Alice Neel : painted truths

Jeremy Lewison and others. 2010

Widely regarded as one of the most important American painters of the 20th century, Alice Neel is internationally recognized for her contributions to Abstract Expressionism, especially her perceptive portraiture. Neel (1900-1984) was a portrait painter at a time when this was traditionally the role of a male artist. After ascending to prominence in the 1960s as the feminist movement gained momentum, she has remained an iconic figure in the history of American painting. A self-proclaimed "collector of souls", Neel often painted friends and family, as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, such as Andy Warhol, Frank O'Hara, and Meyer Shapiro, delving into personalities and idiosyncrasies with a rare frankness. Alice Neel: Painted Truths brings together paintings that demonstrate Neel's range and ability, along with insightful commentary from four leading art historians. Although the book focuses on her portraits, it also covers the artist's early social realist paintings and cityscapes, tracing the evolution of Neel's style and examining themes that she revisited throughout her career. (Amazon)

Barbara Kruger

by Alexander Alberro and others ; introduction by Hal Foster ; with additional essays by Barbara Kruger. 2010

Bluntly ambiguous and confrontational, Kruger's unmistakable work evokes an urgent desire to examine and get real about the complexity of human experience in the face of reductive politics and consumer culture. She is best known for images that play with the visual language of advertising: Signature red or white banners of text stamped on black-and-white photographs blast viewers with statements like "Your body is a battleground" (over the face of a woman) or "I shop therefore I am" (in a red square held like a credit card in a large hand). These and many other equally provoking works--including her early explorations pairing photographs and text, humorous sculptures, and full-room installations--make up the first comprehensive retrospective of Kruger's work, which opened last October in Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art and will travel to the Whitney in New York later this summer. This book beautifully presents her work and frames a friendly investigation of its meanings and power in a group of essays that home in on the unsettling jolt her work delivers. It is an excellent and affordable overview of the work of an important contemporary artist. Highly recommended for all libraries. -Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal" (Amazon)

Chris Ofili

2009

Chris Ofili's intricately constructed works, combining beadlike dots of paint, collaged images from popular media, and elephant dung, create a unique iconography that marries African artistic and ritual practices with Western art historical traditions and contemporary hip-hop culture. This beautifully designed book, made in close collaboration with the artist, is the first to examine Ofili's artistic development and surveys his work in watercolor, graphite drawing, and sculpture. Literary and historical parallels from a formidable list of contributors explore the ways through which the artist has grasped his times with a palpable sense of history. (Amazon)

See also: Chris Ofili. Tate. 2010
Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at Tate Britain, London, 27 Jan.-16 May 2010.

Edward Hopper

edited by Carter E. Foster. 2009

An extensive study on Hopper, which accompanies a major travelling exhibition and illuminates the life and work of one of America's most celebrated artists. Illustrated with over 150 oils, watercolors, etchings and drawings with comments on their formal and technical characteristics, this exhibition's catalog offers an updated critical interpretation of Edward Hopper's work and an alternative view to the extensive literature that already exists on this artist. Among the artworks included are Cape Cod Sunset, Second Story Sunlight, and some interesting self-portraits from the Whitney Museum of American Art; the famous Morning Sun from the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, and a number of lesser-known watercolors and oils from Hopper's journeys to Paris. Also included are essays by several noted scholars, and an extensive chronology and bibliography. Perfect for casual perusing or serious study, this lavish exploration of Edward Hopper's work is certain to find a wide audience. (Amazon)

Gabriel Orozco

Ann Temkin ; with essays by Ann Temkin and others. 2009

Gabriel Orozco emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as one of the most intriguing and original artists of his generation, one of the last to come of age during the twentieth century. His work is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor, resisting confinement to one medium and roaming freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation and painting. Orozco deliberately blurs the boundary between the art object and the everyday environment, situating his work in a place that merges art and reality, whether through exquisite drawings made on airplane boarding passes or sculptures composed of recovered trash. This publication examines two decades of the artist's production year by year, from 1989 through 2009. Each section is richly illustrated and includes a short text, based on interviews with the artist, that combines biographical information with a brief and focused discussion of selected works. Critical essays by Ann Temkin, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Briony Fer supplement these foundational and chronological explorations, providing new insights and strategies for grounding Orozco's work in the larger landscape of contemporary art production. (Amazon)

Heat waves in a swamp : the paintings of Charles Burchfield

curated by Robert Gober ; edited by Cynthia Burlingham, Robert Gober ; with contributions by Dave Hickey, Tullis Johnson, Nancy Weekly. 2009

Offering a comprehensive overview of Charles Burchfield's work, this book presents the artist s expressive watercolors and provides a definitive account of his life and career. Working almost exclusively in watercolour, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) focused on his immediate surroundings-his garden, the views from his windows, snow turning to slush, sudden atmospheric changes, or the forest at dusk. He often imbued these subjects with highly expressionistic light, creating at times a clear-eyed description of the world and at other times, a unique mystical and visionary experience of nature. The book includes drawings from his 1917 sketchbook, Conventions for Abstract Thoughts ; watercolors from 1916-18 that were the focus of the first one-person exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1930; camouflage designs from his tour in the army and wallpaper designs from the 1920s; watercolors from the 1940s showing the artist's unique technique of expanding and reworking earlier works by pasting large strips of paper around them to dramatically increase their size; and finally Burchfield's large, transcendental watercolours from the 1950s and 1960s. (Amazon)

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