An arresting and visually rich monograph of the work of contemporary artist Sanya Kantarovsky. Forlorn and spiritually bankrupt, tender or abject-the subjects in the figurative paintings of Sanya Kantarovsky (b. 1982) convey an uneasy, dark humor. They seem trapped in a precarious inner monologue, or under the spell of mundane lived experience. A Solid House, developed in conjunction with Kantarovsky's exhibition A Solid Houseat the Aspen Art Museum, includes more than 200 full-color image plates and spans the artist's oeuvre, focusing on his most recent output following his previous monograph, No Joke (2014). The publicationalso includes a conversation between Kantarovsky and art historian Isabelle Graw, as well as essays by the psychoanalyst and writer Jamieson Webster and art historian George Baker.

Sanya Kantarovsky: Selected Works 2010-2024

Arts & Photography

Graw, Isabelle

Webster, Jamieson

Baker, George

Kantarovsky, Sanya

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

William Monk (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Myers, Terry R.

Miralda, Àngels

Phaidon Press

Today, the art world is not dominated by a small group of insiders. According to Graw, the art economy has been transformed from a retail business into an industry that produces visuality and meaning. This book questions the assumption of a dichotomy between art and the market, as well as the notion that market value is equal to artistic value. While examining the intrinsic connection between artistic production and its market conditions, Graw also insists that art is a commodity unlike any other. High Price claims that art and the market have to escape each other precisely because they are so deeply entangled.
This book provides numerous examples to support the first claim of a massive growth in the defining role of the market and its players during the art boom, who also increasingly have a say in establishing artistic value. There is indeed much to suggest that in recent years, whether or not an artwork was considered relevant in artistic terms depended to a greater extent on its market value. But this market value still depends on a “symbolic value” for its ultimate legitimacy. Without symbolic value, no market value―this is the book's second claim. For if it is true that society has been changing since the 1970s from industrial capitalism into what Antonio Negri has called “cognitive capitalism,” then under such conditions, increased importance would once more be accorded to the symbolic meaning of an artwork. The art world is by definition a knowledge society, even if the spell of commercial success has long held sway over it.
Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst in Berlin.

High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture

Business of Art

Sternberg Pr

Jutta Koether's translucent color fields, expressive brushstrokes and female subjects--as well as her use of poetry, art history and Mylar--can make her seem like a feminist answer to the Cologne art scene, a counterpart to artists like Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. In fact, she is a central contemporary painter in her own right, as well as a performance artist, a musician and a critic. She collaborates musically with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Television's Tom Verlaine, contributes regularly to Artforum and the respected German culture magazine Spex, and teaches in Bard College's MFA program--and has recently shown her work at Reema Spaulings Fine Art and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York. Koether's work, which the New York Times has called "vibrant" and "intriguing," was a standout in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This look back documents the artist's oeuvre from the mid-80s forward, with an extensive selection of images.

Jutta Koether

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Prinzhorn, Martin

DuMont

"Lots of painters are obsessed with inventing something," American painter Joan Mitchell (1925–92) said in 1986. "When I was young, it never occurred to me to invent. All I wanted to do was paint." Throughout her life Mitchell remained committed to totally autonomous abstract painting, always driven by this fundamental love for the craft and technique of painting. In a career spanning more than four decades, Mitchell's painting style married the dynamic gesture of the Abstract Expressionists, her generational peers, to a keen sensitivity to natural phenomena such as light and water. Characterized by an intense color palette and fresh gestural energy, often applied on a very large scale, Mitchell’s paintings both sensually seduce and intellectually stimulate viewers. Published to accompany a large-scale survey of Mitchell's painting, Joan Mitchell: Retrospective draws from Mitchell's entire oeuvre, from her early work of the 1950s to her late, multipart works painted in her last years. Both catalogue and exhibition insist on the importance of biography to any retrospective account of Mitchell’s work, and a large part of the exhibition is dedicated to the first extensive public presentation of archival materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Photographs, correspondence and ephemera from the archives are reproduced here, along with an illustrated timeline that relates Mitchell's life to her work. Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell studied at Smith College before training at The Art Institute of Chicago. After a fellowship in Paris, Mitchell lived in New York, where she became part of the community of Abstract Expressionist painters. She spent increasing amounts of time in France, eventually moving to Paris in 1959, and remaining there until her death in 1992.

Joan Mitchell: Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings

Morris, Laura

Dziewior, Yilmaz

Okiishi, Ken

Koether, Jutta

MICHAUD, YVES

Individual Artists

Kunsthaus Bregenz

ISABELLE GRAW IN EINER ANDEREN WELT /ALLEMAND

A study of how the rhetoric of painting remains omnipresent in the field of art.
Painting seems to have lost its dominant position in the field of the arts. However, looking more closely at exhibited photographs, assemblages, installations, or performances, it is evident how the rhetorics of painting still remain omnipresent. Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw's The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness. Thus, painting is not restricted to the limits of its own frame, but possesses a specific potential that is located in its material and physical signs. Its value is grounded in its capacity to both reveal and mystify its conditions of production. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw's insights are further discussed and put to the test.

The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (Sternberg Press)

Sternberg Press

Examinations of Francis Ponge's texts on Jean Fautrier's "Hostage Paintings," Jack Whitten's Memorial Paintings, and Banksy's auction stunt Love is in the Bin.This book contains three case studies on very different artists, analyzing their work through their respective historical contexts- the writer Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and his seminal text on Jean Fautrier's "Hostage Paintings" from 1943; visual artist Jack Whitten's (1939-2018) Memorial Paintings and Banksy's notorious auction stunt Love is in the Bin from 2018. Examining all three artistic propositions from a value-theoretical point of view, Graw finds Ponge's text on Fautrier to be "doubly materialist" insofar as it (seemingly) reveals its own material conditions while simultaneously grasping the specific materiality of Fautrier's paintings; suggests that the indications of value in Whitten's painting to be more indirect; and reveals Banksy's value reflections to have a very different generational thrust. Gaw shows that Ponge's text is full of value-reflexive insights but that Ponge himself is an ambivalent figure. She finds that the dedication of Whitten's paintings inscribes them in a system of exchange. And, finally, the deliberate aesthetic meagerness of Banksy's Love Is in the Bin points to an emptiness at the heart of value. Institut f r Kunstkritik series

Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (Sternberg Press / Institut für Kunstkritik series)

Blending memoir and social critique, elegantly written essays explore a world that feels different, from Brexit and Trump to #MeToo and the death of parents.This book merges memoir and social critique in an original fashion. By combining personal observations with a general systemic analysis, it seeks to propose a new genre of writing. Isabelle Graw manages to capture radical political, social, and cultural changes that have occurred since 2014 in elegantly written observations, also analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. Addressing topics that range from Brexit, Trump, and a general rightward turn to #MeToo, men with beards, and Balenciaga, Gaw registers the symptoms of a world that clearly feels different. Meditating on irretrievable personal losses, she describes how we find ourselves literally "in another world" after the death of our parents. With a theme of mourning running throughout, her book is an attempt at exposing and analyzing painful emotions.

In Another World: Notes 2014-2017

A diaristic novel on contemporary friendship and its importance. Isabelle Graw's latest book reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus. By focusing on her own social milieu-the art world-Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity-if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe-with it, we are able to fully live.

On the Benefits of Friendship

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