BRIDGET RILEY

Venice and Beyond

Examining a breakthrough moment in Bridget Riley’s career, the latest volume in the extensive library of focused publications on the artist’s oeuvre illustrates the importance of color in her investigations of visual contrast and perception. During the early 1960s, Riley’s black-and-white work employed elementary shapes to convey movement and light. Having tested this limited set of means, in 1967 Riley began incorporating color into her paintings. The slender softcover catalog accompanying the eponymous exhibition at Graves Gallery chronicles the period of change that took place before, during and after Riley’s exhibition at the 34th Venice Biennale. Using Rise 1 (1968) as the starting point, the carefully selected group of paintings and works on paper from 1967 to 1985 situate this important painting within its context. An essay by curator Paul Moorhouse on how color informs developments throughout Riley’s career accompanies over 30 color illustrations of her drawings and paintings from this period.

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Bridget Riley: The Eye’s Mind

Collected Writings 1965-2009

In the newest addition to Ridinghouse’s in-depth series on Bridget Riley, The Eye’s Mind brings together over 40 years of essays by and interviews with this leading abstract artist. Divided into three sections – Autobiographical, Development as a Painter and On Art and Other Artists – the writings reveal Riley’s relationship to numerous topics, including the term “abstract;” the influence of Seurat and Cézanne; the role of color and painting throughout art history; the importance of perception and much more. Also featured are interviews with leading art historians David Sylvester, Mel Gooding and Lynne Cooke as well as studies of other artists whose work relates to Riley’s, such as Piet Mondrian, Bruce Nauman and Georges Seurat. A combination of text and copious illustrations gives the reader a complete and engaging look into this important artist’s life and career.

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RIOTOUS BAROQUE

Bice Curiger

The Baroque era of the 17th century is associated with sensuality, extravagance and theatricality. This abundantly illustrated, full-color exhibition catalog from Kunsthaus Zürich juxtaposes the work of contemporary luminaries such as Cindy Sherman, Maurizio Cattelan and Juergen Teller with those of Baroque-era masters such as Pieter Aertsen, Valentin de Boulogne and Jacob Jordaens. This exhibition highlights works that approach life with sensualist intelligence, proclaim a vital exuberance and link to questions about what constitutes art itself through the connections with contemporary art. Texts by Bice Curiger, Elfriede Jelinek, Eileen Myles and Raoul Vaneigem and a discussion with Nike Bätzner, Bice Curiger, Victoria von Felmming, Michael Glasmeier and Tristan Weddigen.

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PIPILOTTI RIST

Your Saliva Is My Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain

Swiss visual artist Elisabeth Charlotte “Pipilotti” Rist (b. 1962) has been a pioneering figure in video art since the 1980s. Her sensual and audacious video installations tackling conventions and taboos in an entertaining, ironic and self-confident way have brought her international fame. Accompanying her new installation at Kunsthaus Zürich, this condensed information-packed publication is structured as a visual and literary glossary with short alphabetically organized contributions on important themes in her work. Renowned authors such as Martin Suter and Sibylle Berg, the artist’s friends, plus art historians, representatives of other guilds and, last but not least, children, all have their say, giving us insight into not only her art but her psyche. In addition, documents and photographs from Rist’s personal archive are published here for the first time—and as a special feature, the book includes 12 large plates that can be removed from the book. Rist’s work are in collections such as MoMA, NY; MCA, Chicago; and SFMOMA.

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RITE OF PASSAGE

The Early Years of Vienna Actionism 1960–1966

Viennese Actionism, a school of radical performance art, was intent on upending what it saw as the stultifying bourgeois art conventions of the postwar years. This was, of course, squarely in line with the performative paradigm of the late 20th-century avant-garde—a rereading of painting and sculpture as directly experiential. Four artists, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, shocked polite gallery-goers across Europe with their radical actions and immensely physical, body-mutilating performances. They stretched the painted image to its “breaking point”—literally. In their mission to reanimate the arts, they replaced representation with a vehement devotion to sensual and directly perceptible materials: blood for Nitsch, junk and rubbish for Muehl, white paint sludge for Brus, and the deconstruction of the compositionally controlled image for Schwarzkogler. This catalog amasses examples of their painting and collage as well as original documentation of their radical “staged performances.”

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Peter Robinson

Ack and Other Abdications

New Zealander Peter Robinson is one of that nation’s leading artists, producing painting and sculpture known for challenging institutional constructions of ethnicity and value. Part Maori by birth, Robinson concentrated early in his career on work exploring the sticky territory of post-colonial politics in Aotearoa, the Maori name for New Zealand. But in the last decade, Robinson’s work has taken a sculptural turn, his work playing out familiar figurative elements from his paintings on a new and puzzling scale. One strand of this body of work employed polystyrene as a construction material. This artist book considers the life of one such sculpture, Ack – at once ice-floe and intestine – and the painting that was made and shelved in parallel.

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STEVE RODEN

In Between

Southern California artist Steve Roden is known as more than a painter; his internationally acclaimed, multi-media sound-driven works use musical scores that offer him a set of options to compose a segment of painting, sculpture, or other formal composition. This template results in a startlingly diverse array of images, objects, sounds and spaces. Roden’s every artwork, whatever its form, is both familiar yet utterly unexpected. He’s an eccentric virtuoso whose paintings look abstract, but only in the way that a chair, a tree, a face or even a Pop-Tart becomes abstract the longer you look at it. This catalog of a 20-year mid-career survey of Roden’s work includes an illustrated essay by curator Howard N. Fox and a CD with the four soundtracks from Roden installations.

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ROLAND REISS

A Seventeen-Year Survey

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ROPPONGI CROSSING 2016

My Body, Your Voice

Araki Natsumi & Sasaki Hitomi (Eds.)

Every three years since 2006, Mori Art Museum has hosted Roppongi Crossing, a sprawling showcase featuring only Japanese contemporary art. This year’s edition, My Body, Your Voice, presents work by 20 artists and artist groups exploring issues of identity, body politics, history and gender. The work presented dates from 2008 to the present and covers such loaded topics as natural disaster, labor and the US military presence in Okinawa. Despite the breadth of subject matter, the exhibition shows how Japanese artists are revisiting familiar tropes using immersive storytelling, formal strategies and direct engagement with difficult subject matter. The elegant catalog is filled with installation views, video stills and details of works along with artists’ bios and essays by the four exhibition curators, Araki Natsume (Mori Musuem), Kim Sunjung (South Korea), Ozawa Keisuke (Tokyo) and We Dar-Kuen (Taipei). Artists included are Yuko Mohri, Ryuichi Ishikawa, Nile Koetting, Hiraki Sawa, Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda and more. Complete list of artists include Yuko Mohri, Mari Katayama, Ryuichi Ishikawa, Hiraki Sawa, Daisuke Yamashiro, Akira Takayama, Nomura Kazuhiro(b.1958), Futoshi Miyagi, Hikaru Fujii, Yasuka Goto, Shun Sasa, Nobuhiro Shimura, Aya Momose, Nile Koetting, Tomona Matsukawa, Erika Kobayashi, Nishihara Nao, Jun Yang, Jay Chung, Q Takeki Maeda and Ai Hasegawa.

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CHRISTIAN ROSA

I am in love with the Coco

I am in love with the Coco, the second publication by young, fast-moving international artist Christian Rosa documents his most current paintings in this handsome overscaled exhibition catalog from Kustverein Heilbronn, Berlin. The Vienna- and Los Angeles-based artist’s works on canvas are minimal compositions— colorful loops, craquelures, obliterations and casually painted bubbles and squares—on unprimed, rough beige canvas. His playful reductive approach to form and color is reminiscent of the work of Cy Twombly and Joan Miró and implicitly recalls Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs. Painting since 2006, Rosa is currently considered one of the most compelling young contemporary artists. His first catalog, Love’s gonna save the day, was published in collaboration with CFA Gallery Berlin (2014). Also included is an insightful essay by exhibition curator Marrhia Lobke.

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