During the past decade, Wade Guyton (b. 1972) has emerged as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation by using common technology to reinvent abstraction and question the ways in which images function and circulate. His works range from made by printing letters and shapes on found book pages using word-processing software to executed by running sheets of primed canvas through a large-format printer. The misuse of these machines results in accidents that create subtle painterly incident while gesturing to a world of technological failure and possibility. Guyton's works are often deployed in dramatic architectural installations; drawings fill dozens of vitrines and multi-panel paintings stretch fifty feet wide or more than twenty feet high. This book illuminates Guyton's unconventional working methods and the development of his techniques, showcasing the visual flair and conceptual provocation inherent in his art.
The definitive survey of Jeff Koons's Hulk Elvis paintings, including an extensive interview with the artist in his studio. From the outset of his controversial career, Jeff Koons turned the traditional notion of the work of art and its context inside out. Focusing on unexpected yet banal objects as models for his work, he eschewed typical standards of good taste in art, instead embracing what he perceives as conventional middle-class values in order to expose the vulnerabilities of aesthetic hierarchies and value systems. Koons's declared strategies are to make art beautiful, to strive for objectivity, to give back the familiar, and to reflect, and thus empower, the viewer. The works of Koons's series Hulk Elvis burst with energy and precision yet mystify with their complex permutations and combinations of figurative and abstract elements. A charged mix of inflatable monkeys, geishas, birds, the Incredible Hulk, and the Liberty Bell jostle against realistically rendered landscapes, gestural paintings, steam engines and horse-drawn carriages, negative silhouettes, and underlying dot screens.
American artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is best known for his landmark body of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. His subject matter ranges widely from the Million Man March and the aftermath of slavery to 1970s coloring books and the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe-all treated within artworks that are both politically provocative and beautiful to behold. Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, created in close collaboration with the artist, surveys twenty-five years of Ligon's art, including paintings, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings. Essays examine his working methods in depth and situate his output within a broad cultural context, while lavish new photography highlights the formal subtlety of his art. This first comprehensive survey of Ligon's career will greatly advance our appreciation of his pioneering oeuvre.
Mel Bochner (b. 1940) is considered a pioneer of the Post-Minimal and Conceptual art movements. Perhaps best known for his paintings, sculptures and drawings, Bochner became deeply involved with photography in the mid- to late-1960s, although most of these works have only more recently been exhibited. This volume provides a critical look at a virtually unknown body of Bochner's extremely varied photographs dating from 1966-1969. Some 75 of his photographs are presented, many in colour. Also included are a number of Bochner's drawings that directly informed his photographic works. Scott Rothkopf explores the crucial role of photography in Bochner's artistic development as well as key issues in the relation of photography to Minimal and Conceptual art. In Bochner's photography, Rothkopf argues, a clear arc can be traced from his grappling with Minimalism toward a more rigorous and nuanced articulation of Conceptual art. Examining this shift, the author compares Bochner's work with that of other artists who were engaged with photography during this period, among them Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt and Bruce Nauman. For Bochner and others, Rothkopf concludes, photography was used as a response to the limits of minimal sculpture and helped make possible the birth of Conceptual art. The book also features an essay by Elisabeth Sussman on the relevance of Bochner's 1966 film experiments to his later photographic projects.
