OLAF METZEL

From the TV to the Fridge

Karin Pernegger

German sculptor and provocateur Olaf Metzel became famous in one stroke in 1987 when his sculpture 13.4.81, a pile-up of metal barriers in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm alluding to a false report of a terrorist’s death, unleashed a storm of indignation. Violence, racism, demonstrations and migrations across the world continue to be the subjects of this prolific artist’s relentlessly provocative interventions. This in-depth artist monograph includes hundreds of illustrations of his compelling projects addressing a range of political and social issues from the early 1980s to the present, along with the artist’s writings for newspapers, catalogs and magazines, gathered together here for the first time. His recent crumpled aluminum sculptures, which reintroduced the genre of relief in contemporary discourse in a surprising and confident way, are clearly described by the artist in relationship to his earlier work.

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Collected Words and Images

Sabine Folie (Ed.)

Director of the Generali Foundation from 2008 to 2014, Sabine Folie helped establish the institution’s reputation for generating new critical discussion on contemporary art through revisiting modernism. This voluminous survey catalog, richly illustrated with photographs and source materials, documents the extensive collection of works acquired during Folie’s tenure. Essays by theorists and artists reflect on contemporary art themes exploring areas such as linguistic devices, the dismantling of representation and the reorganization of pictorial space, the changing roles of artist and museums, the relationship between subject and environment due to globalization and post-colonialism, artistic processing of history and the production of memorial culture. Included are commentary and artworks by Lothar Baumgarten, Marcel Broodthaers, Ernst Caramelle, Morgan Fisher, Stéphane Mallarmé and Ian Wallace, among others. Essays by Christa Blümlinger, Rachel Haidu, Gabriele Mackert, Michael Newman and more.

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1914

The Avant-Gardes
at War

Uwe M. Schneede (Ed.)

The First World War ranks as the seminal political catastrophe of the 20th century, but the sociocultural worlds that collapsed in 1914 into global conflict had long been fragile at best. German painter Franz Marc summed up this bellicose spirit as follows: “In our era of great struggle for new art, we do not fight as the organized, but as ‘wild ones’ against an old, established power.” This richly illustrated catalog—sharing the personal stories of enlisted protagonists from Klee to Picasso—examines the processes of transmission between the international art movements of the time. How were the artists of the historical avant-garde molded or even deformed by the experience of war? More than 40 pitoval artists are featured to support this well-researched project, including Beckmann, Kandinsky, Leger and many more. Essays by curator Uwe M. Schneede and others.

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3 YEARS: ARROW FACTORY

Pauline J. Yao, Rania Ho and Wang Wei

Arrow Factory is an influential, independently run art space located in a narrow 200-year-old alleyway in the center of Beijing. Founded in 2008, Arrow Factory reclaims an existing storefront and transforms it into a space for site-specific installations and projects by contemporary artists that are designed to be viewed from the street, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This publication features 28 temporary site-specific works produced by Chinese and international artists at Arrow Factory during its first three years, capturing the fleeting connections forged in China’s larger economic, intellectual, and artistic zeitgeist. Rich and insightful contributions by Patty Chang, Li Jinghu, Beatrice Leanza, Ken Lum, Ou Ning, Dan S. Wang plus Arrow Factory’s neighbors and local residents.

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69/96

Bob Nickas (Ed.)

69/96 documents an exhibition of two parallel shows curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen of Studiolo and critic Bob Nickas in Switzerland (2014). 69 featured art works from 1969 selected by Nickas, while 96 featured works from 1996 chosen by Fischli and Olsen. The sense of the temporal overlay in the exhibition is captured in the publication in a third layer of images and information including a xerox catalog edited by Nickas in 1991 and documentation of the curators’ collaborative process. While engaging an intergenerational dialogue both personal and art historical, the three curators remind us that art history also reflects the texture of everyday life. Artists include Richard Artschwager, Larry Clark, Franz Gertsch, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, Albert Oehlen, Meret Oppenheim, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Weinberger, Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.

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7 DAYS

My Art Life

Holly Crawford (Ed.)

The art world and all the people it encompasses have daily lives that are structured in one way or another by art. But how is it structured? And how do they perceive any one slice of their art life? New York–based Holly Crawford, the author of Critical Conversations in a Limo, invited anyone in the art world to answer the question, “How would you describe seven days living within the art world?” No parameters were given or template to follow. The result is a collection of 30 entries that pull back the curtain to reveal hardships, vulnerabilities and the banality of life in the arts. Each chapter presents a personal account of the contributor’s intimacy with art—and the disillusionment, poignancy and success that comes with it during a week. Contributors include Peter Frank, Doug Harvey, Jonathon Keats, Nancy Lippe, Cristin McKnight Sethi, ORLAN, David Raymond, Tracy Snelling, Mary Valverde and Linnea West, among others.

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1,2,3 … Avant-Gardes

Film / Art between Experiment and Archive

Lukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang

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BANI ABIDI

The Speech Writer

A fictional “documentary” presented in the form of ten flip books in a beautiful slipcase, this evocative artist’s book tells the story of a retired political speech writer. Surrounded by memories, his connection with the outside world takes the form of a daily broadcast from within his home. This is no podcast: passersby see a perplexing array of loudspeakers wired to the outside of his house, and perhaps stop to listen for a few moments each day. From Sri Lankan publisher Raking Leaves, this story addresses issues of repression and free expression, and how political power and human desires meet.

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ABOUT BRIDGET RILEY

Selected Writings 1999–2016

Doro Globus & Karsten Schubert (Eds.)

The period between 1999 and 2016 was a particularly fruitful period in the reception of Bridget Riley’s work. This handsome new anthology, Selected Writings, includes the significant writings that broadened the discourse and solidified Riley’s reputation as one of the most important painters of her generation. The essays range from biographical and career overviews to detailed analyses of specific themes from Riley’s over-six-decade career. Eighteen contributions by Frances Spalding, Michael Bracewell, Dave Hickey, Éric de Chassey, Lynne Cooke, Robert Kudielka, Paul Moorhouse, Richard Shiff and others are included. Most of the critical texts were written in close consultation with the artist, the result of long conversations, studio visits and archive access. Largely commissioned on the occasion of particular exhibitions, they track and trace Riley’s focus and influences at different moments in time. Each essay builds upon the next, with more recent authors clearly responding and referencing earlier discourse. The result is a collection of great breadth and cohesion.

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ABOUT TREES

Peter Fischer & Brigitt Bürgi (Eds.)

Zentrum Paul Klee director Peter Fischer and artist Brigitt Bürgi have gathered almost 100 works for this beautifully curated exhibition on the tree as subject and symbol in art. The well-designed hardcover catalog includes individual sections devoted to each artist including color reproductions of each work, an artist’s state- ment on the subject and a brief biography. Fischer’s introductory essay explores the tree as motif and symbol, the nature/culture dichotomy and the tree as an imaginary world as well as the embodiment of the actual world. Works by Carlos Amorales, Louise Bourgeois, Peter Doig, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Valérie Favre, Rodney Graham, Katie Holten, Forest Law, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Paul Klee, Ndary Lo, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Shirin Neshat, Jill Orr, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Wolfgang Tillmans, Su-Mei Tse and Shinji Turner-Yamamoto among many others make this publication a rich visual compendium on the topic.

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