Kaari Upson

At her untimely death from cancer in 2021 at the age of 51, Kaari Upson (1970–2021) was widely regarded as one of the most significant and versatile American artists of her generation with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, performance, film and painting. Though her career was cut short, she left behind a rich, intense and strongly personal body of work that revolves around identity, body, sex, relationships, memory, illness and loss. Published on the occasion of the Louisiana’s retrospective exhibition, the catalogue comprises the Los Angeles–based artist’s most important works: from her dollhouses to The Larry Project, where she conducted something close to a criminological "investigation" of a person who once lived across from her childhood home in San Bernardino, California; her Mother’s Legs tree trunk installation and her never-before-shown large series of "foot face" drawings that she made just before she died.

Contained within them are all the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of their owners. Like a shaman, Upson creates her own gateways, using unorthodox techniques to imbue everyday objects such as mattresses and bags with an arcane magic. The result is auratic works that act as powerful symbols of absence, failed aspirations and loneliness.

Part of the 2000 Words series conceived by Massimiliano Gioni and published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, this monograph contains an essay by Ali Subotnick that examines Upson’s pseudoscientific approach to her art that allows her to create confounding work that is simultaneously familiar and foreign.

For The Larry Project (2005–ongoing), she unearthed a well of projected histories, images and artifacts inspired by forgotten fragments from the abandoned personal archive of a man whom she had never met. Upson has continued this forensic approach in subsequent projects. This catalog accompanying her New Museum exhibition features an interview with the artist by Paul McCarthy, a new essay by curator Margot Norton and a text by artist Jim Shaw. It also debuts her newest series, centering around a family living in a Las Vegas tract house.