Thomas Houseago

Leeds-born, Los Angeles–based artist Thomas Houseago (born 1972) is best known for his sculptures that combine traditional (wood, plaster, clay and bronze) and less conventional (steel cables, canvas and cement) materials. During the last couple of years, however, Houseago has started painting, with liberatory results. Vision Paintings charts his recent foray into the medium, presenting a wide selection of both figurative and abstract artworks created between 2020 and 2022. The book features various large-scale series (including the Vision Paintings, California Love Songs and Vortex Paintings). Thematically, Houseago is drawn to nature, drawing on landscapes in Malibu, Big Sur and Yosemite for evocations of cosmic unity and the cycle of life. The volume—the first entirely dedicated to his paintings—is punctuated by close-ups, citations, pages from the artist's journals and writing by the musician Nick Cave.

Los Angeles–based sculptor Thomas Houseago (born 1972) is part of a recent generation revisiting modernist sculpture through a contemporary lens, adding an array of nontraditional materials to the standard repertoire and finding new ways to dramatize figuration, often “leaving the seams showing,” so to speak. His often monumental works thus possess a somewhat monstrous character; probably the best-known instance of this is his Baby, which he presented at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and L'Homme, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

Published for his 2019 show at the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, this book includes an interview between Houseago and Paul McCarthy; a section of plates plus a focus on the two pieces produced for the exhibition in Paris; and texts by David Hockney (on the Leeds-to-Los Angeles trajectory, with which Hockney is himself familiar), Rudi Fuchs (on one artwork), Lorna Simpson and Jan Dibbets.