David Breslin

Rockabye provides a glimpse of post-Hurricane Sandy Queens--its damaged landscape and debris, as well as its residents.

Rockabye

Adrienne Edwards

Presenting the latest iteration of this crucial exhibition, always a barometer of contemporary American art The 2022 Whitney Biennial is accompanied by this landmark volume. Each of the Biennial's participants is represented by a selected exhibition history, a bibliography, and imagery complemented by a personal statement or interview that foregrounds the artist's own voice. Essays by the curators and other contributors elucidate themes of the exhibition and discuss the participants. The 2022 Biennial's two curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, are known for their close collaboration with living artists. Coming after several years of seismic upheaval in and beyond the cultural, social, and political landscapes, this catalogue will offer a new take on the storied institution of the Biennial while continuing to serve--as previous editions have--as an invaluable resource on present-day trends in contemporary art in the United States.

Quiet As It's Kept

Whitney Biennial 2022

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political. Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist’s career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017. The interplay with the specific architecture of the gallery and the way works are installed is highlighted throughout the catalogue, with images that explore the poetics of how space and work influence each other. Together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, the works on view challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself. Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his work, Gonzalez-Torres worked with familiar materials, from his iconic candy spill works and his evocative light string pieces, but also including mirrors, clocks, and curtains. His work activates the architecture of the various spaces, the physicality of the viewer, the past and present, continuously maintaining its relevance. Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece. New text by David Breslin explores the variety of works included here while contextualizing Gonzalez-Torres’s contribution to art history.

David W. Kiehl

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online--and the large societal impact of these decisions This engaging and richly illustrated book comprehensively examines the life and art of David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), who came to prominence in New York's East Village art world of the 1980s, actively embracing all media and forging an expansive range of work both fiercely political and highly personal. First displayed in raw storefront galleries, his work achieved national attention at the same moment that the AIDS epidemic was affecting a generation of artists, himself included. In a thoughtful overview essay, David Breslin looks at the breadth of the artist's work as well as Wojnarowicz's broad range of interests and influences, situating the artist in the art-historical canon and pushing beyond the biographical focus that has characterized much of the scholarship on Wojnarowicz to fully assess his paintings, photographs, installations, performances, and writing. A close examination of groups of works by David Kiehl sheds new light on the artist's process and the context in which the works were created. Essays by Julie Ault, Gregg Bordowitz, C. Carr, Marvin Taylor, and National Book Award finalist Hanya Yanagihara investigate the relationship between artistic production and cultural activism during the AIDS crisis, as well as provide a necessary accounting and close evaluation of divergent practices that have frequently been subsumed under broad labels like "East Village," "queer," "postmodern," and "neo-expressionist."

David Breslin

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