The enormous, photorealistic charcoal drawings by American artist Robert Longo (*1953 in Brooklyn, New York) show the beauty and horror of the present day and age. His large-format works contrast the innocence of sleeping toddlers, the tranquil grandiosity of Earth and the planets, roses in bloom, and Gothic cathedrals with threatening images of atom bomb explosions, fighter pilots, monster waves, sharks, and the muzzles of revolvers. Inexorably and seismographically precise, the winner of the 2005 Goslar Kaiserring and 2010 inductee into the French Order of Arts and Letters records the state of our world. Longo’s powerful motifs give form and expression to the feelings of fear and longing felt by people in the twenty-first century, and affect the viewer with the full force of the medium.

This large-format, elaborately designed book, printed on natural paper using a tritone process, bound in half cloth and distributed in four different cover designs, has been created in close collaboration with the artist and affords a comprehensive overview of his charcoal drawings from the past decade.

 

Exhibition schedule: Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm, November 28, 2010–September 25, 2011

 

Olaf Breuningì Ugly Edited by Christoph Doswald, texts by Christoph Doswald, Gianni Jetzer, Markus Stegmann, Dorothea Strauss, Philippe Vergne English editionì 164 pp., 125 color illus., ì 22.4 x 30.5 cm, hardcoverì ISBN 3-7757-1105-8ì July 2001 Over the last three years the Swiss artist, Olaf Breuning (born in Schaffhausen in 1970), has become widely known through his participation in various international group exhibitions, including Missing Link (Kunstmuseum Bern/Kunst Haus Dresden), Hypermental (Kunsthaus Zürich/Kunsthalle Hamburg) and Let's Entertain (Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis/Centre Pompidou, Paris/Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg). In his photographs, videos and installations - seen here for the first time in a comprehensive overview - Olaf Breuning engages with the reality of the media that surround us day in, day out. In doing so he draws on a huge fund of images from films, television and advertising, video clips and computer games which he brings together in a hybrid mix of nonchalant elegance. For Breuning nothing is too sacred or profane to be icluded in one of his playfully subtle combinations: in his installation Ugly Yelp (2000), for instance, Breuning creates an ensemble from the accoutrements of occultism, New Age fads and vampire films - combining disgust, sweetness and kitsch, horror, levity and gravity to create a world of unforgettable images.

To describe Meredith Monk as an outstanding singer, composer, choreographer, and director says much and yet too little. With her work, she has expanded the boundaries of music, theatre, dance, video, and installation and is considered a pioneer of site-specific performance. Central to her work is always the suggestive power of the human voice. The body becomes a resonance chamber for a universal language without words. Monk was the first artist to create a performance for the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda; she performed in public parking lots and grand opera houses. This catalogue offers the most comprehensive presentation to date, featuring works spanning six decades. Widely known in the music and theatre world, the exhibition will be the first in Europe to be dedicated to her work in an art context. With unpublished archival material, notations, drawings, photographs, and an interview with the artist, the publication underscores Monk's lasting significance for the present day.

MEREDITH MONK (b. 1942, New York City) began exploring the voice as an instrument in the early 1960s. She composed and performed numerous solo pieces for the voice. In 1968, she founded The House to promote interdisciplinary performance, and ten years later, the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble. As a filmmaker, she has received numerous awards.

Between 1971 and 1972, a remarkable cross-section of New York’s downtown creative community participated in a collaborative drawing project conceived by Hisachika Takahashi (*1940 in Tokyo), an artist and studio assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. Repurposing a primary school exercise, Takahashi asked each artist to draw a map of the United States from memory. Contributions from the twenty-two participants—among them Jasper Johns, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Keith Sonnier, and Lawrence Weiner—range from sensitive renderings to visualized reminiscences and sly riffs on the process of mapping. After decades in storage, the drawings came to light in 2013. This publication reproduces the entire series and features comments from participants.

 

Artists featured (selection): Arakawa, Jed Bark, Mel Bochner, Juan Downey, Alex Hay, Jasper Johns, Joseph Kosuth, Jefrey Lew, Jane Logemann, Brice Marden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, Robert Petersen, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Keith Sonnier, Cy Twombly, Susan Weil, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Whitman, Don Wyman