Katharina Grosse Atoms Outside Eggs

Large scale colourful airbrush painting on flat and 3 dimensional surfaces. Includes an interview between the artist and curator, Painting on three dimensional supports.

Painting has often been declared dead since the 1960s and yet it refuses to die. Even the status and continued legitimacy of the medium has been repeatedly placed in question. As such, painting has had to continually redefine its own parameters and re-negotiate for itself a critical position within a broader, more discursive set of discourses. Taking the American Clement Greenberg's 'Modernist Painting' as a point of departure, After Modernist Painting will be both a historical survey and a critical re-evaluation of the contested and contingent nature of the medium of painting over the last 50 years. Presenting the first critical account of painting, rather than art generally, this book provides a timely exploration of what has remained a persistent and protean medium. Craig Staff focuses on certain developments including the relationship of painting to Conceptual Art and Minimalism, the pronouncement of paintings alleged death, its response to Installation Art's foregrounding of site, how it was able to interpret ideas around appropriation, simulation and hybridity and how today painting can be understood as both imaging and imagining the digital. After Modernist Painting is an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the themes and issues that have pertained to painting within the context of postmodernism and contemporary artistic practice.

To engage with the aesthetic is to watch yourself watching – and what you see cannot be reached, for all that exists is the reflection of the vision performed by you. The aesthetic experience offers insights into the consciousness that are both ancient and linked to creative inventions in present-day art culture. In A Place to Know, Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf interprets twelve recent artworks, from Sol LeWitt to Katharina Grosse. She sets out the unique claims and qualities which are inherent in seeing and understanding contemporary art. The book presents four analytical categories of artwork, charting the character of the aesthetic experience and the traditions that determine how we think about visual art. She peels back the layers of consciousness to lay bare the forgotten seams of experience, interwoven with artistic expression. The ancient thus arcs into a deepened awareness of avant-garde art.

As the accompanying publication to the largest exhibition of contemporary art ever assembled in the U.S., the Prospect.1 New Orleans catalogue is one of the most sought-after art books of 2008-09. Featuring new illustrated essays on New Orleans and its place in twenty-first century America by Prospect.1 organizer Dan Cameron, art historian Barbara Bloemink, journalist Lolis Eric Elie and curator Claire Tancons, the book also includes a fully illustrated section on each of the 81 participating artists, who include William Kentridge, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Fred Tomaselli, Cai Guo Qiang, Sanford Biggers, Tony Fitzpatrick, Amy Sillman, Malick Sidibe, Clare E. Rojas and Monica Bonvicini, among many others. Locating contemporary art in the cauldron that is New Orleans adds a new dimension to the book and its visuals: It's an incisive statement on art making and humanity today. Dan Cameron, the Director and Curator of Prospect.1 New Orleans, is an international New York-based curator who was inspired to organize an exhibition in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Cameron has been a frequent visitor to New Orleans since the late 1980s, and he organized the 1995 New Orleans Triennial for the New Orleans Museum of Art. In May 2007 Cameron took on the position of Visual Arts Director at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), one of the leading venues for new art in the South, and a principal venue for Prospect.1 New Orleans.

In spite of the steadily expanding concept of art in the Western world, art made in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes û notably Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the communist East Bloc countries û is still to a surprising degree excluded from main stream art history and the exhibits of art museums. In contrast to earlier art made to promote princely or ecclesiastical power, this kind of visual culture seems to somehow not fulfill the category of 'true' art, instead being marginalised as propaganda for politically suspect regimes. Totalitarian Art and Modernity wants to modify this displacement, comparing totalitarian art with modernist and avant-garde movements; confronting their cultural and political embeddings; anti writing forth their common genealogies. Its eleven articles include topics as varied as: the concept of totalitarianism and totalitarian art, totalitarian exhibitions, monuments and architecture, forerunners of totalitarian art in romanticism and heroic realism, and diverse receptions of totalitarian art In democratic cultures.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book by Gertrude Stein, written in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas. Alice was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner Gertrude Stein. The book starts with Alice's days in San Francisco, before she moved to France, then describes her moving to Paris, meeting Gertrude, and starting their life together. The book had mixed reception, both among critics and Stein's friends, but the success of it was great. Today it is ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector, best known for Three Lives, The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. Picasso and Cubism were an important influence on Stein's writing. Her works are compared to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and "woman's place." He investigates the social, economic, and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction. The debate over "woman's place" in the fifties was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the "woman question," West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West. Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities, and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined, and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, "politics construct gender and gender construct politics." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.