Yayoi Kusama has been obsessively and nearly incessantly creating artwork since the 1950s. The Japanese artist exhibited her first signature "Infinity Net" painting--a large canvas covered with a hypnotic array of little dots--in New York City in 1959. Since then she's shown her work the world over. Kusama's long career has overlapped the surrealist, expressionist, and pop-art movements, to name just a few, and though she has drawn inspiration from some of these sources, she has remained steadfastly focused on her own artistic vision. Her collections of wriggling, overstuffed spongy tubes overtaking floors, pieces of furniture, and rowboats; the polka dots covering her Infinity Net paintings, mirrored rooms, mannequins, and even her own skin; the mottled, gourdlike sculptures she installs in mirrored rooms--all of these visual motifs recur consistently in her work and evoke both Western and Eastern aesthetic influences.Yayoi Kusama is one of Phaidon's contemporary artists series, which includes, among others, books on Thomas Sch++tte, Jeff Wall, and Jessica Stockholder. Yayoi Kusama features an interview with Kusama in which she discusses her lifelong mental illness and her love affair with Donald Judd, along with the anti-establishment art "happenings" she staged in Manhattan in the 1960s and the major themes in her work. A pictorial survey, a collection of her own writing, and a Takuboku Ishikawa poem she selected to accompany her work round out the volume. This is a highly recommended book for readers already familiar with Kusama's oeuvre and those interested in learning more about this important artist. --Jordana Moskowitz

Yayoi Kusama (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Hoptman, Laura

TATEHATA, AKIRA

KULTERMANN, Udo

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

"Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century" is the first exhibition in the "Unmonumental" cycle, and explores the reinvention of sculptural assemblage. Using found, fragmented, and discarded materials, the works of the artists on view make a case for modesty, informality, and improvisation. The exhibition includes more than one hundred objects by thirty artists who represent a wide range of backgrounds and artistic strategies.

Unmonumental

Smith, Trevor

Gioni, Massimiliano

Flood, Richard

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

This volume on Tomma Abts (b. 1967) will be published in conjuction with the exhibition of the same name that will be on display at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art from 9 April to 29 June 2008. It explores how the artist creates forms that delight the eye and challenge the mind. While working within strict parameters, Abts has reinvented abstraction for the twenty-first century. This is the first monograph on Abts, providing an extensive overview of more than ten years of work. It includes illuminating essays by three top critics, as well as full color reproductions of virtually every painting and drawing made by the artist since 1997.

Tomma Abts

Hainley, Bruce

Werwoert, Jan

American artist Elizabeth Peyton has been credited with breathing new life into the ancient art of portraiture. Her highly stylized, idealized oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors are driven by the emotional, adoring eye of an unrequited lover. Willowy, melancholy young men and women contemporary pop stars, royalty, artists, and friends are the magnetic subjects of her devotion. Caught as if in a state of ambiguous absorption and frozen at the height of their youth, they embody a new kind of portraiture that confirms and updates the immortalizing aura of the traditional genre. Peyton's melding of influences and obsessions ranges widely: from fandom and fashion illustration to academic anatomical studies; from David Hockney and Andy Warhol to a range of Mannerist and Old Master classics; from innocence to the world of bohemia, equally crediting photography and life drawing as its driving forces. Her enamored yet refreshingly informal light wash technique underscores her uniquely delicate, informed hybrid of high and low culture, a statement executed with infectious, seemingly effortless fluidity. Published in conjunction with the artist's major solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York, which will travel to the Whitechapel in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht.

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton

Giorno, John

Blazwick, Iwona

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press~ Inc

Vitamin 3-D provides an essential blend of sculpture and installation made by today's most influential artists. Featuring innovative new work from around the globe, Vitamin 3-D's patented formula will expand and enrich your perception of artworks in all three dimensions.

Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation

Pedrosa, Adriano

Hoffmann, Jens

Sculpture

Following the successful reception of Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing and Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography, Vitamin 3&amp;hyphen;D aims to create a lively and informative survey of contemporary sculpture and installation from around the globe. With 120 artists selected by 40 nominators, Vitamin 3&amp;hyphen;D will be an up&amp;hyphen;to&amp;hyphen;the&amp;hyphen;minute guide to the best artists working in three dimensions.

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)

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D.

An updated edition of the acclaimed monograph, celebrating one of the most iconic and revolutionary artists of our time.
"Yayoi Kusama transcended the art world to become a fixture of popular culture, in a league with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Keith Haring." —The New York Times
Kusama is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on themes such as infinity, self-image, sexuality, and compulsive repetition. A well-known name in the Manhattan scene of the 1960s, Kusama's subsequent work combined Psychedelia and Pop culture with patterning, often resulting in participatory installations and series of paintings. This revised and expanded edition of the 2000 monograph, which is arguably still one of the most comprehensive studies on her work to date, has been augmented by an essay by Catherine Taft and a collection of new poems by the artist.

Yayoi Kusama: Revised & expanded edition (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Taft, Catherine

Humor & Entertainment

Kusama has influenced the direction of American art more than any other post-war Japanese artist. Her work combines elements of expressionism, minimalism, surrealism and pop art.

Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968

Zelevansky, Lynn

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

When Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Museum of Art, his goal was to introduce the people of Pittsburgh to paintings by modern American and European artists. His vision for developing the collection program centered on purchases from an annual exhibition of modern art, now known as the Carnegie International. First held in 1896, the exhibition is the longest running survey of recent art in North America. What was modern then is contemporary in 2004, and the 54th Carnegie International promises to fulfill the exhibition's long-standing tradition of assembling the best contemporary art from around the world . A large-format, fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies this tightly conceived exhibition of interrelated projects grouped around three small monographic exhibitions. These three exhibitions present the work of artists whose lengthy and influential oeuvres serve as touchstones for the larger exhibition. Catalogue entries prepared by a variety of writers with curatorial or critical expertise document the work of 40 artists from all over the world. The artists range in age from 28 to 80 and work in diverse media, including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, video, animation, and ceramics. (Artists will be announced in June 2004.) Each artist will be presented through a short essay accompanied by a three-page spread of color images, as well as comprehensive biographical and bibliographic information. The catalogue features an introduction by Laura Hoptman, curator, and expanded essays on three artists will punctuate the book.

54Th Carnegie International

SMITH, ELIZABETH

Medina, Cuauhtémoc

Thomas, Elizabeth

Armstrong, Richard

Mercier, Jean-Pierre

Stipancic, Branka

Carnegie Museum Of Art

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