Published by Hatje Cantz and Sean Kelly
Edited by Jeffrey Grove
Published in conjunction with the exhibition, this major new monograph, Janaina Tschäpe, extensively documents Tschäpe’s work over the past seven years, alongside installation images of her museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. This publication documents a prolific period of creativity and boundary-pushing use of media.
Available on Sean Kelly Website
Sex, death, and the female body’s capacity for renewal and transformation are among the themes that emerge from the paintings, drawings, and photographs of German-born contemporary artist Janaina Tschäpe. Physically sensuous, with rich, layered colors and soft lines, Tschäpe’s works create the sensation of being underwater or suspended in air. This beautifully illustrated book—designed and produced in collaboration with the artist—is the first to offer a complete overview of Tschäpe’s full body of work. Tschäpe’s artistic process consciously mimics processes found in the natural world—the product of the artist’s time in Brazil, where the bounty of nature is such that living things must often emerge from something else, like a tree boring through a crack in the sidewalk or a plant breaking through a concrete wall. As such, the paintings themselves appear to be in the process of becoming made, palimpsests upon which each emphatic brushstroke partially occludes those made previously. In this way, Tschäpe gradually builds forms and finely calibrates color through layers of accumulation.
This title offers a lavishly illustrated look at the latest exhibition from innovative contemporary artist Janaina Tschape. In the summer of 2008, German-Brazilian artist Janaina Tschape held a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Structured around the genetic form of the fabled Chimera from ancient myth, the exhibition showcased Tschape's unique visual style with bright botanical notations intertwined with extraordinary film and photographic works, creating a fantastical environment where the everyday world metamorphosed into a mythical place populated by amazing creatures and fluorescent vegetation. This striking volume presents readers with an unrivalled look at the entire exhibition, bringing it to life with vibrant photographs, superb illustrations, and insightful commentaries.
In a curious botanical milieu peopled with costumed creatures born from myths and folktales, Janaina Tschape makes photographs and video. Melantropics, her first American monograph, documents recent works staged in the 79-acre Saint Louis Botanical Garden, a National Historic Landmark and one of the country's oldest botanical institutions, and in Rio de Janeiro's John Tyndale-designed Parque Lage. The linked projects incorporate the same costumes and props, leaving viewers to decipher their artificially luxuriant locales. Photographed and filmed during the spring, their subjects serve as transitory blooms and foliage, surrogates for those that have withered and those yet to blossom.
The photographic series 100 Hundred Little Deaths is the artist Janaina Tschape's meditation on mortality, both dark and oddly humorous photographs taken all over the world. The artist lies face down in empty rooms, houses, casxtles, gardens, on beaches, fields, oceans and bridges, daring the viewer to decide, is she sleeping, dead or merely joking? Within the different environments the only constant is her prostrate form, inviting fictions of crime and liberating the artist both as subject and creator from all spatial and temporal boundaries.
In Conversas entre Coleções [Conversations Between Collections], we are collaborating with six highly significant private collections. We challenged them to establish connections between their works and those in the Roberto Marinho Collection.
Besides the quality of the works presented, we have the opportunity to observe the criteria by which they were brought together: dialogues in pairs; the establishment of affiliations and contexts of renowned artists with others who are still little-known; dialogues across various eras, arising by intention or by chance; the Brazilian trajectory of two Jewish artists forced to migrate due to the outbreak of wars and persecutions in Europe in the first half of the 20th century; landscapes, geographies, maps, affirmative actions, and ethnic questionings.
This rare gathering is an invitation to enjoyment, artistic education, and reflection. A magical moment in which productions from a diversity of times and geographies have converged to live together in our presence and sensitivity. Treasures and incentives in the daily construction of our lives: a today composed of past and future.
Lauro Cavalcanti
Executive director of Casa Roberto Marinho
Stay in touch. The ongoing catalog of contemporary art, now in its fourth volume. Think of this time as a global go-round of the world’s most influential galleries: if it’s hot in the art world today, it’s in this book. Emerging artists are featured alongside established greats like Chuck Close, David Hockney, or Brice Marden. A to Z entries on more than 100 artists include images of important recent work, an introductory text, and a short exhibition history with bibliographical information. The illustrated appendix collects contact details for the galleries representing the artists as well as auction results of the last few years.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, is the first museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women through the arts. Drawing from a collection that spans five centuries and includes artists from six continents, this publication spotlights new additions to the museum as well as longstanding highlights. Vibrant images present over 175 works from the museum’s collections, including key artworks by Louise Bourgeois, Lalla Essaydi, Frida Kahlo, Hung Liu, Clara Peeters, Faith Ringgold, Niki de Saint Phalle, Amy Sherald, Alma Woodsey Thomas, and many others. Thematic chapters weave connections across medium, genre, and time. Essays by museum curators and more than thirty guest artists and scholars illuminate the mission of NMWA and help readers discover great women artists.
This publication engages with the proposition formulated through the exhibition Abundant Futures, that presents a daring attempt to imagine worldmaking and ecological futures from the condition of abundance and fullness. It places a wealth of artistic visions and propositions from TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s collection into conversation, gesturing at the multiplicity of worlds humans and nonhumans cohabit, a world of many worlds.
Centering around the thought-provoking narratives encapsulated in the exhibition, the fully illustrated publication brings together a multitude of voices and artistic practices, interventions, poetry, newly commissioned texts, and a rich selection of exhibition and performance photography. It proposes an evocative discussion of the themes of abundance, scarcity, the conflict between ecology and nature, and authenticity and identity, as well as the vulnerability of the ecological matrix.
Did you know that we can see with our tongue? Or that we can plug our nervous system directly into a computer? With cybernetics, prosthetics, robotics, nanotechnology and neuroscience altering the way we perceive and experience space, the body has re-emerged as an important architectural site, revealing its astonishing potential as a creative medium.
This volume presents a recently rediscovered series of pencil drawings from the early 1990s, through which American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) imagined his own funeral. Chapters by leading art historians explore the significance of picturing one’s own death in both the context of Wyeth’s late career and contemporary American art. The book connects the funeral series to Wyeth’s decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his use of drawing as an expressive and exploratory medium. It further inserts Wyeth’s work into a larger conversation about mortality and self-portraiture that developed in American art since the 1960s, and includes works by Duane Michals, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, George Tooker, Janaina Tschäpe and Mario Moore. While his contemporaries posed a variety of existential questions in picturing their own passing, those that interrogate the universality of death as a human experience have become especially urgent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning with racial inequality that emerged in 2020. Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death thus addresses ideas about loss, grief, vulnerability and (im)mortality that pervade the current moment.
Pintura Brasileira Séc. XXI
O livro Pintura Brasileira Séc. XXI apresenta um panorama da produção pictórica feita hoje no Brasil. São diversos modos de trabalho e reflexão que ocorrem simultaneamente em diferentes regiões e gerações de artistas plásticos brasileiros.
A pintura concentra uma grande força no cenário das arte plásticas mundial. E o amplo coeficiente de estilos próprios dos artistas presentes no livro, resulta de uma complexa equação de estudos acadêmicos, influências locais, referências internacionais e, principalmente, do estofo poético que cada artista carrega em si. Uns enfatizam o desenho, outros a pincelada ampla e firme, outros ainda a gestualidade voraz, em contraponto àqueles que empregam a cor crua ou os tons suaves.
Além do foco na nova geração de pintores, o livro expõe também a obra de renomados artistas, atuantes no circuito profissional desde os anos 80, dada a sua importância e influência formativa na obra desses jovens.
Com mais de 160 obras de 33 artistas brasileiros, a publicação conta ainda com ensaios dos críticos José Bento Ferreira e Tiago Mesquita.
Photo Art: Photography in the 21st Century
More adventurous in scope than other comparable compendiums, "Photo Art" is a vast critical survey of contemporary conceptual-oriented photography. It particularly addresses the work of artists emerging in Western and Eastern Europe--many of whom will be new to American audiences--and presents critical contexts for their work in accompanying essays. Gathering more than 120 image-makers from around the globe, this luscious compendium reads like an international art fair between covers, with the work of artists to watch now and in the future, from established figures to representatives of the newest generation. Among the artists featured here are Roy Arden, the Atlas Group, Seung Woo Back, Richard Billingham, Gerard Byrne, Claude Closky, Natalie Czech, Tacita Dean, Luc Delahaye, Ruud van Empel, J.H. Engström, Charles Fréger, Stephen Gill, G.R.A.M., Beate Gütschow, Jitka Hanzlová, Annika von Hausswolff, Michael Janiszewski, Aglaia Konrad, Justine Kurland, An-My Lê, Jochen Lempert, Zbigniew Libera, Hellen van Meene, Multiplicity, Wangechi Mutu, Mika Ninagawa, Arno Nollen, Gábor Ösz, Peter Piller, Xavier Ribas, Torbjørn Rødland, Anri Sala, Jules Spinatsch, Eve Sussman, Alec Soth, Santiago Sierra, Janaina Tschäpe, Jens Ullrich, Santos R. Vasquez, Qingsong Wang, Michael Wesely, Yang Fudong and Takashi Yasumura. Each artist's work is given a generous four-page spread, and many of these are embellished with installation views, book layouts and shots of artist's websites. Essays by 20 of the world's top international curators and theorists, including Uta Grosenick and Thomas Seelig, along with a glossary of important technical and theoretical terms, make this a definitive and essential volume.
Tidalectics: imagining an oceanic worldview through art and science
The oceans cover two-thirds of the planet, shaping human history and culture, home to countless species. Yet we, as mostly land-dwelling humans, often fail to grasp the importance of these vast bodies of water. Climate change destabilizes notions of land-based embeddedness, collapses tropes of time and space, and turns our future more oceanic. Tidalectics imagines an oceanic worldview, with essays, research, and artists' projects that present a different way of engaging with our hydrosphere. Unbound by land-based modes of thinking and living, the essays and research in Tidalectics reflect the rhythmic fluidity of water. Tidalectics emerges from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21)–Academy, the only Western arts organization entirely dedicated to work on climate change and the oceans. In 2016, TBA21–Academy became the first cultural organization to gain UN observer status at the International Seabed Authority Assembly. The book presents newly commissioned work from a range of disciplines and often-neglected perspectives, alongside classic “anchor texts” by such writers as Rachel Carson. The contributors include an anthropologist from Fiji, a Norwegian scholar who specializes in maritime legal history, the author of the first comparative history of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures, and a poet from Barbados who coined the term “tidalectics” as a play on “dialectics.” The art projects documented in the book form part of an exhibition curated by the volume's editor, and include a video of the infinite whites, blues, and grays of Antarctica; a collection of oceanic smells from the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Costa Rica; and a quartz submersible capsule designed to communicate with cetaceans. Tidalectics provides a unique collection of the strongest voices in oceanic thinking, bridging arts, oceanography, history, law, and environmental studies.
Artists surveyed in the book
Atif Akin, Darren Almond, Julian Charrière, Em'kal Eyongakpa, Tue Greenfort, Ariel Guzik, Newell Harry, Alexander Lee, Eduardo Navarro, Sissel Tolaas, Janaina Tschäpe & David Gruber, Jana Winderen, Susanne M. Winterling
Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, Performance
Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter and technologies, these arts can embody a melancholic longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines the myriad ways by which photographic imagery is incorporated into recent art practices, and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media—while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession with accessing and retrieving the past. The works included in Haunted range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, to videos, film, performance and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim collection and its recent acquisitions, Haunted features major artists such as Marina Abramovi?, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anthony Hernandez, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Zoe Leonard, Sally Mann, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sara VanDerBeek, Jeff Wall and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the survey is dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists such as Walead Beshty, Spencer Finch, Ori Gersht and Idris Khan.
Toda criança gosta de fazer arte. Com este livro, crianças de todas as idades poderão conhecer o trabalho de diversos artistas brasileiros e ainda experimentar algumas atividades inspiradas em suas obras. Numa linguagem simples e divertida, Arte brasileira para crianças conta com uma seleção de 100 importantes nomes das artes, apresenta um trabalho e uma pequena biografia de cada um deles, além de propor uma atividade inspirada na obra do artista para as crianças conhecerem diferentes ideias, materiais e maneiras de fazer arte. O livro traz, ainda, um glossário para as crianças aprenderem os mais diversos termos relativos às artes visuais. A brincadeira acontece com os trabalhos de Adriana Varejão, Alfredo Volpi, Beatriz Milhazes, Candido Portinari, Hélio Oiticica, Leonilson, Lygia Clark, Miguel Rio Branco, Nuno Ramos, Tarsila do Amaral, Tunga, entre outros.
Contemplating Landscape
'Contemplating Landscape’ observes, reconsiders and recasts the various elements found in nature: its shapes and forms, their vivacity and impermanence, flora and fauna’s flashes of colour and fluidity. From the abstract and delicately rendered watercolour on paper works to the bold sculptural creations that echo the geometries of those biomorphic patches that flourish across her larger canvas paintings, Tschäpe presents a series of works that transpose the viewer into a space replete with artistic organisms that collectively form the composite of an articulated botanical vision.