Keeping it Real traces the history of artists and their engagement with materials in the late twentieth century by closely analysing more than 60 key works from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection, Athens. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" serves as starting point for probing the relationship between art and reality. The book is divided into four sections: "Act 1: The Corporeal" assesses the reemergence of sculpture via installation and the invented readymade in the work of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, David Hammons and Sherrie Levine. "Act 2: Subversive Abstraction" examines works by artists including Lynda Benglis, Mike Kelley and Dieter Roth which combine abstraction with the use of 'abject' materials. An installation by Mona Hatoum referencing both the body and the minimalist grid forms the center of "Act 3: Current Disturbance"; and "Act 4: Material Intelligence" looks at the increasingly prevalent engagement with everyday source material.

Keeping it Real: From the Ready-Made to the Everyday, The D.Daskalopoulos Collection

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Whitechapel Gallery

What is a photographic image? Can a photograph ever tell the truth? These are some of the questions artist Walid Raad (born 1967) has been investigating for the past 20 years, in a practice that encompasses photography, film and video, sculpture, installation and performance. This publication brings together three major bodies of work: the photographic and video works produced under the fictional collective name The Atlas Group; various series of seemingly "straight" photography of his native Beirut titled Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut); and his most recent project, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World. The publication includes an exchange between the artist and curator Achim Borchardt-Hume; an essay on conceptions of truth by poet and writer Alan Gilbert; a text on Raad's use of photography and its ties to Beirut by Blake Stimson; and an essay by Hélène Chouteau-Matikian.

Walid Raad

Gilbert, Alan

Stimson, Blake

Chouteau-Matikian, Hélène

History & Criticism

This Is Tomorrow was a seminal exhibition of art, architecture, music and graphic design that took place at London's Whitechapel Gallery in August 1956. At its core was a room given over to the Independent Group, the proto-Pop collective comprised of (at various stages) the theorists Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway, photographer Nigel Henderson and the artists Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, William Turnbull and John McHale. The Independent Group's room premiered works of Op art alongside film posters, collages, murals, films and a jukebox, and was Britain's introduction to the phenomenon later named Pop. The spiralbound catalogue for This Is Tomorrow was designed by Edward Wright and published by Lund Humphries; out of print since 1957, it has since become a much sought-after rarity and a classic of graphic design and postwar visual culture. This facsimile edition is published for the Whitechapel's 2010-11 reconstruction of the 1956 show.

This is Tomorrow

Education (DOCUMENTS OF CO)

Allen, Felicity

The "ruins" of the modern era are the landmarks of recent art's turn toward site and situation, history and memory. The abiding interest of artists in ruination and decay has led in particular to the concept of the modern ruin - an ambiguous site of artistic and architectural modernism, personal and collective memories, and the cultural afterlife of eras such as those of state communism and colonialism. Contemporary art's explorations of the ruin can evoke on the one hand diverse experiences of nostalgia and on the other a ceaselessly renewed encounter with catastrophes of the recent past and apprehensions of the future. For every relic of a harmonious era or utopian dream stands another recalling industrial decline, environmental disaster, and the depredations of war. This anthology provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary ruin in cultural discourse, aesthetics, and artistic practice.It examines the development of ruin aesthetics from the early modern era to the present; the ruin as a privileged emblem of modernity's decline; the relic as a portal onto the political history of the recent past; the destruction and decline of cities and landscapes, with the emergence of "non-places" and "drosscape"; the symbolism of the entropic and decayed in critical environmentalism; and the confusing temporalities of the ruin in recent art--its involution of timescales and perspectives as it addresses not just the past but the future. Artists surveyed include Edgar Arceneaux, Miroslaw Balka, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Walead Beshty, Martin Boyce, Gerard Byrne, Adam Chodzko, Jeremy Deller, Katja Eydel, Angela Ferreira, Cyprien Gaillard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Susan Hiller, Roger Hiorns, Runa Islam, Ilya Kabakov, Joachim Koester, Robert Kusmirowski, Zoe Leonard, Vera Lutter, Goshka Macuga, Teresa Margolles, Dorit Margreiter, Edgar Martins, Julie Mehretu, Christian-Philipp Muller, Mike Nelson, Paulina Olowska, The Otolith Group, Philippe Parreno, Mai-Thu Perret, Walid Raad - The Atlas Group, Conrad Shawcross, Robert Smithson, Rachel Whiteread and Jane & Louise Wilson.Writers include Magali Arriola, J.G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Svetlana Boym, Giuliana Bruno, J.J. Charlesworth, Barbara Clausen, Jonathan Crary, Jacques Derrida, Jorg Heiser, Martin Herbert, Andreas Huyssen, Patrick Keiller, Darian Leader, Mark Lewis, James Lingwood, Tom McDonough, Jeremy Millar, Celeste Olalquiaga, Nina Power, Ralph Rugoff, Lytle Shaw, Iain Sinclair, Robert Smithson, Rebecca Solnit, Susan Stewart, Anthony Vidler, Paul Virilio and Gilda Williams.

Ruins (DOCUMENTS OF CO)

Dillon, Brian

Nature (DOCUMENTS OF CO)

Kastner, Jeffrey

Mixing art historical references with images taken from the internet, the paintings of Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal (born 1972) borrow liberally from the image glut around us, appropriating anything from icons of popular culture such as Roy Orbison to paintings of the past such as Georges Seurat's "Bathers at Asnières"--from the lonesome cowboys in a Steven Spielberg film to the photographs of Enrique Metinides. In an era flooded by photographic images, Sasnal's work attests to the continuous spellbinding power of painting to cohere and recode visual data. This volume, published for a major show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, surveys Sasnal's paintings of the past ten years. It opens with recent works referencing world events and the artist's extensive travels before returning to Pop-inspired work from the 1990s and reflections on the troubled history of his native Poland.

Wilhelm Sasnal

Wilmes, Ulrich

Individual Artists

This catalogue documents Josiah McElheny’s recent site-specific installation at the Whitechapel Gallery. A sculptor, performance artist, writer and filmmaker, McElheny is best known for his use of glass in combination with other materials. The installation presented here incorporated seven large-scale, mirrored sculptures upon which abstract films were projected.

Josiah McElheny: The Past Was a Mirage I’d Left Far Behind

Gerhard Richter’s ongoing, encyclopedic Atlas project began in 1964, and now comprises more than 5,000 gridded photographs, diagrams, drawings and sketches. As an image archive, work tool and artist’s book, Atlas sits at the very heart of Richter’s practice, offering a massive summation of his masterful explorations of the tensions between photography and painting, history and memory, perception and representation. As a publication, Atlas has gone through numerous editions, each new volume expanding on the previous with elaborations of persistent themes. This book provides a critical tool for navigating Atlas, bringing together Richter’s own writings alongside commentaries by the art historians and curators Armin Zweite, Jean-François Chevrier, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Lynne Cooke and Helmut Friedel. Originally published in 2003 to coincide with the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition Gerhard Richter: Atlas, this updated edition also includes a review of the exhibition by Adrian Searle.

Gerhard Richter: Atlas: The Reader

This publication documents Italian artist Giuseppe Penone’s sculpture “Spazio di Luce” (“Space of Light”), installed at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. “Spazio di Luce” is a bronze cast of the thick layer of wax surrounding a 40-foot-tall larch, with a radiant goldleaf interior that spreads dramatically across the columned gallery. The work references and augments a 1969 work of Penone’s titled “All the Years of the Tree plus One,” for which he also cast a tree in wax. Created in close collaboration with the artist, this volume brings together previously unpublished drawings, photographs of historic actions and recent sculptures and a selection of the artist’s own writings. It also includes an interview between Achim Borchardt-Hume and the artist and an essay by art critic and scholar Douglas Fogle focusing on Penone’s work with trees, alongside color documentation of the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Giuseppe Penone: Spazio di Luce (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London: Exhibition Catalogues)

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