Bøger af Karen Marta

Surveying Hasper's joyously chromatic abstract paintings and works for public sitesArgentinian artist Graciela Hasper's (born 1966) brightly colored geometric abstract paintings, made over the last three decades, are a means to bring people together and to build bridges between audiences, which is precisely what she does with her large-scale public projects. This is the artist's first English-language monograph.

Documenting Koons' multisensory homage to the sun god, a timeless dialogue with ancient historyThe definitive record of Jeff Koons' (born 1955) Apollo Wind Spinner, his transcendent offering to Apollo, this volume brings together lush plates of the eponymous 2022 DESTE exhibition alongside an essay by Daniel Birnbaum and an extensive interview with the artist by Dakis Joannou. Koons' multisensory installation shone a light on the interwoven history of Greek myth, readymade sculpture and contemporary art to wide acclaim--so much so that the inhabitants of Hydra voted unanimously to have the work remain permanently installed on the roof of the DESTE Slaughterhouse building.The many threads of this particular story are explicated here through a detailed "glossary of terms," tracing references from Plato to Duchamp and enlightening the reader on one of Koons' most distinctive works of the last decade.

Leading and emerging artists and recent exhibitions from Dakis Joannou's DESTE FoundationMore than just a catalog of recent exhibitions, DESTE 33+: 2015-2022 is a map to the fascinating web of collaborations and friendships at the heart of Dakis Joannou's curatorial world. A rich array of archival images and new essays lend an overarching view to the DESTE Foundation's recent work. Studded with contributions by such artists as Urs Fischer, Kara Walker and Jeff Koons, it also introduces members of the younger generation continuing to shape and challenge contemporary art. "DESTE has always had a stake in the current climate," Joannou notes, and, even in the face of the pandemic's upheaval, continues "engaging in a global dialogue and offering a platform for new voices." Eight years after the release of DESTE 33 Years: 1983-2015, which introduced a broad audience to the DESTE project, this volume is an essential primer on the state of art today.

An artist's photographic portrait of domesticity, steeped in luminosity and eroticismBrazilian artist Marcos Chaves (born 1961) uses photography, installation, video, texts and sound to alter the way we view the world around us. Here Chaves explores his domestic surroundings through seemingly casual snapshots with plays of light and involuntary eroticism that reveal playful references to art history.

Ametria, an exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens, celebrates excess and accumulation. Against the common Western supremacy of moderation, artist Roberto Cuoghi assembles a disorienting labyrinth of contemporary artwork and historical objects drawn from the Benaki Museum's collection.

In Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play The Chairs, chairs stand in for characters at the brink of the world's end. Artist and curator Andreas Angelidakis pays homage to Ionesco at Swiss Institute with Fin de Siècle, a fantastical and idiosyncratic narrative of design after modernism. Inspired by Ionesco's play, Angelidakis reanimates a number of important chairs from design history and popular culture, casting them in dramatic roles. As a document of Swiss Institute's inaugural Architecture and Design show, this volume includes a conversation on late-modernist design between Angelidakis and Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Met; a dialogue on AirBnB's approach to space with Alessandro Bava, Aaron Taylor Harvey, Sean Monahan and Rachael Yu; an essay and specially created artist's book by Angelidakis; and a glossary of the chairs selected for the exhibition.

Through painting, performance, sculpture and design, New York-based artist Kerstin Brätsch (born 1979) depicts the mutation of images over time, and the volatility of data consumption. This book includes an essay by Massimiliano Gioni on her engagement with the social lives of images.

This book documents the work that Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg (born 1980) produced during a residency at in-Site/Casa Gallina in Mexico City--a participatory piece involving a local high-school marching band.

A hybrid of archive and oral history, Deste 33 Years: 1983-2015 tells the colorful and nontraditional story of Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art and its founder, Dakis Joannou, whose deeply personal approach has informed the foundation's ability to embody a given cultural moment--all while defying convention. "Deste was always really about ideas," Joannou says. "And the first idea was to create a museum of contemporary culture. Looking back, I'm not sure I was really collecting art. I think I was collecting relationships." Retracing more than three decades of one of the world's most important contemporary art foundations through archival photographs, press clippings, critical reviews, correspondence and unabashed conversations with many main protagonists--Maurizio Cattelan, Jeffrey Deitch, Urs Fischer, Massimiliano Gioni and Jeff Koons, among others--this more than 850-page book walks the reader through not only the extraordinary, artist-centric work, but also through the recent and entertaining history of contemporary art itself.

Since 1966, Swiss painter Niele Toroni (born 1937) has applied paint imprints of a number 50 brush at regular intervals of 12 inches, irreverently challenging accepted notions of authorship and gently mocking the figure of the artist. The first-ever English-language publication about this pioneering artist illuminates his humble attempts to liberate painting from its own representation by documenting his groundbreaking exhibition at Swiss Institute in New York. An essay by Joachim Pissarro and Annie Wischmeyer attempts to reveal the implications of Toroni's metonymic interventions, while letters from the artist reveal his own thinking about his practice and its place in art history. Embracing the conceptual framework of an exhibition at Swiss Institute and its related public programs, each book in the Swiss Institute series adds retrospective context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation.

Work Hard, the curatorial debut of celebrated Swiss artist Valentin Carron (born 1977), presents a creative discourse between a surprising group of artists: Edmond Bille, Vittorio Brodmann, Marguerite Burnat-Provins, Luciano Castelli, Claudia Comte, Sylvain Croci-Torti, Latifa Echakhch, Frédéric Gabioud, Mathis Gasser, Fabrice Gygi, Andreas Hochuli, Trix and Robert Haussmann, David Hominal, Bernhard Luginbühl, Urs Lüthi, Fabian Marti, Méret Oppenheim, Simon Paccaud, Mai-Thu Perret, Ugo Rondinone, Denis Savary, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely. In this book Carron suggests an imaginary time and place in art history while conjuring mythologies of labor and exploring the very personal approach that he took to understanding the narrative of national identity. Essays by Mai-Thu Perret and Balthazar Lovay plus an annotated walkthrough by Carron evoke the vernacular poetry of quirky Swissness.

The 1980s were a groundbreaking decade for contemporary art in the United Arab Emirates, a radical moment when artists in the UAE explored experimental new formats, formed art collectives and founded journals. Rather than a transliteration, this radical reinvention of a traditional bilingual book, which accompanies a show curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, focuses on translating the aesthetics of this important moment in the history of contemporary art.

Michael Chow, born Zhou Yinghua in Shanghai in 1939, was abruptly uprooted to England at the age of 13, where he lost his family and name. Voice for My Father illuminates Chow's long journey, celebrating both father--Beijing opera star Zhou Xinfang--and son, the artist and legendary restaurateur, who has recently made a triumphant return to painting. Their stories are told through rare archival images and personal portraits by such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Urs Fischer, Julian Schnabel and Andy Warhol. Published on the occasion of Chow's first exhibition in China, held at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, on the 120th anniversary of his father's birth, this book affords a close look at Chow's artistic practice and persona.

Featuring works from the Dakis Joannou Drawing Collection, Animal Spirits comments on the current global crisis and the cultural climate it has fostered. The book's title references British economist John Maynard Keynes' idea that "animal spirits"--emotional factors that cannot be quantified, and that are often downplayed by economists--are crucial to the understanding of economic dynamics. Comprised of the selected artworks, as well as installation photographs, the book articulates a startling worldwide social relapse and shows how contemporary artists are negotiating our precarious present. Edited by Karen Marta, with an essay by Nadja Argyropoulou and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Animal Spirits includes work by Huma Bhabha, Paul Chan, Brian DeGraw, Sam Durant, Adam Helms, Christian Holstad, Cameron Jamie, Kim Jones, Panos Koutrouboussis, Dominic McGill, Tom Sachs, William Scott, Dash Snow and Kelley Walker.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Figa at the DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece, June 20-September 30, 2017.

In placing us at a remove from our relationships to familiar, domestic objects and environments, the labor-intensive work of Robert Gober (born 1954) defies our understanding of accepted conventions and draws attention to the movement of meaning between materials and across personal histories. Part of the 2000 Words series, conceived and commissioned by Massimiliano Gioni and published by the Deste Foundation, 2000 Words: Robert Gober presents the entirety of the sculptor's works in the Dakis Joannou Collection and includes an essay by Johanna Burton that examines how the artist's work alloys personal histories with collective experience.

Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's (born 1979) work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

In der visuellen Welt von Frederic Tuten spielen auf Strukturkarton und Leinwand traumhafte Landschaften und Tischszenen an so weit entfernten Orten wie Tanger und der Toskana die Hauptrolle. Eine Vielzahl von Charakteren, Objekten und Formen vereinen sich in fantasievollen, manchmal mysteriösen Kompositionen, die er mit Tusche, Buntstift, Kreide, Pastell und neuerdings auch mit Ölfarbe malt kreiert.Der Katalog stellt lebendige Auswahl von Tutens jüngsten Gemälden und Zeichnungen zusammen und enthält darüber hinaus Kurzgeschichten des Künstlers zu seinen Werken und ein Interview mit dem Kurator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

In the "St. Petersburg gamble," the house offers to flip a coin until it comes up heads. The payoff doubles each time tails appears. By conventional definitions, the St Petersburg gamble has an infinite potential return; nonetheless, most players feel that they should not risk more than a few dollars each time. Explaining why people offer such small sums for something with infinite potential remains contentious in both economics and philosophy. The St. Petersburg Paradox embodies Swiss Institute's longstanding dedication to producing inventive group exhibitions, putting artists across a century (Marcel Duchamp, Ericka Beckman, Hans Arp, Amalia Ulman, Tabor Robak) in dialogue with each other to explore the precarious nature of gaming and the impulses that underlie the way risk is calculated. Embracing the conceptual framework of an exhibition at Swiss Institute and its related public programs, each book in the SI Series adds retrospective context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts. Each book in the series assumes a unique format to delve into the work of an artist, an artistic movement or a philosophical conundrum.