Lindsay, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, Elizabeth Peyton, Martha Rosler, Aki Sasamoto, Shimabuku, Danh Vo

Four decades of participatory art, films, sculpture and more from the iconic Relational Aesthetics pioneer

Accompanying the first US survey and largest exhibition to date dedicated to Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, 

 traces four decades of Tiravanija’s multifaceted practice. Spanning rarely seen early works from the 1980s through recent projects, the publication covers Tiravanija’s experimentations with installation, film, works on paper, ephemera, sculpture and participatory works. Designed by Tiffany Malakooti, the publication features over 400 images—many of which are published for the first time—as well as 23 newly commissioned texts. Longform essays by exhibition curators Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond, as well as scholars Jörn Schafaff, David Teh and Mi You, dive into key aspects of Tiravanija’s work, providing historical context. These texts are complemented by 18 short reflections from artists, thinkers and collaborators who have been key interlocutors with Tiravanija over the years.

Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE

Leo Amino

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible

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

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

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

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

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

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction

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

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

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

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

Neo Rauch: The Dream of Reason

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