Published by Walker Art Center. Edited with text by Siri Engberg. Introduction by Olga Viso. Text by Thomas Crow, Matthew S. Witkovsky, Aram Moshayedi, Allen Ruppersberg.
Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 accompanies a major retrospective exhibition on one of conceptual art’s most inventive and acclaimed practitioners. Emerging in late-1960s Los Angeles, Ruppersberg was among that city’s first generation of conceptual artists to espouse a working method that privileges ideas and process over conventional aesthetic objects. Deploying posters, books, postcards and even a café and hotel, his projects have consistently had at their center a focus on the American vernacular—its music, popular imagery and ephemera—mining the nuances of culture through its unsung conventions. From his earliest works, the artist has also welcomed the involvement of the viewer as participant, inviting an immersive experience of his work through language, visual density, accumulated elements and ideas.
This fully illustrated catalog is the most comprehensive publication to date on Ruppersberg’s work, featuring a wealth of scholarly content and critical writing connecting Ruppersberg’s work to the larger contemporary art field. Produced by the Walker’s award-winning design studio and in close collaboration with the artist, the book presents a holistic view of Ruppersberg’s wide-ranging, 50-year practice.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1944, Allen Ruppersberg has been the subject of more than 60 solo shows. His only other US retrospective, The Secret of Life and Death, was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1985. His work is in the collection of public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Le Fonds Ronal d’Art, among many others. Ruppersberg lives and works in Los Angeles, Cleveland and New York.
Published by Walker Art Center. Edited by Siri Engberg. Text by Siri Engberg, Josiah McElheny, Michael Lobel, Rochelle Steiner.
Is it real? Lifelike invites a close examination of art since the late 1960s based on commonplace objects and situations that are startlingly realistic, often playful and sometimes surreal--works that investigate the quieter side of the quotidian. While artists such as Vija Celmins, Rudolf Stingel and Paul Sietsema employ illusionistic painting and drawing, others’ use of materials is surprising--Thomas Demand’s video of what appears to be a rainstorm is made from animated candy wrappers; Susan Collis’ sculpture of construction debris is fashioned from exotic hardwoods, mother of pearl and silver. What binds these artists together is their rejection of the easy route technology might offer in favor of labor-intensive fabrication. Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, video and installations by more than 40 artists, Lifelike is the first publication to address the recent history of artists using these strategies across media.
Published by Walker Art Center. Edited by Siri Engberg. Interview by Bartholomew Ryan. Text by Geoff Dyer, Barry Schwabsky, Britt Salvesen, Siri Engberg, August Kleinzahler.
From Here to There: Alec Soth's America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography, whose compelling images of everyday America form powerful narrative vignettes. Featuring more than 100 of the artist's photographs made over the past 15 years, the book includes new critical essays by exhibition curator Siri Engberg, curator and art historian Britt Salvesen and critic Barry Schwabsky, which offer context on the artist's working process, the photo-historical tradition behind his practice and reflections on his latest series of works. Novelist Geoff Dyer's "Riverrun"--a meditation on Soth's series Sleeping by the Mississippi--and August Kleinzahler's poem "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" contribute to the thoughtful exploration of this body of work. Also included in the publication is a 48-page artist's book by Soth titled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, a photographic essay with short, diaristic texts capturing the banality and ennui of middle America's suburban fringes, with their corporate office parks, strip clubs and chain restaurants. This full-color publication includes a complete exhibition history, bibliography and interview with the artist by Bartholomew Ryan. Alec Soth was born in 1969 and raised in Minnesota, where he continues to live and work. He has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation (1999, 2004) and Jerome Foundation (2001), was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography and was short-listed for the highly prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published Niagara (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007) and The Last Days of W (2008). He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Published by Walker Art Center/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Essays by Siri Engberg, Madeleine Grynsztejn and Douglas R. Nickel. Foreword by Kathy Halbreich and Neal Benezra.
A celebrated, popular and influential figure in American art, Chuck Close has focused exclusively, and with great innovation, on the genre of portraiture. This exhibition, co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, explores the artist's work in self-portraiture over four decades and across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, photography, collage, and printmaking. The first comprehensive museum survey of Close's self-portraits, the exhibition and its accompanying publication offer a fascinating glimpse of an artist's self-examination and evolution over time and elucidate his unbounded, process-driven experimentation with media and techniques. Working with the seemingly narrow subject of his own face, Close has produced a richly varied trove that ranges from intimately scaled collage maquettes and fingerprint drawings to monumental gridded canvases; from the sharp definition of certain photographic techniques to the ghostly blurs of daguerreotypes and holograms; from the tactile complexity of paper pulp editions to the smooth, mechanical surfaces of Polaroids and digital ink-jet prints; from the subtle tonalities of gray-scale paintings and drawings to the exuberance of an 111-color screenprint. When Close unleashes his imagination on his own visage, this familiar figure is at his most revealing.
Published by Walker Art Center. Edited by Siri Engberg. Essays by Siri Engberg, Linda Nochlin and Marina Warner. Interview by Lynne Tillman. Foreword by Kathy Halbreich.
Widely considered to be one of the most engaging and fascinating artists of our time, Kiki Smith has, over the past 25 years, developed into a major figure in the world of twenty-first-century art. Her subject matter is as wide-ranging as the materials her work has encompassed. In the 1980s, with her earliest figural sculptures in plaster, glass and wax, Smith developed an elaborate vocabulary around the forms and functions of the body and its metaphorical as well as physical relationship to society. By the early 1990s, she began to engage with themes of a more religious and mythological nature. Her re-imaginings of biblical women as inhabitants of physical bodies--rather than as abstract bearers of doctrine--led her to make series of sculptural works related to the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lilith and others. The artist has more recently considered fairy tales and folk narratives as well as nurturing a growing menagerie of work concerned with animals and the natural world. Smith has now earned a considerable reputation as a virtuoso printmaker and draftsperson, and as a re-inventor of the startling sculptural possibilities present in materials ranging from paper and resin to bronze and porcelain. Organized by the Walker Art Center with the full collaboration of the artist, the exhibition Kiki Smith represents the artist's first full-scale monograph.
Published by Walker Art Center. Artwork by Ed Ruscha. Edited by Siri Engberg. Text by Clive Philpot.
This slip-cased, two volume publication presents a comprehensive look at the print projects, editions, and artist books of Edward Ruscha.... This monumental book reveals the depths of Ruscha's printmaking process, and offers important insight into the unique aesthetics of a major artist.
Lifelike
From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005
Kiki Smith
Edward Ruscha: Editions 1962-1999