South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) has produced an outstanding body of work in multiple mediums―drawings, animations, sculptures, theater and stage design―all of which trace the fraught political and cultural history of South Africa. This book is the first to explore Kentridge’s extraordinary new series of seventeen large-scale tapestries, created under his artistic direction by a team of South African weavers between 2001 and 2007. The tapestries depict shadowy figures that resonate with his collages of itinerant characters set against the weblike backgrounds of 19th-century maps of Europe and Johannesburg. 
A distinguished group of authors relate the tapestries to the rest of Kentridge’s multifaceted oeuvre, underline the centrality of drawing in his practice, and illuminate the connection between the tapestries and South African geography and history. Together they contribute to an understanding of Kentridge’s tapestries as a precise critical examination of issues surrounding memory and conflict in the context of societies that, while rife with violence, strive for peace and reconciliation.

William Kentridge: Tapestries

Arts & Photography

VLADISLAVIC, Ivan

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Basualdo, Carlos

Guercio, Gabriele

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

The first substantial monograph on an artist whose sculptures capture the proliferation of information and objects in contemporary life.
Sarah Sze (b. Boston, 1969, lives and works in New York) has developed a sculptural aesthetic that transforms space through radical shifts in scale, colonizing peripheral spaces, engaging with the history of a building, and altering the viewer's perception and experience of architecture through large, site-specific interventions. Known for her unexpected and carefully arranged combinations of materials, from cotton buds and tea bags to water bottles and ladders, light bulbs and electric fans, Sze has presented ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings and burrow into the ground. Her work exists at the intersection of sculpture, drawing and architecture where her formal interest in light, air and movement is coupled with an intuitive understanding of colour and texture.
Like the scientific instruments of measurement they often reference, Sze's sculptures attempt to quantify and organize the universe, ascribing a fragile, personal system of order. Within her practice, sculpture becomes both a device for organizing and dismantling information and a mechanism to locate and dislocate oneself in time and space.
Sze received a BA from Yale University in Connecticut in 1991 and an MFA from New York's School of Visual Arts in 1997. She is represented by Tanya Bonakdar in New York and Victoria Miro in London. In 2013 she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2003 and of the AICA Award for Best Project in a Public Space in 2012.
Her work is well represented in important private and public collections worldwide, including those of New York's Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, along with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, Japan, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sarah Sze (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Hoptman, Laura

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

On the occasion of a major exhibition, performance, and film premiere, this book considers Matthew Barney's epic seven-year project, an odyssey of death and its mythologies. This long-awaited volume documents the full breadth of this ambitious new project, the first major series by the artist since the legendary Cremaster cycle. River of Fundament is directly inspired by Norman Mailer's Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings, his infamous classic that chronicled the passage of a narrator through the stations of death and reincarnation. In a sequence of unique live performances, a series of massive sculptures, and, finally, a marathon-length opera in cinematic form, made with the artist's longtime collaborator, the composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney has elaborated a richly perverse and complex universe in which mythology, iconography, narrative, sex, and death are inextricably entwined. Organized according to the narrative structure of the film, the book features sculptures (made from elemental materials such as iron, sulfur, bronze, lead, salt, and copper), drawings, film and live performance stills, storyboards, and original scores by Bepler. A comprehensive essay on the exhibition and film project by Okwui Enwezor provides an overview of the entire project. The book also includes contributions by literary theorist Homi K. Bhabha and critic Hilton Als, as well as facsimiles of the playbills produced for the related live performances.

Matthew Barney: River of Fundament

Skira/Rizzoli

This new volume presents Katharina Grosse's first gallery exhibition in New York and at Gagosian in context with recent works including her in-situ paintings. In her first exhibition with Gagosian, Katharina Grosse presents both works on canvas and cast-metal sculpture. This catalogue documents the exhibition and related recent works, and introduces readers to several of her important in-situ paintings including her installation at the 56th Venice Biennale and Rockaway! (2016), a site-specific outdoor installation that memorialized a building on the beach in Rockaway, Queens. This volume is presented in a slipcase with a stenciled cutout designed by Grosse.

Katharina Grosse

Cameron, Dan

Gagosian / Rizzoli

Essays by Okwui Enwezor, James Rondeau, Hamsa Walker.

Thomas Hirschhorn: Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake--The Art Institute of Chicago: Flugplatz Welt/World Airport

Rondeau, James

Hirschhorn, Thomas

Walker, Hamsa

Art Institute of Chicago/The Renaissance Society

The 30 African photographers selected for this pioneering anthology challenge long-standing Western misconceptions about Africa. Created from the beginnings of the continent's struggles for independence to the postcolonial present, their diverse works include studio portraiture and architectural views from the 1940s and 1950s; photojournalism from Drum, the influential South African magazine that celebrated and critiqued life in the 1950s; scenes of the activities of cosmopolitan youth in the 1960s and 1970s; and contemporary art that addresses more personal concerns, from issues of identity and representation of the body, to formal studies exploring the symbolism of light and darkness. Okwui Enwezor's and Octavio Zaya's probing essays discuss photographic representation, Western perceptions of Africa and the changing self-images of Africans over this period of profound transformation. Olu Oguibe's text illuminates the nature and uses of the image in African history and traditions. Also included are artists' biographies and personal statements.

In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to the Present

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Guggenheim Museum

This catalog is the first monographic publication to survey the work of London-based artist John Akomfrah (born 1957) and accompanies his upcoming New Museum exhibition. Since the early 1980s, Akomfrah's moving image works have offered some of the most rigorous and expansive reflections on the culture of the black diaspora. Zoe Whitley and Aram Moshayedi survey Akomfrah's early work as part of Black Audio Film Collective. Tina Campt explores the sonic resonances of Akomfrah's installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012), which focuses on the life of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Diana Nawi examines the recent work Transfigured Night (2013/2018), considering how Akomfrah continues to find new languages for film, representation and narrative. T.J. Demos and Okwui Enwezor look at Vertigo Sea (2015), Akomfrah's monumental work exploring the concept of the black Atlantic, using the work to articulate the visual and philosophical underpinnings of Akomfrah's work across his career.

John Akomfrah

Nawi, Diana

Whitley, Zoé

Carrion-Murayari, Gary

Moshayedi, Aram

Akomfrah, John

Campt, Tina

Demos, T.J.

Mopadevi, Srivinas Aditya

New Museum

Season South Africa is a major program of contemporary visual and performing arts that runs from September 2004 through January 2005. Launched by the Museum for African Art and The Cathedral of St. John the Divine during the year that South Africa is commemorating its first decade of democracy, Season South Africa showcases some of that country's most gifted and acclaimed contemporary visual and performing artists chosen by an international team of curators. The visual arts exhibition, Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, presents newly commissioned and recently produced works in various media by 17 South African artists. The common thread throughout the exhibition is the higly personal point of departure of the artists' working methods that are informed by their varied experiences as South Africans. Volume I also features an introduction by the exhibition curators, as well as various exploratory and insightful texts.

Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Volume 1

Brodie, David

Madikida, Churchill

Murinik, Tracy

van der Watt, Liese

Museum for African Art/Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine

Over the past twenty-five years, Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum has developed a large and compelling body of work that includes painting, sculpture, performance and photography. From exuberant paintings of nonsensical language to arrangements of furniture that deliberately block their conventional use; from shopkeeper signs that combine the language of commercial identity with personal messages to mazes that incorporate mirrors and poetic texts, Lum's multi-faceted work is consistent in its exploration of the tension between individual identity and the unrelenting processes of acculturation that pervade contemporary urban life. Since the early 1980s, Lum has regularly been represented in exhibitions throughout North America, Europe and Asia, including such prestigious shows as Documenta, the Shanghai Biennale and, most recently, the Istanbul Biennal. This richly illustrated volume, which contains insightful essays by celebrated critics and curator Grant Arnold, accompanies a large-scale exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery that celebrates Lum's entire career and showcases important aspects of his work that have never been seen before in North America. Clearly written and sumptuously designed, Ken Lum showcases the intelligent, provocative and passionate work of one of Canada's foremost artists, recent winner of the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award for outstanding achievement by a Canadian artist.

Ken Lum

Arnold, Grant

Schoeny, Roland

Douglas&McIntyre

Lorna Simpson is one of the leading artists of her generation, devoted to the beauty of image-making, innovatively juxtaposing the figure and gesture with text and narrative. This rich monograph, created to accompany the major retrospective of Simpson's work touring in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York (among other destinations) beginning this spring, includes insightful essays by curator and critic Okwui Enwezor and New Yorker writer Hilton Als, and a conversation with the artist, Isaac Julien, and Thelma Golden, along with 126 reproductions from Simpson's formally elegant, subtly provocative body of work-including her recent work.

Lorna Simpson.

Abrams

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