To Robert Rahway Zakanitch, life is full of ordinary miracles and the boundless beauty of humanity, which he expresses on paper and canvas in what essayist David Pagel calls a wild collision between freewheeling bohemian abandon and settled-down domestic sociability. Zakanitch, who was trained in commercial art and has a background in advertising, began to paint seriously amid the 1960s culture of artistic intellectualism, when beauty was out of fashion and modern art seemed bent on excluding rather than including its audience. After exploring formalism and abstract expressionism, Zakanitch began painting what he described as gestural things and patterns that were anathema to modernism. Things that I didn t quite understand, but felt good to me. He wanted to get back to the human rather than pursue the abstract. He wanted to reclaim beauty. By the 1970s, Zakanitch had reached critical acclaim as a fine artist and as a founder of the pattern and decoration movement. More recently, Zakanitch uses line, form, color, composition, and scale especially scale to create accessible, visually rich paintings. He wields his pencils and brushes with undeniable authority, but generously invites viewers into his artistic process, allowing visible erasures, drips of paint, glimpses of gridwork and support materials, and bits of hand-lettering. The first monograph on the artist s work, Robert Rahway Zakanitch presents more than one hundred of his paintings from 1962 to 2014, while essays by David Pagel and John DeFazio provide critical consideration. For more than fifty years Zakanitch has shown his artwork in solo and group exhibitions the world over, all the while reflecting on the nature of painting. His work is in many private and public collections, among them the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museés de Strasbourg, France. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995.

Zakanitch: Robert Rahway

Arts & Photography

David Pagel

John Defazio

Individual Artists

Pomegranate

A photographic innovator and conceptual artist, Robert Heinecken played an important role in the development of contemporary art practice. That role is critically assessed in this exhibition catalog, which accompanies a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. This volume, the first comprehensive book on Heinecken since 1980, illustrates all the major work in his thirty-year career, and features essays by leading photography critic and historian A.D. Coleman and exhibition curator Lynne Warren.

Robert Heinecken: Photographist- A Thirty-Five Year Retrospective

Irene Borger

Susie Cohen

A.D. Coleman

Lynne Warren

Museum Of Contemporary Art, Chicago

<div>Four Chicago-based artists, Judy Ledgerwood, Jim Lutes, Kay Rosen and Kevin Wolff, propose a variety of answers, exits and witty retorts to the often asked, and purportedly existential, question: why paint? Why not? Between the large-scale romantic landscapes of Ledgerwood, Rosen's carefully crafted word games, Lutes' calligraphic jumbles and the wily appendages of Wolff, painting has rarely seemed as varied and relevant. Art critic David Pagel looks at the crises in painting within the pretext of Modernism's decline and the ascension of Postmodernist pluralism and search for narratives. Pagel asserts that the question of how and why to paint always arrives either too late or too early, ever missing the crime in action, but there to reap the benefits of the deed.</div>

Why paint? Judy Ledgerwood, Jim Lutes, Kay Rosen and Kevin Wolff: the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, March 22-April 26, 1992

Renaissance Society

Published on the occasion of an exhibition at INOVA.

Fifteen: A Fifteen-Year Survey of Jim Isermann's Work

Michael Darling

Jim Isermann

Institute of Visual Arts, University of Wisconsin

L.A. NOW curated by David Pagel, Las Vegas Art Museum, December 12, 2008 - March 8, 2009

L.A. NOW

Bright City Books

KIRK PEDERSEN: URBAN ASIA is a large format photography book with 85 color reproductions from Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and several cities in China. It is not a travel book and is unlike any other book on the cities of Asia. Photographer Jeff Brouws writes in the introduction: No other artist-photographer is doing exactly what he's doing. With this fluid approach, traveling from city to city with no grand theme in mind, his work is distinctly different from his contemporaries. Michael Wolf shoots exclusively in Hong Kong and China; Edward Burtynsky's extensive coverage of the Three Gorges Dam Project and other industrial sites has happened often within the territorial limits of China; and Sze Tsung Leong history images - scenes of rampant development and architectural spectacle - are confined to Shanghai. While they all might share continents and countries they don't share viewpoints. Pedersen's eclectic stance creates a different photographic yield - he reclaims the commonplace and the fragmentary in these spaces/places... Hardcover, cloth with paper jacket, edition 1000, 12 x 12 inches, Japanese matt paper with spot vanished images. Also available is a Special Edition with a signed photo in a clamshell box - edition 100 (40 reserved for the artist).

Kirk Pedersen: Urban Asia

Jeff Brouws

Kirk Pedersen

Photography & Video

Zero+ Publishing

Kirk Pedersen: Urban Asia (Deluxe Edition with Signed Photo)

Stone Gravy

Summer Wheat: Blood, Sweat, and Tears

Erin Dziedzic

Anna Stothart

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Features fifteen internationally recognized contemporary artists, including Sophie Calle and Edward Burtynsky, whose work, in painting, sculpture, installations, and photography-based media, embodies an essentially idealistic outlook formed of traditional "romanticism", tempered by a strong sense of reality and stubborn optimism in the face of daily adversity and heartbreaking disappointment.

Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion

Claudia Schmuckli

NICK FLYNN

Terrie Sultan

Colin Gardner

History & Criticism

GILES

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Books by David Pagel