A comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of Belgian painter Jan Van Imschoot A comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of Belgian painter Jan Van Imschoot (b. 1963), whose contemporary work builds bridges to predecessors such as Caravaggio, Tintoretto, Goya, and Manet. Van Imschoot's painting consciously opts for a clear, sometimes contradictory and ironic style. The directness of his decisive brushwork and his balanced yet audacious use of color is strikingly contemporary, while his work draws on historical themes from literature and art history. In this way, Van Imschoot engages in a continuous dialogue with the past, in which he, with a dose of cynicism, often targets phenomena or figures that find themselves on the fringes of (contemporary) society. Bringing together more than 220 works by Van Imschoot with five accompanying texts, this book gives fresh insight into the painting practice of this Belgian master. <div> Distributed for Mercatorfonds</div>

Jan Van Imschoot: The End is Never Near

Arts & Photography

Roelstraete, Dieter

Ansen, Selen

Folkerts, Hendrik

Tapié, Alain

History & Criticism

Mercatorfonds

The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

Alteveer, Ian

Molesworth, Helen

Winograd, Abigail

Skira/Rizzoli

In 1967, Richard Long, then twenty-two years old and a student at Saint Martin's School of Art in London, walked back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the English countryside, leaving a track that he then photographed in black and white. The resulting work, A Line Made by Walking, was not only the starting point for Long's career as an artist but also a landmark for a new kind of art emerging in Europe and the Americas. The formal simplicity of Long's artwork suggested a relation to minimalism, but its location outside the gallery context and its suggestion of bodily actions also connected it to a new generation of artists whose work combined the organic, the temporary, the nonmaterial, and the performative to offer a critique of the art system and its language, forms, and values. Long's work bridged the concerns of his North American and European counterparts, connecting the industrial scale of Robert Smithson to the modesty of Gilberto Zorio, the exercises in dematerialization of Robert Morris with the organic forms of Alighiero e Boetti, and the performance of Yvonne Rainer with that of Joseph Beuys.Although A Line Made by Walking is an instantly recognizable work, no detailed analysis of this foundational piece has yet been published. At a time when Richard Long's career is being celebrated and reassessed, this study by writer and curator Dieter Roelstraete could not be more timely.

Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking (One Work)

Afterall Books

An illustrated study of a work that marks the transition from minimalism to a new mode of practice encompassing conceptual art, land art, and performance art.

An ingenious photographic analysis of Chinese propaganda across two photo technologies 
In the early 2000s, Thomas Ruff (born 1958) chanced across a coffee-table propaganda book on Mao Zedong and became interested in the visual rhetoric of Chinese Communism, eventually purchasing copies of La Chine—the French iteration of a periodical that the Chinese Communist Party produced from the late 1950s through the 1970s as a means of demonstrating the advantages of Communism to European countries. 
Ruff scanned images from La Chine depicting cheerful soldiers, scenic views, ceremonial occasions and Mao himself, enlarging them to reveal the offset halftone dots, then duplicating the image and converting it into pixels; that image was then layered over the original scan, from which Ruff removed various areas. The final image therefore contains both analog halftone and digital pixel. As Susanne Holschbach observes, “Ruff has visually merged the technological process of preparing photographs for their mass distribution from the two photographic eras on one pictorial plane.”

Thomas Ruff: Tableaux Chinois

Photography & Video

Walther König, Köln

Juzgar el arte contemporáneo / Judging Contemporary Art: Simposio internacional / International symposium

García Düttmann, Alexander

Menke, Christoph

Kunst, Bojana

Rebentisch, Juliane

Voss, Christiane

Univ Públic Navarra/Nafarroako Unib Publik

It has become almost obligatory to introduce a book on curating by noting the plethora of recent publications on the subject. How, in just a few short years, did we reach this point of saturation? What questions, exactly, do all these books address? Many attempt to offer an overview of the curatorial field as it exists today, or attempt to map its historical trajectory. Others propose a series of case studies under a common curatorial theme. All are hoping to contribute to this relatively new discipline and its accompanying canon. Edited by Jens Hoffmann, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating offers a real critique of existing publications and modes of thinking by explicitly asking the questions that others have missed, ignored or deemed already answered: What is a curator? What is the public? What is art? What about collecting? What is an exhibition? Why mediate art? What to do with the contemporary? What about responsibility? What is the process? How about pleasure? Here, Peter Eleey, Elena Filipovic, Juan A. Gaitán, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Adriano Pedrosa, João Ribas and Dieter Roelstraete each propose and then address one question. Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating takes a back-to-basics approach--a return to a kind of zero-degree state--at a time when a recalibration of what a curator is and does seems both necessary and urgent.

Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating

Morgan, Jessica

Eleey, Peter

Pedrosa, Adriano

Filipovic, Elena

Gaitán, Juan

Chong Cuy, Sofía Hernández

Lind, Maria

Martinez, Chús

Ribas, João

Mousse Publishing

Greek-born artist Jannis Kounellis is often identified with the Italian Arte Povera movement, though he had already made a name for himself in the Roman art scene of the early 1960s before allying himself to that movement in 1967. Using materials then considered unusual (such as wool, coal, live animals and plants), and blessed with a keen sixth sense for combining them, Kounellis worked to eliminate ideological boundaries between life and art, ethics and aesthetics, creation and production, the social and the individual. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kounellis continued to build this vocabulary of materials, introducing smoke, shelving units, coffee and coal. Kounellis's exemplary artistic odyssey and his more than four decades of fervent and impassioned activity are here surveyed on the occasion of his first large-scale exhibition in Belgium.

Jannis Kounellis

Hoet, Jan

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Charta

In a daring act of historical reconstruction, the curator Germano Celant, in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas, has recreated Harald Szeemann’s epochal Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, held at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, and installed by Celant at the magnificent Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice in June–November 2013. Szeemann’s show was a dialogue with the Bern Kunsthalle, and Celant has reprised its spirit by placing the works in dialogue with the Ca’ Corner della Regina--a very different building, in its Venetian grandeur, to the Kunsthalle. This publication is divided into three parts: the first reproduces photo documentation of the original exhibit, the second compiles essays and interviews on Celant’s project and the third includes the installation views of the show in Venice. The book is completed by a "Register" of works included in both shows.

When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013

Smith, Terry

Verwoert, Jan

Groys, Boris

Bishop, Claire

Esche, Charles

Hoffmann, Jens

Phillips, Glenn

Buchloh, Benjamin

Rattemeyer, Christian

Fondazione Prada

This story d'O is a long one. The Belgian conceptual, video and installation artist has packed some 1000 images, along with text, into these 800 pages. The tale is enigmatic, the meanings of the varying shapes ambiguous, but like previous works of his (the sculpture Mammy made of cooking and cleansing utensils; a video of the Himalayas that showed him appearing to top a peak with toothpaste), the work is playful, humorous, lively and interactive. Often, the images here seem to be in motion of their own accord, but if you want to watch them really move, pick up some popcorn and pop in the accompanying DVD.

Honoré d'O: Tant Pis

Individual Artists

Ludion

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