Brad Kahlhamer fuses exuberant Expressionist painting with the visionary tradition of Native American art, resulting in what the critic Michael Cohen describes as "a new narrative of how the West was won that allows the original inhabitants to live to tell the tale." Kahlhamer draws in part from visual sources in the country western and Native American rock-music scenes, and his landscapes swirl with an atavistic energy; they seem to have a sound that accompanies their visual rhythm. Their unruly cast of characters, dead and alive, from the artist's life and from his imagination, are visited by the great American bald eagle, who sweeps though the frame as the artist's surrogate. Kahlhamer's immersion into his personal American landscape finds him mixing representations of the real into what he calls a visionary "third place," counted out from the "first place" of his Native American heritage, and the "second place" of his more conventional American upbringing with his adoptive parents. This, his own personal third America, gleefully mingles the real and the imaginary. This volume is the first complete survey of Kahlhamer's work to date, covering more than 10 years of material.

Brad Kahlhamer

Arts & Photography

Jeffrey Deitch

Dean Sobel

Mariuccia Casadio

History & Criticism

Charta/Deitch Projects

The Italian-born painter Francesco Clemente came to prominence in the mid-1970s when intensely subjective yet universal themes filtered into his skewed self-portraiture, witty wordplay and gestural figuration. This volume compiles a decade's worth of works on paper from those early days, many of which were inspired by Italy's political crisis at the time or fellow artists Alighiero Boetti and Luigi Ontani. The Italian artists of the 1970s were working in the context of the "terrorist generation." There was a crisis of capitalism and of Western societal values--both of which informed such major ideas in Clemente's early work as "fragmentation of self" and the "refutation of reason." Suddenly the body became a territory for artistic exploration; it became a border and led to the idea of travel. Here Clemente learned to trust geography over history, and his highly personal symbolism of the time bears proof of an itinerant life spent between homes in Madras (current-day Chennai, India), New York and Rome, with many trips to Dehli, Srinagar and various areas of Afghanistan mixed in. Published on the occasion of Clemente's recent exhibition at New York's Deitch Projects, this deluxe volume highlights the artist's concerns with process and concept--not technical perfection--and his obsession with paper's ephemeral vulnerability. Hints of Clemente's later forays into Surrealism and deep human psychology are also evident, and provide an essential view of the beginning of a masterful career.

Francesco Clemente: Works 1971-1979

Ammann, Jean-Christophe

Individual Artists

Francesco Clemente's new Three Rainbows project had a prolonged gestation; for years he had wanted to use watercolor and to paint rainbows, but only recently did the moment ripen. Three Rainbows began as three 60-foot long rainbow paintings--probably the largest watercolors ever made. For Clemente, whose attraction to given forms (such as the mandala) has long formed an integral part of his iconography, the rainbow suggests a number of important interpretations: it is a bridge (and therefore a structure that brings things together), a phenomenon that occurs after a period of darkness (Clemente's works of recent years had darkened noticeably) and a reversible image capable of leading the eye in opposite directions. The artist's affinity for watercolor derives in part from the medium's immediacy--an ideal vehicle for Allen Ginsberg's "first thought, best thought"--and these works betray his spontaneity and joy in making them.

Francesco Clemente: Three Rainbows

WALCOTT, Derek

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

Books by Charta/Deitch Projects