Shahryar Nashat inserts his art in the pages of this new artist’s book, which takes the form of a catalogue-turned-manual: but instead of explaining its meaning, he strips it of its aura, flaunts its nature as an object and describes step-by-step how to create it.
Martin Heidegger, Glenn Gould, Jacques-Louis David, Cy Twombly, Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein: characters that Francesco Arena has chosen or rediscovered in multiple contexts over the time recur in this book. Ranging from philosophy, to music, to visual arts, they embrace the whole world of knowledge.
This first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri aims to highlight the themes and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects at GAMeC, Bergamo; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; Swiss Institute, New York; Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; and the National Gallery, London.
The book highlights the main characteristics of the collective trauma that gave rise to Rachel Whiteread’s project for GAMeC. The psychoanalysts Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis map out a composite picture, starting from the sense of vulnerability and collective loss associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.
This book, with follows the eponymous exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, is constructed as a story, with a prologue, four acts, and an epilogue: an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative.
Dreaming Alcestis is an artist’s book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. It features a commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley’s 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?
Texts by Kirsty Bell, Christopher Bollen, Judith Eisler, Wade Guyton
Design by Joseph Logan
2024, English, hardcover, 19.6 x 28.5 cm, 176 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-56-0
Center of the Frame, which brings together paintings made between 1997 and 2024, is Judith Eisler’s first monograph. The artist’s paintings depict paused moments in cinematic time in which predominantly female subjects are caught midnarrative, cropped, and recontextualized by the fundamental elements of painting: form, color, and light. Using preexisting material borrowed from moving images, Eisler defines the abstractions inherent in the representational image with shifting marks of paint. The structure of the painting is informed by the information in the source as well as the more intangible issues of perception, desire, and mediation.
Featuring an essay by Kirsty Bell, an introduction by Christopher Bollen, and an interview with Wade Guyton, the texts delve into the artist’s fascination with cinema and the transmission of images through the various formats of analog film, television broadcasts, internet videos, and of course, the painted canvas.
“Eisler seizes on the information within the cropped still image in an entirely structural sense, beyond any cognitive meanings of expression, action, or emotion, focusing in on these differentiations as if examining the very infrastructure of vision.”
—Kirsty Bell
Judith Eisler’s exhibition Dreams, Jokes, Mistakes is on view at Casey Kaplan, New York through October 26, 2024.