A fascinating history of the explosive convergence of avant-garde art and rock music The dynamic relationship between rock music and visual art crosses continents, generations, and cultures. Beginning with Andy Warhol’s involvement with The Velvet Underground in 1967, artists have maintained a strong connection to rock. Artists such as Slater Bradley, Mike Kelley, and Raymond Pettibon have created album covers and music videos for rock bands, while rock musicians such as Bryan Ferry, John Lennon, and Peter Townsend have emerged from art schools, and punk and new wave bands such as Talking Heads and Sonic Youth have shared the same social and artistic milieu as artists including Robert Longo and Richard Prince.
Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 looks at the intimate and inspired relationship between the visual arts and rock-and-roll culture, charting their intersection through works of art, album covers, music videos, and other materials. Organized regionally by cultural centers including London, New York, Los Angeles, and Cologne, the essays examine rock and roll’s style, celebrity, and identity politics in art; the experience, energy, and sense of devotion rock music inspires; and the dual role that many individuals play in both the sonic and visual realms. Presenting work that defies a more literal interpretation of the theme and instead suggests the style, energy, and attitude that has come to be associated with rock and roll, this fascinating volume is essential for admirers of contemporary art and culture.

Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967

Graham, Dan

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Nickas, Bob

KELLEY, MIKE

Higgs, Matthew

Hell, Richard

Molon, Dominic

Tumlir, Jan

Koether, Jutta

Elms, Anthony

History

Yale University Press

In recent years, abstract painting has developed a rich complexity that, now more than ever, rewards intensive viewing; this authoritative book guides the reader through the key issues in the field. Painting Abstraction profiles 80 of today?s most vital contemporary abstract painters, such as Mark Grotjahn and Amy Sillman, featuring large full-color reproductions of their work and incisive texts by author and curator Bob Nickas. The product of years of research and countless studio visits, Painting Abstraction is a major statement on the last five years of this exciting new wave of creativity in painting.

Painting Abstraction: New Elements In Abstract Painting

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

'Painting Abstraction' profiles 80 of today's most vital contemporary abstract painters, such as Mark Grotjahn and Amy Sillman, featuring large full-colour reproductions of their work and incisive texts by author and curator Bob Nickas.

Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting

Ugo Rondinone’s Sun paintings are reproduced at unprecedented scale in a display-worthy elephant folio, published in a limited edition of 345 copies.\nNew York–based, Swiss-born conceptual artist Ugo Rondinone’s Sun paintings are among his most celebrated series. Begun in 1992 and spanning three decades, the Sun works reflect Rondinone’s inter-ests in nineteenth-century German Romanticism and Tibetan mysticism as vehicles to explore natural phenomena and interior states. Rondinone began the Sun series by directing his gaze inward (a coun-terpoint to his contemporaneous plein air works), translating his emotional state to circular bands of watercolor on paper. To create distance between these diaristic studies and the viewer, Rondinone then altered the media and scale: expanding the Suns to more than seven feet in diameter and exchanging tremulous watercolor for seamless airbrush. Main-taining a consistent form and naming strategy—the German date of the work—Rondinone cycled through more than 370 color combinations, ranging from strong contrasts to barely perceptible shifts.\nSometimes referred to as mandala works, the Sun paintings fill the viewer’s field of vision with pulsing color. At 19 by 22 inches, this elephant folio creates an intense optical experience at close range. Complete with reproductions of all 219 large works and 154 smaller canvases and prints, Ugo Rondinone: The Sun is the most comprehensive source on the series to date.

Ugo Rondinone: The Sun

Individual Artists

Rizzoli Electa

Performance Anxiety

Consey, Kevin

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum Of Contemporary Art, Chicago

In the tradition of Brassaï's Paris at Night, Peter Hujar's Night brings together 43 hauntingly beautiful images of New York City. These pictures--most published here for the first time--illuminate a New York that has all but disappeared, one populated by the late-night demimonde, crumbling cobblestone streets, and landfills before the coming of Battery Park. Photographing costumed Halloween partygoers, dilapidated domestic interiors, cruisy city parks and trash-strewn parking lots, Hujar has left behind his own unique record of New York streets and their denizens, one as indelible as that of Weegee or Berenice Abbott. In a time before AIDS and a downtown before gentrification, Hujar's sometimes playful, often bleak photographs have an underlying sadness that is bound in the palpable mortality of his subjects, from revelers to decaying urban landscapes, all wrapped in a velvety blackness broken only by street lamps, fluorescent office windows and his camera's flash.

Peter Hujar: Night

Matthew Marks Gallery/Fraenkel Gallery

Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg have been collecting contemporary art for more than 25 years; their collection features major works by artists including Kai Althoff, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, David Hammons, Mary Heilmann and many others.

At Home/Not at Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing recently in The New Yorker about the exhibition No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984–1989 at David Zwirner in New York, "the show's cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era." Canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of the art scenes in Cologne―arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time―and New York. While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler and Monika Sprüth showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel and others. These German artists were exhibited alongside artists such as Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the work of German artists was presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring Augustine and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this dialogue, among them Europa/Amerika (Museum Ludwig, 1986) and A Distanced View (New Museum, 1986). Big, bold and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color every one of the over 100 artworks by 22 international artists included in this massive exhibition―one of the largest in David Zwirner's history. The book also features new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, an illustrated timeline for both cities and compelling archival material―from documentary photographs from the period and reproductions of Cologne's historic Spex Magazine to reviews of exhibitions from the period. This catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart and "dissonance of styles"―in the words of Schjeldahl―embodied by this fecund moment in global art history.

No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984-1989

David Zwirner Books

This volume is comprised of years of recent writing by the influential New York–based critic and curator Bob Nickas, widely considered one of the few independent voices still at work today. The 50 essays and interviews, written since 2007, are spread across five chapters, touching on encounters with artists from the 1960s to the ’80s to the present―among them, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, On Kawara, Isa Genzken, Steven Parrino, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kelley Walker and Pierre Huyghe. Writing as if these figures were passing us by in present time, Nickas traces the disappearance of artists, architecture and culture in New York over three decades. As a way to keep the past in every sense present, his writing is always issued from his fictional “Dept. of Corrections.”

The Dept. of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007–2015 By Bob Nickas

Karma, New York

Yesterworld: 2019 Diary

Karma Books, New York

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nickas, Bob. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nickas, Bob