April’s Art on the Shelf includes plenty of new art books that are being released throughout the month. Expect to find a wide range of books on different artists, art movements and mediums including painting, street art, installation, photography and more.
Included in this month’s Art on the Shelf book list are: “Catherine Murphy,” “Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change,” “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture,” “Unspoken Spaces,” “Make Your Mark: The New Urban Artist,” “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” and “Nan Goldin: Diving for Pearls.”
“Catherine Murphy”
Representational painter Catherine Murphy's first monograph, “Catherine Murphy,” surveys her complete work, which unites American Minimalism and American naturalist painting. Murphy has evolved a style that combines obsessive authenticity with Minimalist rigor. From the shaded lawns of the New Jersey suburbs to the Massachusetts woods, from childhood interiors to self-portraits and detailed images of buttons and dust, carpeted stairs, or a stuccoed ceiling, Murphy always paints and draws from life, often the domestic and quotidian.
John Yau notes in his introduction that, “her attachment to the commonplace is not just a matter of convenience, of painting and drawing what she can see from her window or inside her apartment. In her choice of subjects—the artist has made a conscious decision to stay true to both what she could observe and to her own working-class background.” Catherine Murphy's work is represented in many public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Phillips Collection.
BASIC FACTS: “Catherine Murphy” (Hardcover Edition) is written by John Yau (contributor) and Svetlana Alpers (contributor). Published by Skira Rizzoli in association with Peter Freeman, Inc. Release Date: April 5, 2016. Hardcover; 192 pages; $55.00.
“Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change”
Robert Irwin, a postwar American artist and a pioneering figure of California Light and Space Art, is the subject of this book that traces his development and accomplishments in the 1960s. The first publication to focus exclusively on Irwin's trajectory during the 1960s, this book explores how the artist moved from creating small-scale abstract paintings to temporary installations that responded to the specific circumstances of a given site. During this relatively brief interval, Irwin interrogated the most essential premises of art and, in the process, redefined what a work of art could be, proposing that art not be limited to objects but be considered a way of seeing.
Through its discussion of Irwin's paintings, sculptures, and his new site-conditioned scrim installation created in response to the Hirshhorn's distinctive round architecture, this publication immerses the reader in the artist's investigations into the nature of color, light, and perception. The essays offer fresh insights into Irwin's art while highlighting his pivotal role in the broader aesthetic developments in the 1960s.
BASIC FACTS: “Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change” is written by Evelyn C. Hankins (editor). Published by Prestel. Release Date: April 7, 2016. Hardcover; 176 pages; $49.95.
“MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture”
“MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture” traces the inexorable rise of collage, montage, sampling and the cut-up. Tracing its roots from Braque and Picasso's experiments, and the multiple-perspectives, montages and readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Hoch, to the present with its postmodern network culture, where remixing and co-production are the norm and the New Aesthetic seeks to harmonize the now-everyday crossover of the digital and the actual.
The book finds parallels between the works of luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Price, Joyce Wieland and Jeff Wall, tracing the lasting impact of such seemingly disparate cultural phenomena as voguing, hacking and the use of audio and film as a kind of a globally available, open source language in art that deals with the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies. “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture” situates the work of Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Guy Debord alongside the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, Superstudio, Brian Eno and Cory Arcangel, and more generally within a culture where the new is necessarily re-made and re-modeled, and quotation and re-appropriation are an integral part of the way we talk about it.
BASIC FACTS: “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture” is written by Bruce Grenville (editor), Daina Augaitis (editor) and Stephanie Rebick (editor). Published by Black Dog Publishing in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Release Date: April 12, 2016. Hardcover; 368 pages; $59.95.
“Unspoken Spaces”
The first monograph of Olafur Eliasson in more than ten years, produced in close collaboration with the artist and his studio, explores his driving interest in finding visionary shapes to physically represent abstract ideas. It is an illustrated journey through spheres, tunnels, towers, walkways, and archways, as well as pavilions and larger buildings realized by Eliasson and his studio since the late 1990s. The work is illuminated by in-depth project descriptions and Eliasson’s own words. Essays by renowned writers across a variety of fields―from geologists and historians of art and science to architects, artists, and philosophers―give the works context.
Eliasson’s works around the world range from small-scale experiments, such as pavilions or tunnels, to large-scale public projects, among them such seminal works as “The Serpentine Pavilion” (2007) in London (with Kjetil Thorsen), “Your Rainbow Panorama” (2011) in Aarhus, Denmark, or the crystalline façade for Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre (2005–11) in Reykjavik. The works investigate the nature of space itself, in particular considering how space is actively conceived of by viewers as they move through and perceive the artwork.
BASIC FACTS: “Unspoken Spaces” is written by Olafur Eliasson. Published by Thames & Hudson. Release Date: April 18, 2016. Hardcover; 416 pages; $95.00.
“Make Your Mark: The New Urban Artist”
In an age when Banksy’s installations are protected by Plexiglas and graffiti artists exhibit in galleries as well as on the street, “Make Your Mark” explores the work of thirty-five urban artists who use mark-making techniques―drawing, painting, and other methods―to create a diverse array of work. Ranging from figurative painting, illustration, and comic book drawing to tattoo art, poster design, and mural making, the work is stylistically original, often incorporating experimental techniques or elements of the handmade.
This is the intersection of traditional and “street” sensibilities, from Mexican-born artist Carlos Donjuán’s paintings of masked figures to the atmospheric drawings of Bucharest-based artist Mark Francis Williams, whose work responds to the new shopping malls around his city. Other featured artists include the French illustrator and graffiti artist Bault, the American muralist Zio Ziegler, and the Japanese painter Fuco Ueda. As in his previous books on street art and other nontraditional genres, author Tristan Manco’s curatorial eye is a guide at the frontier of a new genre.
BASIC FACTS: “Make Your Mark: The New Urban Artist” is written by Tristan Manco. Published by Thames & Hudson. Release Date: April 18, 2016. Paperback; 256 pages; $45.00.
“Kerry James Marshall: Mastry”
This book celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition.
With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this book features essays by noted curators as well as by the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.
BASIC FACTS: “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” is written by Elizabeth Alexander, Ian Alteveer, Helen Molesworth, Dieter Roelstraete and Abigail Winogrand. Published by Skira Rizzoli. Release Date: April 19, 2016. Hardcover; 288 pages; $65.00.
“Nan Goldin: Diving for Pearls”
In her newest work, photographer Nan Goldin merges her deep admiration for the artworks of the past with a lifelong dedication to her most immediate circle of friends. Invited by the Louvre, she photographed artworks of her choice at the museum and, guided by aesthetic and associative considerations, connected them to earlier photographs of her friends and lovers. In this way she not only draws inspiration from the rich sources of art history but also revisits her own oeuvre of the last 40 years.
The striking similarities between the two different pictorial worlds exert an intense dynamic on the viewer. The series, which yielded over 400 photographs, was shown for the first time in its full scope at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. For this occasion, “Diving for Pearls” was conceived as an independent artist book, which, alongside Goldin's newest work "Saints," contains a selection of photographs that have never been published before.
BASIC FACTS: “Nan Goldin: Diving for Pearls” is written by Nan Goldin (author and photographer), Lotte Dinse (author) and Glenn O’Brien. Published by Steidl. Release Date: April 26, 2016. Hardcover; 208 pages; $45.00.
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