Michelle White

The work of London-based artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) addresses the growing unease of an ever-expanding world that is as technologically networked as it is fractured by war and exile. Best known for sculptures that transform domestic objects such as kitchen utensils or cribs into things strange and threatening, Hatoum conducts multilayered investigations of the body, politics, and gender that express a powerful and pervasive sense of precariousness. Her works are never simple and often elicit conflicting emotions, such as fascination and fear, desire and revulsion. This copiously illustrated presentation of Hatoum's oeuvre offers critical and art historical essays by Michelle White and Anna C. Chave and imaginative texts by Rebecca Solnit and Adania Shibli, which contextualize the artist's work and its relationship to surrealism, minimalism, feminism, and politics.

Terra Infirma

Mona Hatoum

Isabelle Dervaux

Sarah Rothenberg

A breathtaking exploration of one of Twombly's largest paintings, the second version of his Treatise on the Veil One of the most important American postwar artists, Cy Twombly (1928-2011) engaged with mythological and poetic source material, setting him apart from other artists of his generation. In 1970, Twombly revisited his 1968 painting Treatise on the Veil and, in a short period of focused creativity, produced a painting--Treatise on the Veil (Second Version)--on a single, 33-foot canvas along with more than a dozen related drawings. This handsomely produced oversize book features three essays that examine these works in relation to Twombly's oeuvre, contemporaneous explorations of time, the Orpheus myth, and a musical composition that Twombly cited as an influence. Large images and details bring us in close to Twombly's magnificent meditation on time and space. Distributed for The Menil Collection

Treatise on the Veil, 1970

Cy Twombly

Claes Oldenburg

In 1957-58, after he moved to New York’s Lower East Side, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) began making collages he has described as "mostly done in an uncontrolled and intuitive dream mode.” Made from found, printed imagery, the Strange Eggs are enigmatic, surrealistic, and vastly different from the Pop art of the 1960s for which he soon became famous. These collages are characterized by self-contained forms, or "eggs," the artist made by melding cut fragments of photographic illustrations. While many of the pieces are unrecognizable, some original references are discernible: a piece of pie, the hind leg of a horse, the creased skin of a clenched fist, and the texture of concrete. These eighteen collages were first shown at the Menil Collection in 2012, and they are being published together for the first time, along with poems that the artist wrote at the same time based on found imagery from his walks around New York's Lower East Side. Anticipating second-generation New York School art-poetry collaborations by half a decade, Strange Eggs makes an important single-artist contribution to our understanding of the period.

Poems and Cutouts 1956-58

Strange Eggs

Jill Dawsey

A timely reassessment of the artist's early performances and feminist sculptures, affirming their radical engagements and art historical significance This volume is a focused look at two bodies of work, the Tirs ("shooting paintings") and Nanas ("dames"), in the experimental 1960s practice of the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002). Alongside a poetic response to the work, four essays treat Saint Phalle's oeuvre as works of radical performance and feminist art, as well as highlighting her transatlantic projects and collaborations. A chronology with photo-documentation and known participants details for the first time all Tirs shooting events in Europe and the United States, and another timeline recaps Saint Phalle's life in the 1960s. Tirs were made by firing a .22 caliber rifle at the surfaces of paintings. The bullets pierced bags of pigment, aerosol paint cans, or even food embedded in dense assemblages covered in painted plaster. Saint Phalle's increasingly liberated female figures with outstretched arms, curvaceous forms, and powerful poses developed into her well-known Nanas, an evolution contemporaneous with the rise of a Euro-American feminist movement.

Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s

Horn's silkscreens of crowdsourced clichés and colloquialisms celebrate the instabilities of the vernacular In the two series of drawings that comprise Wits' End, Roni Horn (born 1955) takes handwritten idioms, clichés and colloquialisms as her source material. Horn asked approximately 300 people to write down five of these vernacular phrases, which were then made into individual silkscreens. In Wits' End Sampler(2018), shown at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas, in 2018-19, the idioms are screened in a unique configuration directly on the wall; Wits End Mash(2019) consists of compositions of 75 to 350 idioms silkscreened on paper. These drawings engage the "moments when language fails and connotation migrates," with meaning that "delights in instability and movement," as Michelle White writes in her essay included in this volume. Wits' Endis the seventh in a series of books by Horn gathering series of works, two of which--bird(2008) and aka(2010)--were published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers.

Roni Horn: Wits' End

When Katherine Portienne (Kate), an innocent mid-western college graduate, lands her dream job in Los Angeles, she doesn't realize what kind of a ride she was in for... literally. Tonight wasn't the first time that she'd worked twelve hours straight since she took on the Junior Associate position at the law firm of Johnson, Smith, and Barnes, and she knew that it wouldn't be the last. Kate had big plans to remove the Junior in her title and do it fast. Matter of fact Kate had everything in her life planned and nothing, especially a man, was going to get in her way... or so she thought. However, she never expected that she would be kidnapped in her own car. Suddenly, she finds herself trapped with a desperate man on a mission... What follows is a seductive and passionate journey across country, as Kate faces the harsh reality that everything she thought she wanted in life, had now changed.

Kidnapped Seduction

Venus & Mars

Even the smallest events and creatures within the natural world provide insight into how to live our best lives. Just Be extracts life lessons from nature, pairing stunning photography that represents an essential quality of “being” with intuitive analysis and concrete guidance. This collection lends perspective to the search for purpose in life, and the effort to reconcile painful, humdrum, or frustrating experiences in serving our growth and evolution...

Just Be: Awakening

Roberto Tejada

A beautiful presentation of a new suite of works made for the Menil Collection by Allora & Calzadilla The Puerto Rico-based collaborative duo Allora & Calzadilla created Specters of Noon as a group of seven large-scale works specifically for the Menil Collection. The ensemble is orchestrated around the idea of solar noon, a notion derived from Surrealist texts by Caillois, Césaire, and others that probe the transcultural mythology of noon--a time when shadows vanish and delirious visions momentarily reign. The works include light projections, guano, ship engines, live vocal performance, and coal. Using the Menil's Surrealist holdings as a point of departure, Specters of Noon is infused throughout with a Caribbean perspective that addresses the instability of environmental and colonial politics; one work is a power transformer damaged in Hurricane Maria that is half-sheathed in bronze. Filled with stunning installation photography and insightful texts both commissioned and reprinted, this volume captures the spirit of Jennifer Allora (b. 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla's (b. 1971) deeply researched and multifaceted work.

Michelle White

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