Isabelle Graw

Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw's The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw's insights are further discussed and put to the test.

Genealogy of a Success Medium

The Love of Painting

George Baker

Jamieson Webster

Sanya Kantarovsky

An arresting and visually rich monograph of the work of contemporary artist Sanya Kantarovsky. Forlorn and spiritually bankrupt, tender or abject—the subjects in the figurative paintings of Sanya Kantarovsky (b. 1982) convey an uneasy, dark humor. They seem trapped in a precarious inner monologue, or under the spell of mundane lived experience. Sanya Kantarovsky: Selected Works 2010-2024 is published with the support of Aspen Art Museum, following Kantarovsky's exhibition A Solid House (2022). It includes more than 140 full-color image plates and spans the artist's oeuvre, focusing on his most recent output since his previous monograph No Joke (2014). The publication also includes a conversation between Kantarovsky and art historian Isabelle Graw, as well as essays by the psychoanalyst and writer Jamieson Webster and art historian George Baker.

Selected Works 2010-2024

Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture

High Price

Daniel Birnbaum

Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market. “It was especially interesting for us to watch a kind of transatlantic divide happening. While the US-American participants mostly declared criticism as obsolete while hoping for turning its weakness into a strength, most European participants departed from the opposite diagnosis: that criticism has never been as strong as it is today, since it is now part of a knowledge-based economy.”—Isabelle Graw/Daniel Birnbaum Contributors George Baker, Johanna Burton, Merlin Carpenter, Melanie Gilligan, Isabelle Graw, Tom Holert, Branden W. Joseph, John Kelsey, André Rottmann, Julia Voss Institut für Kunstkritik Series

Criticism and Its Markets

Canvases and Careers Today

A diaristic novel on contemporary friendship and its importance. Isabelle Graw’s latest book reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus. By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

On the Benefits of Friendship

Nikolaus Hirsch

Peter Geimer

Städelschule Frankfurt am Main. Institut für Kunstkritik

Introduction : remarks on contemporary painting's perseverance André Rottmann -- Painting and atrocity : the Tuymans strategy Peter Geimer -- Questions for Peter Geimer Isabelle Graw -- Response to Isabelle Graw Peter Geimer -- The value of painting : notes on unspecificity, indexicality, and highly valuable quasi-persons Isabelle Graw -- Questions for Isabelle Graw Peter Gaimer -- Response to Peter Gaimer Isabelle Graw.

Reflexivity and Agency Beyond the Canvas

Thinking Through Painting

Eine von Euch - Über Freundschaft

Barry Schwabsky

Eric Troncy

Gesine Borcherdt

At first glance, Shara Hughes's (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh's brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes's work. Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.

Shara Hughes

Jutta Koether

Jutta Koether's translucent color fields, expressive brushstrokes and female subjects--as well as her use of poetry, art history and Mylar--can make her seem like a feminist answer to the Cologne art scene, a counterpart to artists like Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. In fact, she is a central contemporary painter in her own right, as well as a performance artist, a musician and a critic. She collaborates musically with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Television's Tom Verlaine, contributes regularly to Artforum and the respected German culture magazine Spex, and teaches in Bard College's MFA program--and has recently shown her work at Reema Spaulings Fine Art and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York. Koether's work, which the New York Times has called "vibrant" and "intriguing," was a standout in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This look back documents the artist's oeuvre from the mid-80s forward, with an extensive selection of images.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation. Contributors Carol Armstrong, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, René Démoris, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Jutta Koether, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Matt Saunders, Amy Sillman Institut für Kunstkritik Series

The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition

Painting beyond Itself

"This book is based on the conference 'Art and subjecthood: the return of the human figure in semiocapitalism' ... organized by the Institut f'ur Kunstkritik on July 1, 2011, at the Staatliche Hochschule f'ur Bildende K'unste/St'adelschule in Frankfurt am Main"--P. 6.

The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism

Art and Subjecthood

Christoph Menke

The Value of Critique casts its gaze on the two dominant modes of passing judgment in art--critique and value (or evaluation). The act of critique has long held sway in the world of art theory but has recently been increasingly abandoned in favor of evaluation, which advocates alternate modes of judgment aimed at finding the intrinsic "value" of a given work rather than picking apart its intentions and relative success. This book's contributors explore the relationship between these two practices, finding that one cannot exist with the other. As soon as a critic decides an object is worthy enough of their interest and time to critique it, they have imbued that object with a certain value. Similarly, theories of value are typically marked by a critical impetus: as much as critique takes part in the construction of evaluations, bestowing something with value can then trigger critiques. Assembling essays from an international array of authors, this book is the first to put value, critique, and artistic labor in conversation with one another, making clear just how closely all three are related.

Isabelle Graw

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