Dieter Roelstraete

Cecilia Vicuña

José de Nordenflycht Concha

From the 1970s to the present, Chilean artist, poet and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuas (b. 1948) work has used red thread to visually and poetically engage with rituals from Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe and pre-Columbian America. Vicuas performances, site-specific installations, paintings and drawings relate to the symbolic function of textile and language in terms of femininity, maternity and the support and continuation of life. Published on the occasion of Vicuas installation in Athens for dOCUMENTA (14), Read Thread tells the story of the sanguine thread in Vicuas worka kind of weaving-as-writingand conveys the tension of ecological disaster and reparation as well as a bodily sense of the cosmic scale of landscape, history and time. Alongside historical and recent documentation of Vicuas large-scale installations, the softcover publication extensively illustrates her drawings, poetic texts and narratives relating the works to their political and historical context. Essays by dOCUMENTA (14) curator Dieter Roelstraete and art historian Jos de Nordenflycht Concha complete the book.

The Story of the Red Thread

Read Thread

What does it mean to paint a flag and to paint it in 2020? Through art historical, sociocultural, and philosophical lenses, Dieter Roelstraete undertakes an investigation of vexillology?the study of flags?as a way to decipher World Paintings, the new series of works by Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev depicting national flags. Flags connote territorial belonging and whereas class, racial, and sexual identity continue to dominate the political discourse of art, national identity has long been shrouded in taboo. In times of ever-tensing culture wars?wars fought over symbols (flags, hymns, face masks, statues)?and unparalleled racial strife, Værslev?s artistic proposition is an especially contentious yet also a painfully timely one. Worldwide, COVID-19?enforced semi- or total lockdowns induce nations, borders, and sovereignties to regain weight. In its reinterpretation of the standard sizes and colors of national flags, especially through expressive whites (smears of colored paint soiling unpigmented portions of the canvas), this new body of work syncs with the artist?s earlier projects such as the canopy, terrazzo, trolley, sail, and window paintings, all of which trigger a tension between seeing an image as an image and seeing it as a representation, between the idea of mastery and the general avoidance of authorial mark making. Along with Roelstraete?s essay, the publication includes reproductions of forty-five World Paintings, and it is available with three different cover designs, imitating the national flags of Greece, the United States of America, and Uzbekistan.00Exhibition: Giò Marconi Gallery, Milan, Italy (22.09.2020-22.01.2021).

Fredrik Vaerslev. World Paintings

Timothy Leary

Tobia Bezzola

Eva Kenny

For over 50 years as a leading figure of Photorealist painting, Franz Gertsch (b. 1930, Switzerland) has created lively, expansive portraits of charismatic youths and meditative depictions of nature in vivid and painstaking detail. Polyfocal Allover surveys paintings from 1970 to 1982 and woodcut prints from 1979 to 2019, reflecting a vision in which all that lies within the frame is given equivalent value. The essays, interviews and conversations in this publication bring further definition to the lives and landscapes that Gertsch renders with virtuosic precision.

Polyfocal Allover

Eva Schmidt

Jennifer Cierlitza

Window Shopping

Luc Tuymans

Gerrtit Vermeiren

Montserrat Albores Gleason

I don't get it

Gerrit Vermeiren

"Three young writers and exhibition curators - Gerrit Vermeiren, Dieter Roelstraete and Montserrat Albores Gleason - reflect on the challenging artistic and social positions taken by painter Luc Tuymans. Tuymans is currently, if only in terms of market value, Belgium's most prominent contemporary artist. This book is an invitation to the reader, to look beyond the paintings. While Tuymans is and remains a painter first and foremost, a lot goes on in the margins of his paintings, before and after their creation. The artist has recently opened up a part of his artistic practice, in the form of Polaroids and other documents, that was previously largely out of sight. It is now possible as never before to chart his fascinations and working processes." "Tuymans willingly allows himself to be caught engaging with visual culture, using the frozen image to make something with real meaning. As though driven by a fear of boring himself, he allows explanations and misunderstandings to flourish unchecked."--BOOK JACKET.

I Don't Get it

Kersten Geers

The first survey of internationally acclaimed artist Pieter Vermeersch's work Pieter Vermeersch (Belgium, 1973) is well-known for his gradual wall paintings that create powerful visual experiences. Vermeersch combines painting with architecture and works on a variety of surfaces such as canvas, marble and photographs. Beyond the traditional borders of the canvas, his investigations result in large-scale spatial interventions that manipulate the space. Time, colour and space are the building blocks of his oeuvre: these concepts lie at the foundation of his gradual murals and architectural interventions. Variations presents a complete survey of Vermeersch's work, from the beginning of his career until his recent solo exhibition at M - Museum Leuven (March 15-August 11, 2019), and includes a broad selection of painted works (canvases, stones, photographs, walls), installations and sketches. Each signature of the book is dedicated to a particular work or aspect of Vermeersch's oeuvre. There will be seven different cover versions of the book, each printed in a different colour variation defined by the artist.

Pieter Vermeersch: Variations

Mark Godfrey

British conceptual artist Simon Starling (born 1967) interrogates the histories of art and science, as well as other subjects such as economic and environmental issues, through a wide variety of media including film, installation and photography. Published for his first survey exhibition at a major American museum, Simon Starling: Metamorphology highlights a fundamental principle of Starling's practice: an almost alchemistic conception of the transformative potential of art, or of transformation as art.

Simon Starling: Metamorphology

Janet Harbord

The first comprehensive monograph on a Turner-Prize-winning artist whose work encompasses historical research, scientific enquiry and a deep engagement with the materials of his art.

Simon Starling

Luca Bertolo

Craig Burnett

This exhibition catalog for Italian artist Luca Bertolo (born 1968) features multimedia works created between 2012 and 2017, essays and a conversation with the artist. Paintings, neon signs and videos explore connections between word and image, building upon a theme from Feuerbach explored by the Situationists and Susan Sontag.

Le Belle Parole / The Beautiful Words

Giuliana Bruno

Chantal Akerman

The M HKA is holding the very first large-scale retrospective of the Belgian film-maker and artist Chantal Akerman, who has now lived in Paris for many years. It is also the first time her work has been shown in Belgium since her exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels in 1995. Akerman is one of the most influential film-makers of her generation and has long been a feminist icon. She was able to establish this reputation with her early masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Since the mid-nineties, however, she has also been increasingly active as an artist, and her film and video installations have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Documenta 11 and elsewhere. The exhibition at the M HKA will focus mainly on this latter aspect of her work and will be accompanied by an ambitious monograph.

Too Far, Too Close

Chantal Akerman - Too Far, Too Close

locusfocus

Sonsbeek 9

In 1967, Richard Long, then twenty-two years old and a student at Saint Martin's School of Art in London, walked back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the English countryside, leaving a track that he then photographed in black and white. The resulting work, A Line Made by Walking, was not only the starting point for Long's career as an artist but also a landmark for a new kind of art emerging in Europe and the Americas. The formal simplicity of Long's artwork suggested a relation to minimalism, but its location outside the gallery context and its suggestion of bodily actions also connected it to a new generation of artists whose work combined the organic, the temporary, the nonmaterial, and the performative to offer a critique of the art system and its language, forms, and values. Long's work bridged the concerns of his North American and European counterparts, connecting the industrial scale of Robert Smithson to the modesty of Gilberto Zorio, the exercises in dematerialization of Robert Morris with the organic forms of Alighiero e Boetti, and the performance of Yvonne Rainer with that of Joseph Beuys. Although A Line Made by Walking is an instantly recognizable work, no detailed analysis of this foundational piece has yet been published. At a time when Richard Long's career is being celebrated and reassessed, this study by writer and curator Dieter Roelstraete could not be more timely. One Work series Distributed for Afterall Books

Dieter Roelstraete

Books

Your next favorite book is out there