A handsome volume charting the thirty-year career of a widely celebrated, American-born conceptual artist Representing Christopher Williams’s first publication with a major American museum, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Williams (b. 1956) has crafted photographs that engage—often through uncanny mimicry—the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, as well as their sociopolitical contexts and implications. The book includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, which explore Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with the methods and modes of display and publicity in the art world, in addition to a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain. These more conventional contributions are “interrupted” by additional historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself and are occasionally presented in facsimile form. An exhibition history, bibliography, and illustrated list of works round out the publication.

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

Arts & Photography

WILLIAMS, CHRISTOPHER

Marcoci, Roxana

Witkovsky, Matthew S.

Godfrey, Mark

History & Criticism

Art Institute of Chicago

German artist Thomas Demand occupies a singular position in the world of photography. Initially he took up photography to record his ephemeral paper constructions, but in 1993 he turned the tables by making constructions in order to photograph them. Demand begins by translating a preexisting image, usually culled from the media, into a life-size model he makes out of colored paper and cardboard. He recreates a room, a parking lot, a staircase, a landscape--then he photographs the model and destroys it. Demand's photographs appear at once compellingly real and strangely artificial. Since their subjects--handcrafted facsimiles of both architectural spaces and natural environments--are themselves built in the image of other images, the photographs are three times removed from the scenes they seek to depict. Combining craftsmanship and conceptualism in equal parts, Demand pushes the medium of photography toward uncharted frontiers. Given the cinematic quality of many of his photographs, it is not surprising that he has set some of them in motion, producing five 35 mm films. This comprehensive publication presents all of Demand's major works from 1993 to the present. It includes previously unpublished archival documentation, and offers compelling insight into his working process and the stories behind his pictures.

Thomas Demand

Eugenides, Jeffrey

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

In recent years, a number of artists have abstracted images culled from slapstick, comic strips and films, cartoons and animation into a new representational mode to address perplexing issues about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and ethnic and cultural stereotyping. From Julie Mehretu’s intricately layered paintings and Arturo Herrera’s psychological collages made of Walt Disney coloring books to Ellen Gallagher’s seductively Minimalist paintings, permeated by “blackface” signs culled from minstrel performances, to Rivane Neuenschwander’s wiped-out cartoon characters, the world of comic abstraction reflects the intensely personal relationship that many contemporary artists maintain with political currents. This publication, which accompanies a Spring 2007 exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, presents the first major investigation into this new model of representation. It features recent work by 13 artists and a selection of 30 large-scale works and installations that bridge the rift between abstraction and comics in ways that are at once critical and playful. It also includes a critical essay, interviews with the artists, and a selected exhibition history and bibliography. Features work by Polly Apfelbaum, Inka Essenhigh, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Herrera, Michel Majerus, Julie Mehretu, Juan Muñoz, Takashi Murakami, Rivane Neuenschwander, Philippe Parreno, Gary Simmons, Franz West and Sue Williams.

Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making

Over the past 50 years, East European artists have seen the virtual breakdown of their societies and their cultures. Instead of seeking to replace their devalued ideologies with new belief systems, many have profoundly challenged the very concept of belief systems. In this provocative exhibition catalogue, artists and essayists from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgari and Slovakia confront Eastern Europe's cultural watershed head on. In addition to the excellent illustrations, the book includes a foldout timeline of noteworthy events since 1945, plus regional maps and a statistical profile of each country.

Beyond Belief: East Central European Contemporary Art

Museum Of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Shows and describes paintings of mothers and children by Dali, Picasso, Miro, Cassatt, Van Gogh, Renoir, Morisot, Monet, Reynolds, Titan, and Durer

Mothers & Children (Celebrations in Art)

Metro_Books

35 full-color reproductions. 10 1/2 x 12 1/4.

Gardens in Bloom (Celebrations in Art)

This book examines the shared preoccupations of five celebrated female artists from around the world, whose work mines the fertile fields of politics, patriarchy, religion and culture: Ghada Amer, Nicole Eisenman, Shahzia Sikander, Lin Tianmiao and Fatimah Tuggar.

Threads of Vision: Toward a New Feminine Poetics

Amer, Ghada

Chambers, Kristin

Eisenman, Nicole

Tuggar, Fatimah

Tianmiao, Lin

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art

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Books by Marcoci, Roxana