Bøger udgivet af Gagosian Gallery

Copublished with Gagosian, this is the first book devoted to the work of a major contemporary artist, with a focus on his painting. Houston-based artist Rick Lowe is widely known for his pioneering contributions to the development of "social practice art," work that landed him a MacArthur fellowship in 2014. What few people realize is that he was originally trained as a landscape painter. In recent years, Lowe has increasingly turned back to painting, producing complex multi-panel and quasi-abstract images that are deeply rooted in thirty years of work creating "social sculptures," recalling the urban fabric of cities around the world that have formed the backdrop of many of his community-based art projects. This book, which brilliantly reproduces Lowe's paintings, is the first dedicated to the work of this important American artist, focusing on his painterly practice and its origins in his work in the public sphere.

With full-color plates of paintings and sculptures, this title was produced for the inaugural exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong, Damien Hirst: Forgotten Promises. It includes "For Heaven's Sake" (2008), a life-size human baby skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,128 pink and white diamonds, as well as beautiful diamond cabinets in gold and silver. A group of paintings from 2008 to 2009, including "Age of Magnificence" and "Fading Magnificence," show real butterflies entombed in layers of shiny metallic paint. The new Love Paintings are painted in oil with painstaking attention to realistic detail. "Why else would you do it, when you could just get a photograph that looks identical?" Hirst has said. "But it's not the same thing, is it? A photograph is from a moment, a split second. Painting is about stopping to look at the world, considering it, and giving it more and more importance."

This comprehensive monograph was produced to accompany the drawings retrospective Damien Hirst: Corpus: Drawings 1981-2006, held at Gagosian Gallery, New York in 2006. It features more than 200 drawings that offer a historical insight into rarely seen aspects of the artist's work and process. Included are early drawings from Hirst's student days; pencil sketches for seminal sculptures such as "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," "A Thousand Years," "'The Acquired Inability to Escape," "Away from the Flock" and "The Hat Makes the Man"; preparatory diagrams for early spot paintings and medicine cabinets; a large-scale series of 14 drawings for The Stations of the Cross (2004); and proposals for unrealised and future projects. Accompanying the drawings is a conversation between the artist and political philosopher John Gray (author of Straw Dogs, False Dawn and Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern), and an essay by British historian Simon Baker.

This hardback catalogue illustrates the complete paintings featured in Damien Hirst's Gagosian Gallery, New York exhibition, The Elusive Truth, in 2005. Extended captions written by the artist accompany many of the paintings. The book features 22 diecuts and 31 tipped-in plates.