"Working in a pioneering fusion of sculpture and conceptually based performance, Paul McCarthy is one of the most influential figures in contemporary art*however the full range is of his oeuvre is still not fully appreciated or understood. While his architectural installations incorporating video and performance artifacts have received copious critical and curatorial attention during the present decade, few viewers are familiar with the scope of his artistic evolution, or with the impact his works had had on two generations of Los Angeles artists. This catalogue*accompanying McCarthy exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in new York*covers more than 100 works from all areas of his activity, and gives an exemplary insight into McCarthy's works form the early 70s up to the present day. Experts on his work give comprehensive descriptions and analyses of the artist's performances and installations, examine the unique ties between his works and the cinematic arts, and explore the ongoing dialogue between the artistic cultures of New York and Los Angeles, particularly in terms of the development of conceptual art."

Paul Mccarthy

Arts & Photography

Rugoff, Ralph

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artist
Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.
These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist.
This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

Paul McCarthy - Revised and Expanded Edition (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)

Gioni, Massimiliano

Stiles, Kristine

<div>Published to document the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings, this lavishly illustrated bilingual English and French catalogue features new essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff. Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings documents the 2022 exhibition of ten new paintings and a new hologram at Gagosian Paris. The exhibition brought together naturalistic paintings of simple wooden slats, which at once represent a new direction in Ruscha's work and extend his long-standing interest in realism, modernist abstraction, and the American vernacular. The catalogue includes plate photography of the ten paintings and one hologram as well as installation views of the exhibition.&nbsp; Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and lives and works in Los Angeles. A career-spanning retrospective, ED RUSCHA/NOW THEN, will open at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in September 2023 and travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April 2024. Since 1993, Gagosian has presented twenty-five major exhibitions of Ruscha's work in the United States and Europe. New, illustrated essays by Mark Godfrey and Ralph Rugoff, offering critical and historical contexts for the work, are included in this bilingual English and French catalogue.</div>

Ed Ruscha: Tom Sawyer Paintings

Godfrey, Mark

Individual Artists

Gagosian / Rizzoli

VERY-GOOD-PLUS HARDBACK-WITH-DUSTJACKET

The Art of Susan Rios

Hugh Lauter Levin Assc

This exhibition examines the uses and the value of the miniscule in contemporary art. It traces recent interest in small-scale art back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, highlighting the work of artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Yoko Ono, Joel Shapiro, Hanna Wilke and many others. In surveying this legacy, the collection presents the work of younger artists who draw on the history of Conceptualism with mischievous absurdity, in many cases hinting that art gains significance as it comes close to disappearing, rehearsing its own erasure. The participating artists are Chris Burden, James Lee Byars, Gene Davis, Jessica Diamond, Judy Fiskin, Tom Friedman, Bethan Huws, Ilya Kabakov, Steve Keister, Charles LeDray, Elizabeth LeMoine, Siobhan Liddell, Guy Limone, John Miller, Joan Nelson, Yoko Ono, Aura Rosenberg, Michael Ross, Sam Samore, Hagop Sandaldjian, Peter Santino, Joel Shapiro, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeffrey Valance, Hannah Wilke and B. Wurtz.

At The Threshold Of The Visible: Miniscule and Small-Scale Art, 1964-1996

Independent Curators International (ICI)

Family photographs are a universally familiar genre, and an intimate one, which makes this collection an accessible entry point for its deceptively simple but deeply complex social and representational issues. In turning their cameras on their own households,17 artists including Miguel Calder*n, Ari Markopoulos, Chris Verene and Gillian Wearing consider the family as a dynamic social institution, and confirm, if there was any doubt, that its affairs are never simply personal, but rather are entwined with and illustrative of broader historical, anthropological and economic considerations. Using the languages of snapshots, documentary and staged photography, as well as conceptual and performance art, and focusing on the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, these artists link the family to class and financial issues, gender and ethnic stereotypes, shifting marital and generational roles, and the impacts of war and immigration. Emotionally incisive and visually inventive, Shoot the Family transforms that most common artifact--the family photograph--into an illuminating investigation of contemporary culture. Essay by Ralph Rugoff and a short story by Lynne Tillman.

Shoot the Family

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

High and low, sweet and sour, this witty but challenging collection embraces the contradictions, paradoxes, and double entendres of contemporary culture. Since 1991 Tom Patchett has amassed an iconoclastic collection that includes the work of antitraditionalists like Marcel Duchamp and provocative contemporary artists such as Chris Burden. Double Trouble is a two-volume catalogue from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Auditorio de Galicia, Spain. Featuring more than 350 color reproductions with essays by curator Elizabeth Armstrong, Ralph Rugoff, and others.

Double Trouble-The Patchett Collection (2 volumes)

Armstrong, Elizabeth

Smart Art Pr

Of his Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson once said, "Part of the assigned task is to reintegrate people with wonder". And wonder museum visitors do, at exhibits like a woman's horn, a bat frozen in a slab of lead, and microminiature sculpture framed in the eye of a needle. Asked to redesign the Los Angeles museum's façade to meet structural requirements, Southern California architects Robert Mangurian and Mary Ann Ray quickly got involved in more than your typical seismic upgrade. Stunning full-color drawings show 40 outlandish potential facades for the MJT. Featuring essays by Pat Morton, Lars Lerup and Ralph Rugoff. Dimension: 7 x 12 inches, 76 color drawings and reproductions.

Wrapper: 40 Possible City Surfaces for the Museum of Jurassic Technology

Politics & Social Sciences

Ray, Mary-Ann

Ray, Robert

Ray, Mangurian

Mangurian, Robert

Social Sciences

William K Stout Pub

Since the mid-1970s, George Condo has been painting portraits of people inhabiting his imagination. By transposing the techniques of the Italian Renaissance, Spanish Baroque, French Impressionism, Surrealism, 1950s Modernism, and Pop Art, Condo has created an original movement, which he calls Artificial Realism - the realistic representation of that which is artificial. In his first artist's monograph, The Imaginary Portraits of George Condo, the painter showcases an incredible selection of subjects - from Madonnas and Clowns to Metaphysical mannequins and Antipodular Beings - which had previously existed only on the periphery of his consciousness. Condo painted while on the move, and the imaginary characters were made manifest in hotel rooms during his travels throughout Europe. The result is a carnivalesque collection of creatures, the likes of which will most surely surprise, provoke, confuse, and delight.

The Imaginary Portraits of George Condo

Condo, George

powerHouse Books

Cameron Jamie (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Vergne, Philippe

Filipovic, Elena

Joseph, Branden W.

Humor & Entertainment

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Books by Rugoff, Ralph