Contemplating the work of Glenn Brown, one gets the feeling that this is what contemporary painting "should" be like: Brown's canvases play with our perceptions, appropriate and reconfigure past works, and offer intoxicating visions of our future-present. While some of his works seem to combine the influence of Gerhard Richter with science-fiction graphics, others are "re-paintings" of works by Rembrandt, de Kooning, Dali, Fragonard and Appel. This new monograph surveys Brown's recent output of remarkably vibrant works that combine the appeal of pop culture--from New Order songs to Bladerunner--with the best of the visual arts.

Glenn Brown

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Domaine de Kerguehennec

<p>"Portseinn Surtr dreamed he was awake but everyone else was asleep; then he dreamed he fell asleep and everyone else woke up." An excerpt from the "Book of the Icelanders" (c. 1125), the above phrase is set near the center of this monograph on Hreinn Fridfinnsson, whose poetic, surrealistic work it surveys.</p>

Hreinn Fridfinnsson

Paul, Frédéric

To paraphrase the essayist of this tidy volume, Glasgow is neither here nor there, but then neither is Paris or Milan or New York. If each strives to be the center of the world, they do it primarily by establishing their brand-name products as better than someone else's. The vernacular is universal and the particular is general. What has value in Glasgow therefore has value elsewhere. And thus David Shrigley creates drawings, sculptures, installations and photographs that are no less but no more than a heroic act because they inspire the memory of sensations that are incongruous, repressed and sometimes just simply unpleasant. Featuring a thorough sampling of recent work, a conversation with the artist and the aforementioned essay.

David Shrigley

"To make art, artists are like thieves, watching for a door left open. At the beginning of the 1960s, I painted a chair on a chair. I painted a chest of drawers on a chest of drawers. A hopeless entanglement of painting and sculpture. Is that what I was looking for? Minimal Art, Pop art... artists learn from other artists but desperately want their art to be unique... But the categories happen. The sense that there is such a thing as sets is at least 50,000 years old. But in your time and when it comes to art, the encounter should be naked, naïve and free of prejudgment (such as classification). My originality, if any, lies in good part in paradoxes: useful/useless, object/image, etc." These are Richard Artschwager's own words, and presented here is a comprehensive full-color documentation of the artist's paintings/sculptures/furniture.

Richard Artschwager

Ammann, Jean-Christophe

<p>Colorful as Carmen Miranda, the paintings of Beatriz Milhazes are a mélange of iconographic Brazilian imagery, drawing from folk art, crafts, jewelry, tropical nature and the splash of carnival, all funneled through a modernist sensibility. Vibrant swirls, bold stripes, and intricate rosettes show both delicacy and sweep in a practice situated somewhere between figuration and abstraction. “Color is the core of my work,” Milhazes says in an extensive interview with fashion designer Christian Lacroix included in this compact catalogue covering paintings from 1996 to 2004, originally exhibited at the Domaine de Kerguehennec in Bignon, France. An essay by Simon Wallis of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and an introduction by Frédéric Paul place this recent work within the context of her oeuvre.</p>

Beatriz Milhazes

Lacroix, Christian

Wallis, Simon

Jonathan Monk, born in the UK in 1969, is a dry-humored mischief-maker who explores 1960s influences in installations, photography, film, sculpture and performance. He has met with success--in 2006 his work appeared in New Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at the Tate Triennial. Interviewed here, he tells the respected artist David Shrigley, "it is sometimes difficult to understand where it [art] all begins and ends the unanswerable question keeps us all going." His work is just as quotable, including signs that read, "Meeting point" and "This painting should ideally be hung to the left of an Ed Ruscha." Not coincidentally, this volume includes contributions from influential supporters including Mr. Ruscha and John Baldessari.

Jonathan Monk: Until Then....If Not Before

History & Criticism

"When I go to a place like Brittany or Houston, Texas, what I'm partly trying to do is go around in this very simple way, point to things and say, this is actually of value, I recognize this, it smells good, it tastes good, or something. I want you to taste this," writes Portland, Oregon-based artist Harrell Fletcher in Where I Lived, and What I Lived For. Featuring texts by artists Miranda July, Allan McCollum, Chris Johanson and Byron Kim, this volume was made during a residency at Domaine De Kerguehennec in Brittany, France. Known for collaborative, socially minded works (such as Learning to Love You More, a 2002-present Web-based project produced with July), during this residency Fletcher engaged local people in the creation of more populist works for their much-used sculpture park, resulting in the production of a bright green bronze turtle designed by an eight-year-old boy.

Harrell Fletcher: Where I Lived, and What I Lived for

Johanson, Chris

July, Miranda

McCollum, Allan

New York-based Conceptual art pioneer Mel Bochner writes in this monograph, "What I try to do is stay open to the work as it develops, not impose myself on it, but permit it to take me somewhere. If I had a model, I suppose it would be those ancient Chinese artists who changed their name three times during their lifetime, in order not to become the prisoner of a style." The book introduces new riffs--produced for an exhibition at Domaine de Kerguéhennec, in Brittany, France--on several well-known bodies of work, including Bochner's recent ongoing series The Thesaurus Paintings, in which a group of often humorous synonyms (lazy, lethargic, crazy, vulgar and irascible, for instance) are painted in brightly colored block letters, and the Measurement Pieces (conceived in the 1960s), in which the walls are highlighted with numbered arrows indicating their measurements.

Mel Bochner (Domaine De Kerguehennec)

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Books by Domaine de Kerguehennec