Cover of the publication Isaac Julien: RIOT, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Isaac Julien: RIOT is not your typical exhibition catalogue. With most of the writing done by artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien himself, it is more like an illustrated intellectual biography.
Cover of the publication Isa Genzken: Retrospective published by The Museum of Modern Art
Isa Genzken is arguably one of the most influential female artists of the past few decades, her impact visible in the work of young sculpture and assemblage artists worldwide. MoMA’s upcoming exhibition Isa Genzken: Retrospective is the first comprehensive survey of her career in the United States, and the largest exhibition of her work to date. The accompanying catalogue explores her unique and decidedly diverse career through illustrated-plate sections and essays spanning a more than 40-year period. Genzken’s artwork is markedly varied and the narrative of her career is unconventional. She’s worked in nearly every imaginable medium, including sculpture, photography, film, assemblage and collage. The catalogue’s essays offer new insights on her aesthetic outlook and approach.
Curator Sabine Breitwieser’s essay covers Genzken’s artistic output from 1970 to 1996, discussing her early geometric drawings and sculptures, and her presence in the art centers of West Germany as a student at the Düsseldorf Academy and in Cologne. In the 1990s, Genzken moved away from post-Minimalism and began to make her first collage works.
Isa Genzken in her studio in Düsseldorf, 1982. Image courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin
Laura Hoptman, curator in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, explores this career break and later parts of Genzken’s career—from 1993 to the present—when her collage and sculptural assemblages and installations grew in scale and conceptual complexity.
Isa Genzken. Empire/Vampire III, 13. 2004. Spray paint on metal and glass, chromogenic color prints, and plastic on wood pedestal, 65 3/4 x 23 5/8 x 18 1/8″ (167 x 60 x 46 cm). neugerriemschneider gallery, Berlin. © Isa Genzken
The book also includes focused thematic essays. Scholar Lisa Lee writes on Genzken’s relationship with architecture and public sculpture in “Isa Genzken: Model Citizen,” considering her experiments with scale, perception and even mutiny, with projects like Fuck the Bauhaus. In “Isa Genzken: Himmel und Erde (Heaven and Earth),” Michael Darling argues for a thematic consistency in Genzken’s variegated oeuvre, positing that she “has married radical formal experimentation and variety to themes that are timeless, poignant and deeply humanistic, rooting her inquiries in the material facts of our world but offering pathways to topics, experiences, and concepts that, by definition, escape the grasp of easy resolution.” Jeffrey Grove’s essay, “Isa Genzken’s Homage to Herself” discusses motifs of autobiography and self-representation in her work, particularly in photography and film. An illustrated chronology by Stephanie Weber, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media & Performance Art at MoMA guides readers through the exciting trajectory of Genzken’s career, from birth to her first American retrospective at MoMA.
Isa Genzken: Retrospective is on view from November 23, 2013–March 10, 2014 in the The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery on the Museum’s sixth floor. A preview of the catalogue can be downloaded here.
On any given day, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Print Room may be full of studio art students viewing contemporary screenprints, art history students researching works for their term papers, or curators from other institutions planning exhibitions.
Taking monumental frescos to a multitouch screen, MoMA’s eBook Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Josè Clemente Orozco offers a fresh exploration of three great figures in the revival of mural painting that brought modern Mexican art to international attention after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20.
Cover of the exhibition catalogue Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, published by The Museum of Modern Art
Photo: Michael Nagle
Children engage with art at a MoMA family program.
The magic of books is coming to life this fall at the MoMA Design Store in Soho. In celebration of our newly expanded children’s area, we are inviting families to meet and engage with authors whose works ignite the imaginations of young people around the world.
Here is the final installment of the four-part Q&A with Dexter Sinister, contributing artists to the exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, on view in the Museum’s third-floor Special Exhibitions Gallery until August 27, 2012.
Dexter Sinister’s work is currently included in the exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language (on view until August 27). Following part one and part two, here is the third part of the Q&A about their contribution to the show: the third issue of their journal Bulletins of The Serving Library doubling as the exhibition catalogue, plus a trailer.
Today’s post is a continuation of a Q&A with Dexter Sinister, the artist collective that contributed to the exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language (on view until August 27). In the previous post, they discussed their contribution to the show: the third issue of their journal Bulletins of The Serving Library doubling as the exhibition catalogue, plus a trailer. Here is the next part of the conversation…
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