Darren Bader’s Life As a Readymade is a four-part disquisition on contemporary art culture and his doubts about its terms of engagement. Addressing inanities, profanities and vanities in the contemporary world of art, the first section is an “open letter to the art world”; the second a meditation on the art fair phenomenon; the third is about “naming things in the face of no names”; the final section addresses what the artist regards as “a paucity of poetics.

Darren Bader: Life As a Readymade

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Kiito-San

Necrophonia documents a 2011 collaborative exhibition by Urs Fischer and Georg Herold at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Transforming the gallery into a studio, the artists created sculptures based on models from a nearby art school. For the exhibition's duration, the resulting sculptures--made of unfired clay, so that they started to disintegrate over time--were exhibited alongside the live nude models from which they were derived.

Urs Fischer & Georg Herold: Necrophonia

Documenting Urs Fischer’s solo exhibition of the same title at the Kunsthalle Wien in 2012, Skinny Sunrise presents a survey of the artist’s oeuvre. Among the new sculptures produced for the exhibition is Fischer’s first candle self-portrait, which is set alight and slowly burns down before our eyes, in the fashion of his acclaimed installation at the Arsenale di Venezia, which was described by the Financial Times as “the single most stunning new piece anywhere” in the 2011 Biennale.

Urs Fischer: Skinny Sunrise

History & Criticism

Bringing together more than 30 works from numerous international collections spanning almost two decades of genre-defying production, this volume presents an overview of the artist’s striking and often humorous work from the late 1990s to the present. It centers on an eponymously titled installation reconstituting the artist’s former studio within the exhibition space.

Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher

Robecchi, Michele

Falguières, Patricia

Urs Fischer provides an overview of the Swiss artist’s heterogeneous oeuvre and features many of his best-known works. Designed and conceived by Fischer, the book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with clusters of works that allow the reader to observe how Fischer has explored disparate formal strategies to engage with his multifarious interests--which include gravity, architecture, shadows, representation, destruction, entropy and time--and revisit favorite motifs, such as furniture, fruit, animals, skeletons and other surrogates for his cardinal subject, the human body, over the past decade and a half. Produced for his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, this hefty volume includes essays by Jessica Morgan and Ulrich Lehmann that unpack the dominant thematics in Fischer’s work and examine the significance of the materials and production techniques in his sculptural practice.

Urs Fischer

The Making of Yes features photographs by Cassandra MacLeod documenting a vast collaborative project by Urs Fischer with contributions by 1,500 individuals who were invited to work in clay over the weeks preceding the opening of Fischer's retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. All were asked to join Fischer in making figures and animals out of clay, allowing for variation within a theme so that the possibilities for style, structure, scale and finish would be open to exploration while preserving the unity of the project. Filling the expansive spaces of the museum, the unfired clay forms disintegrated over time to create a fantastical landscape of fragmented figures. The lively photographs in this volume convey the hands-on sense of fun and excitement the individual participants experienced from partaking in this exuberant project.

Urs Fischer: The Making of Yes: Photographed by Cassandra MacLeod

Marianne Vitale: Train Wreck is the artist's wry look at the infancy of the American railroad, an age mythologized even in its own time as a period of industrial progress and the heroic conquest of the American frontier. But this progress was fitfully achieved, punctuated by incredible, shocking disasters. In a new artist’s book, New York–based artist Marianne Vitale (born 1973) reproduces black-and-white archival photographs of train wreckage on soft, plastic pages, creating an incongruous merger of content and container in a sculptural, compulsively tactile object. Each of the waterproof, pliable plastic pages of this book features a different locomotive carcass or caboose skeleton for readers to re-contort at their leisure. The contrast between the indestructibility of this playtime "bath" book and its imagery depicting the tragic frailty of industrial America's iron workhorses is at once striking and amusing.

Marianne Vitale: Train Wreck

Simple, fresh Greek cooking from Mina StoneChef Mina Stone has been cooking delicious lunches at Urs Fischer's Brooklyn-based art studio for the past five years and producing private gallery dinners in the New York art world since 2006. Cooking for Artists presents more than 70 of Stone's family-style recipes inspired by her Greek heritage and her love of simple, fresh, seasonal food. The book is designed by Fischer and includes drawings by Hope Atherton, Darren Bader, Matthew Barney, Alex Eagleton, Urs Fischer, Cassandra MacLeod, Elizabeth Peyton, Rob Pruitt, Peter Regli, Josh Smith, Spencer Sweeney and Philippos Theodorides--all members of the community of artists that delights in Stone's cooking.

Mina Stone: Cooking for Artists

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Stone, Mina

Regional & International

Painter, DJ and nightlife promoter Spencer Sweeney (born 1973) has been an indelible and essential part of New York City’s cultural landscape for almost two decades, connecting to longstanding roots in the city’s music, art and life after dark. While many mourn the loss of the NYC they love, Sweeney has never fallen out of love with his city. This huge but affordable volume is filled with the evidence: pages of fascinating interviews with fellow faithfuls such as Alex Bag, Larry Clark, Abel Ferrara, John Giorno, Mary Heilmann, Harmony Korine, Johan Kugelberg, Jim Lambie, Glenn O’Brien, Will Oldham, Elizabeth Peyton, Rob Pruitt and Tony Shafrazi; archival photos documenting the countless moments, both legendary and obscure; and of course, hundreds of Sweeney’s colorful paintings that synthesize life in New York in the second decade of the new century.

Spencer Sweeney

Phantom Paintings gathers several series of paintings on aluminum panel produced over the last three years by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer (born 1973).
From far away many of these paintings appear to be large-scale gestural abstractions, but on closer inspection the viewer detects total flatness―the abstract paint marks were actually photographed and silkscreened on top of images of personal spaces, creating an image of abstraction rather than the abstraction itself. This process allows a largeness of motion and an immediacy, as two representational systems clash. In other works, the abstractions obstruct images taken from vintage Hollywood publicity headshots as well as close-up photographs of the artist’s own face. Finally, bold paintings on cutout aluminum panels push the limits of line, color and shape, transforming facial features into intersecting organic shapes that slide and mutate in a new form of landscape painting.

Urs Fischer: Phantom Paintings

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

Books by Kiito-San