The latest in Karma's acclaimed series of overviews, this 424-page clothbound volume is the first comprehensive survey of New York-based minimalist painter Paul Mogensen (born 1941). Born in Los Angeles, Mogensen arrived in New York in 1966 already associated with such peers as David Novros and (through Novros) Brice Marden. His first solo exhibition at the Bykert Gallery came the following year. Since that time, Mogensen has created often colorful works that follow rule-based progressions (such as the "n + 1" method) to generate sharply executed geometric abstractions. In a text for this volume, the artist Lynda Benglis usefully summarizes the special character of Mogensen's art: "Paul is a colorist who is measured in his method. It may be said that he is a decorative painter as well a painter of a philosophical disposition. He is stringent in his approach, as stringent as a mechanic might be with a Ferrari. There are no accidents."

Paul Mogensen

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Karma Books, New York

Before her self-imposed exile from the art world, Lee Lozano (1930–99) was a highly regarded painter who defined a generation of American artists infusing conceptualism with a new intensity. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. In the decade before her infamous “dropout piece”―culminating in a move to Dallas where she would remain until her death―Lozano returned to these notebooks, editing the entries, sometimes blacking out entire pages. Private Book 1 is the first in the series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles.

Lee Lozano: Private Book 1

This new book brings together oil paintings from the past two years by New York–based artist Dike Blair. Blair’s still lifes of door locks, ashtrays, swimming pools, hot dogs, cigarette packets, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups and a variety of drinks and cocktails, floral bouquets, windows and light fixtures depict their subjects in painstaking fashion, but also at an often oblique angle, so that the viewer’s gaze is directed both at and beyond the ostensible subject. As Helen Molesworth writes: “Every scene he paints―the waiting areas of airports, bars, the too-harsh incandescent light on the outdoor plants at night, the blue sky out of a plane window, the seams of windows that frame the view from the bed and leave us just a glimpse of the treetops, the bare fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling―is generic … novelty is not what is at stake; familiarity is.”

Dike Blair

This is the sixth volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book (1930–99) project. One excerpt reads: “For my opening at the Whitney I would like to do a very special FANCY: want to give an invitation personally to the downtown people I know from being/living in this neighborhood for so long. In fact these are the only people I want at my opening. Just NEIGHBORHOOD people: from drugstores, food & laundry stores, stationary stores, etc. GET IT?”

Lee Lozano: Private Book 6

This is the seventh volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book (1930–99) project. “Don’t be RIVAL RABBITS," she writes here. "Give your ideas away. Help the world survive. SHARE AN IDEA JOINT.”

Lee Lozano: Private Book 7

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at OV Project in Brussels, this catalog brings together paintings by two influential modern American painters―Paul Mogensen (born 1941) and Steven Parrino (1958–2005)―revealing how, for both artists, structure, material, production and function of the artwork relate to space and spectator.

Paul Mogensen & Steven Parrino

History & Criticism

This book collects a series of new portraits by the critically acclaimed New York-based painter Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975). The drawings depict a man named Francesco D'Angelo, whom she met while traveling in Peru. The two began sending photos back and forth through WhatsApp of their daily lives. The drawings are accompanied by a group of photo pairings that Bernhardt made of him, alongside other depictions of D'Angelo, as well as images found online that point to similarities between him and others (an image of Jesus in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, for example).

Katherine Bernhardt: Francesco D’Angelo

From art book to artist's book: painterly interventions in an El Greco monograph by Marley FreemanHere, New York-based painter Marley Freeman (born 1981) transforms the spreads of a reference book on El Greco into abstract paintings that cover text and image alike, and leaving half the book with only small traces of interventions.

Marley Freeman: Nature of the Difficulties

The latest colorful, intimately gestural abstractions from Marley Freeman This volume commemorates New York-based painter Marley Freeman's (born 1981) 2019 solo exhibition of her abstractions at Karma with an essay by Lauren O'Neill-Butler, who writes that Freeman's "works offer an alternative, an option to opt-out of signifying monolithically."

Marley Freeman: Park Closes at Midnight

Luminous nocturnal paintings from acclaimed painter Matthew Wong's final exhibition This volume compiles oil and gouaches by the self-taught Canadian painter Matthew Wong (1984-2019) developed for his 2019 solo exhibition Matthew Wong: Blue at Karma Gallery in New York. The dusky and nocturnal scenes were intended as the coda to a previous series of day-lit oil and gouache paintings. All share a watery treatment, awash in blue and its proximal colors. For this body of work, completed over the past year of his life, Wong concerned himself with the "blueness of blue": its fluidity, its affect, and its uncanny ability to "activate nostalgia, both personal and collective." With the sensibility of a flaneur, Wong's semi-fictional subject matter refers to the sights he witnessed on walks while traveling in Sicily with his mother during the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019. The fully illustrated catalog is introduced with a short story titled 1996-2001, 2020, n.d., by Brad Phillips.

Matthew Wong: Blue

Phillips, Brad

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