HISTORY RISING

Marjolijn Dijkman & Jes Fernie

Jonathan Watkins, Krzysztof Fijalkowski & Jes Fernie (Eds.)

History Rising is a subversive and engaging study of museum display. By distancing museum objects from their support structures Dutch artist Marjolijn Dijkman and UK independent curator Jes Fernie critique the assumptions behind how things are positioned, who chooses to display them and how social, political and aesthetic choices dictate the language of display. Dijkman’s interest in the plinths, shelves, bell jars and display stands in museums that contextualize the collections resulted in a series of sculptures—a museum without artifacts—in which display structures become utopian cityscapes, modernist sculptures, fungus-type growths and eroded plinths. Documentation of Dijkman’s installations, two inserts showing photographs of books alongside the artist’s photographs, essays by curators and an interview between Dijkman and Fernie explore an eclectic range of museumrelated challenges concerning enclosure, artifice and the reinvention of history.

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STEPHEN HODGE

The Master Plan

Claire Doherty (Ed.)

Spurred by a public art commission for the British resort town of Weston- super-Mare, part of a national initiative to promote seaside revitalization, artist Stephen Hodge looks at the very notion of “the master plan.” Working with artistic collective Wrights & Sites, Hodge has put together a publication of reconnaissance material collected while researching their permanent commission ‘Everything you need to build a town is here’. In particular, the unpublished transcript of a 1947 meeting for post-war redevelopment acts as a catalyst for a visual exploration of regeneration from the ‘fantastic acropolis’ of Portmeirion to SimCity. Hodge annotates this transcript with historical and contemporary newspaper cuttings, found material and photographs, and concludes with conversation exploring regeneration as an inspiration and hindrance for contemporary artists.

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ULL HOHN

Foregrounds, Distances

Hannes Loichinger & Magnus Schaefer (Eds.)

After his studies at the arts academies in Berlin and Düsseldorf, German artist Ull Hohn (1960–1995) moved to New York to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1987. While at the Whitney, Hohn met his future partner, the artist Tom Burr. Engaging with the current theoretical debates and cultural issues, his work from the late 1980s and early 1990s began to invoke questions of gender and homosexuality and their representation. Foregrounds, Distances offers the first comprehensive overview of Hohn’s work, which contributed to the history of painting-based practices that were marginalized in established narratives of 1980s and ’90s art. In his work, Hull consistently interrogated the history of painting, traditional notions of virtuosity, the conventions of value and taste inherent to education, and the distinction between high and popular culture. Texts by Tom Burr, Thomas Eggerer, Manfred Hermes, Hannes Loichinger, Fionn Meade, Magnus Schaefer, Megan Francis Sullivan, Lanka Tattersall and Alexis Vaillant.

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CARSTEN HÖLLER

Leben

Daniela Zyman (Ed.)

A catalog as puzzling and conceptually elaborate as the exhibition it accompanies, this circular publication has no beginning or end, and allows multiple points of entry—from left to right and vice versa, as well as upside down and right-side up. Seeking to interrupt learned behaviors and solicit the reader’s active engagement, it unfolds a play of doubling and symmetry that references the exhibits formally and in terms of content. This intertwining is also evident in the text around which the catalog pivots: a conversation between Carsten Höller, who studied phytopathology before embarking on his artistic career, and the taxidermist Alfred Höller, on taxidermy (birds in particular), the history of the origins of Thomas Bernhard’s infamous novel Correction (which Bernard wrote in Alfred Höller’s attic in 1974), and the conflicts between life and death and art and nature.

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EVAN HOLLOWAY

Since first exhibiting in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Evan Holloway has earned a reputation as one of the most inventive sculptors of his generation. Looking at the legacies of modernism, while also engaging ideas and methods from a diverse range of cultural sources, Holloway’s sculptures are a corporeal amalgamation of mathematical, alphabetical, and geometric systems, color spectrum charts, and 3D diagrams of social structures that are simultaneously comic, delicate, brute and earnest. The works featured are grouped thematically ‘phenomena’, ‘figuration’, ‘metasculpture’, ‘indexes’, ‘reversal’—to highlight the crosscurrents of Holloway’s diverse body of work. In this first monograph on Holloway’s work, over 100 full-color images are accompanied by an introductory text by Ralph Rugoff, an in-depth look at three experimental projects by Liz Kotz, and an interview by critic Bruce Hainley.

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KARL HOLMQVIST

What’s My Name?

Informed by the strategies of Dada, Fluxus, and beat writing, Berlin-based Karl Holmqvist fuses concrete poetry with cut-up techniques in anti-hierarchical monochromatic texts often presented as selfeffacing, uneasy, live performances. In What’s My Name? the text slowly reveals itself as the modified but recognizable lyrics to pop songs. Rejecting the authenticity of creativity and the idolatry of pop celebrity, the Swedish-born Holmqvist prioritizes the “cover” version, and subtly mocks the machismo of pop celebrity with the bizarre interventions of his performance works. This publication contains 66 poems, reworking the lyrics of artists that range from Grace Jones to Chicks on Speed and The Rolling Stones.

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Robert Holyhead

New Paintings

This small but beautifuly produced exhibition catalog presents ten new paintings by the British artist Robert Holyhead. His work is marked by expanses of white ground left uncovered and traces of color at the canvas-edge where paint has been carefully removed from the surface. In dialog with Holyhead’s paintings is an in-depth essay by art historian Anna Lovatt. She discusses how the work is temporally bounded by the moment of the paint’s application and the point at which it begins to dry. Together, this group of paintings demonstrates the surprisingly diverse outcomes of this restricted situation.

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ROBERT HOLYHEAD

This exhibition catalog celebrates British artist Robert Holyhead’s precise application and removal of paint, his colorful abstract forms and complex compositions. Full-page illustrations of each of the eight paintings from 2010 are accompanied by detailed photographs of the edge of the paintings and places where the paint has been wiped away. Includes a conversation between the artist and Anthony Spira, director of the Milton Keynes Gallery, in which Holyhead says, “I pick up on things that are a little bit peculiar and that exist awkwardly in the world, that are already abstract … My painting presents both a type of personal language and some familiarity with the world.” With several full-color installation views.

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ROBERT HOLYHEAD

Accompanying the solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2014), this slender publication presents a group of exciting new works by British contemporary artist Robert Holyhead. Holyhead’s freely brushed, intensely colored paintings engage the tension between color and form through additions and erasures of the painted surface with blocks, ovals and rectangles acting as pins, wedges, slots, slits and focal points. Many of Holyhead’s painted shapes seem to float on the canvas and, in the artist’s words, “pierce the space open” for the viewer. Twenty-three color plates of the work and installation are accompanied by London-based artist/writer David Ryan’s detailed discussion on Holyhead’s “exquisite sense of craft” and the “malleability, opacity and light” of his new paintings.

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OLAF HOLZAPFEL

The Technology of the Land

Jennifer Allen (Ed.)

Berlin-based artist Olaf Holzapfel explores the interstices between art and craft by collaborating with local farmers and craftspeople to create sculptural work that interweaves human settlement, technique and abstraction. The handsome full-color exhibition catalog features both large site-specific installations consisting of hay, straw and wooden frameworks along with his smaller woven sculptures from his exhibition at the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg. Using space-generating methods like plaiting, weaving and latticing—age-old settler techniques—his sculptures don’t differentiate between the manufactured and the handcrafted, the functional and the aesthetic. By transforming age-old handiwork into contemporary art, Holzapfel unsettles the division between nature and culture, tradition and modernity. A concluding essay by writer Jennifer Allen explores the pattern-making and abstraction in Holzapfel’s work in relationship to Adolf Loos’s influential 1908 essay “Crime and Ornament.”

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