Billy Sullivan has released his first monograph "Still, Looking, Works 1969-2016." The publisher, Edition Patrick Frey, and kaufmann repetto are hosting a book launch on Friday, May 13, 2016, at the Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art in New York City. The event features a panel discussion with Carroll Dunham, Marietta Eugster, William J. Simmons, Billy Sullivan, and moderator Linda Yablonsky, with a book signing to follow.
"Still, Looking. Works 1969–2016" includes 270 pages of color plates spanning the full breadth of Sullivan’s career, along with essays by art historian William J. Simmons and critic Linda Yablonsky. The monograph features color plates that include drawings, paintings and photographs used as templates by Sullivan for his works on paper and oils on linen.
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Artwork by Billy Sullivan. Courtesy Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art.
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For this publication, Bill Sullivan collaborated with Paris-based designer Marietta Eugster to sequence the images into a series of visual chapters that purposefully subvert a standard chronological presentation. Time bends to memory and association as people and scenes continually resurface and echo long after their initial introduction.
Each chapter focuses on a particular subject—with ample allowance for digressions, diversions and reoccurrences—before flowing without delineation into the next.
In a similar way, the book explores the fluid coexistence of photography within Sullivan’s work alongside his paintings and drawings. Although Sullivan often uses his own photographs as templates for works on paper and oils on linen, the pages reveal the complexity editing and compression play in the process. "Still, Looking, Works 1969-2016" also reveals the ways many of his photographs remain images in their own right as coequals and upend the notion of source material versus final product.
Sullivan’s paintings and drawings can be challenging to reproduce accurately in print, due to his frequent use of fluorescent, iridescent and “luminous” hues that fall outside the standard CMYK printing gamut. By using a special profile of three Pantone “neon” inks plus black, this volume aims to restore Sullivan’s color spectrum and to fully translate his work’s vibrant intensity to the page.
Billy Sullivan (b. 1946) has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 1971. Recent solo exhibitions include kaufmann repetto, New York (2016), Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zürich (2014); Salomon Contemporary East Hampton (2010); and Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2008).
Sullivan's work is held in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Parrish Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, as well as many public and private collections. Sullivan lives and works in New York City and East Hampton in The Hamptons.
Since the early 1970s Billy Sullivan has accompanied New York’s underground, art and fashion scenes with his camera, using the resultant photographic material as templates for oil paintings, pastel drawings and elaborate multi-part slideshow installations, according to Edition Patrick Frey.
Sullivan shows his friends, family, lovers and muses and the worlds where they move: in clubs, ateliers, rumpled hotel rooms and elegant beach houses. In Sullivan’s imagery, the underground scene, the cultural elite and high society are always very close together, as are surface and abyss, the lust for life and the transience of youth.
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For details on Billy Sullivan's monograph, "Still, Looking. Works 1969–2016", visit www.editionpatrickfrey.com.
The Swiss Institute is located at 8 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013. www.swissinstitute.net. Click here for event details. For reservations for the Book Launch, email [email protected].
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