Watanabe Katsumi was an itinerant portrait photographer working primarily in Shinjuku in Tokyo. Gangs of Kabukicho reproduces 155 photographs taken in the '60s and ' 70s in the blue-light district of Shinjuku called Kabukicho. The title of the book reflects the title of his first book published in 1973 called simply The Gangs of Shinjuku.

The subjects in Watanabe’s photographs are the prostitutes, street people, drag queens, entertainers and gangsters (Yakuza) that populated Kabukicho at night. Essentially, Watanabe made his living by selling the photographs to his subjects. He would offer three prints for 200 yen. A modest gentleman, Watanabe had a keen sensitivity to the natural posturing of his subjects which allowed them to uninhibitedly reveal their identities. He saw Kabukicho as a stage; his photographs documented the performers.

To accompany the photographs, Iizawa Kōtarō, who wrote “The Evolution of Postwar Photography” in Anne Tucker’s The History of Japanese Photography, has chronicled the history of Shinjuku and offers a biography on the life of Watanabe who died in 2006. The text is printed in English and Japanese.

In Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, renowned critic, curator, and writer Christian Viveros-Fauné has picked fifty representative artworks—from Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810–1820) to David Hammons’s In the Hood (1993)—that give voice to some of modern art’s strongest calls to political action. In accessible and witty entries on each piece, Viveros-Fauné paints a picture of the context in which each work was created, the artist’s background, and the historical impact of each contribution. At times artists create projects that subvert existing power structures; at other moments they make artwork so powerful it challenges the very fabric of society. Whether it is Picasso’s Guernica and its place at the 1937 Worlds Fair, or Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (1977–1979), which still stop us in our tracks, this book tells the story behind some of the most important and unexpected encounters between artworks and the real worlds they engage with.

Never professing to be a definitive history of political art, Social Forms delivers a unique and compelling portrait of how artists during the last 150 years have dealt with changing political systems, the violence of modern warfare, the rise of consumer culture worldwide, the prevalence of inequality and racism, and the challenges of technology.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt is a Danish painter best known for her abstractions. Inspired by the landscapes of her childhood home in the coastal region of Zealand in Denmark, Engelhardt channels her memories of a difficult childhood and her Christian spirituality to create loosely geometric, cumulus paintings. There is often a bright white or dark mass in the center of her canvases, portraying an inner light, or darkness, which hints at representation without ceding qualities of abstraction. “I hope that my images are universal and metaphysical visions of light, air, soil and ocean,” the artist has said. “These are abstract snapshots instead of concrete illustrations of biblical acts." Born on May 2, 1956 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, she grew up on the Odsherred peninsula with abusive parents and two younger sisters. After graduating from the Funen Art Academy in 1980, she moved to a suburb of Paris, where she began her career and received immediate recognition. Engelhardt’s works are in the collections of the Ball State Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, among others. The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

This is a catalog of her work, produced by Elizabeth Harris Gallery and printed by Narayana Press in Denmark.

Exploring the recent sculptural innovations of prominent contemporary artist Carol Bove

Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures presents an extensive look into the contemporary artist’s work over the past five years and her ongoing exploration of scale, color, material, and artistic traditions of the twentieth century.

Bove’s recent work engages the conceptual concerns of mid-century sculpture, such as spontaneity, industrial materials, and the potential of painted sculpture. However, within this space of familiar sculptural traditions, Bove has discovered new approaches that lead to places previously unknown. Bove’s “collage sculptures” are created from scrap metal and stainless steel that has been carefully worked into sinuous forms and are frequently painted. Considering the hard rigidity of the steel, the works possess an appearance of almost impossible softness, as if steel could become as pliable as clay. Such works range from small pedestal sculptures to large, imposing compositions. Bove’s interest in scale and how a viewer’s understanding of an artwork shifts depending on its context are explored through a selection of small works from the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Published by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the catalogue features beautiful reproductions of Bove’s work and an introduction as well as an essay by curator Catherine Craft on the development of the collage sculptures and their relationship to other artists and traditions of modern sculpture. Also included is an essay by Lisa Le Feuvre that explores Bove’s complex work by means of a thematic alphabet related to the artist’s interests.

This is a catalogue for the exhibition of work by Aaron Siskind, held at the Glenn Horowitz bookstore in East Hampton, NY, May 31 - June 24, 1997. Photographs by Aaron Siskind; essay by Peter C. Bunnell; curated by Andrew Roth.

This is a 240-page full-color volume exploring the concept and ideas around Desert X through interviews with the 16 artists who participated in the inaugural exhibition. The book includes a foreword by Ed Ruscha, essays by Bill Fox, Holly Willis, and Neville Wakefield, editorial coordination by Steven Biller, and is edited by Andrew Roth and Neville Wakefield.

Cyanide and Sin offers a broad history of the true-crime magazine in America with an emphasis on its visual content during the 1950s. With 196 color illustrations, Will Straw, a scholar teaching in the Communications Department at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has written a 12,000-word essay that traces the stylistic and conceptual evolution of the crime-magazine genre. He catalogues specific photographers and key designers who were regular contributors to the various magazines.

Many of the images reproduced both within these magazines and on their covers were setup reenactments of crimes, some fictive, others real. Often, the images are accompanied by campy headlines such as: Death Crashes A Party, Love Me or Die!, He Was Too Hot To Cool Down.

There have been numerous publications on the history of pulp and crime fiction. Cyanide and Sin is the first book to look at the impact of the visuals used to accompany these stories.

As Straw writes: “Crime lent itself readily to some of the most powerful impulses within modern image-making. It gave photographers drawn to social marginality subjects with which to avoid the sentimentality that too easily clings to images of the poor or downtrodden. Crime photography has served as the basis for transgressive violations of good taste, and for romantic glorifications of the doomed life. The images assembled in true crime magazines over their 80 year history have moved ceaselessly between what photographic historian Allan Sekula calls the honorific and repressive functions of photography. Images celebrating an extravagant individuality, for instance, have sat alongside others calling for citizen complicity in the enforcement of state power.”

At the 1991 United Nations Earth Summit Committee inaugural ceremony, Robert Rauschenberg unveiled a new painting, Last Turn, Your Turn which included the groups pledge and became the official picture of the UN conference. Since that time, with the continuing degradation of the environment, Rauschenberg continued to produce paintings and other works of art relating to the environmental issues.

This is the catalog of an exhibition of some of those works, held at the Jacobson Howard Gallery in New York City in 2008. Fourteen works in color, including the original Last Turn, Your Turn, with extensive information on Rauschenberg's life and works, and his continuing involvement in efforts to save our planet's environment.

The exhibition presented 77 paintings produced with oil paint applied directly to the artist’s testicles and imprinted on various bound and ephemeral printed matter including: mainstream magazines such as Time and Life; art market staples such as Artforum, Art in America and Art News; exhibition and auction catalogues; rare magazines and artist’s books; personal letters; and lastly, on an assortment of original artworks, poems and studio notes by Vito Acconci, Simon Bedwell, Alejandro Cesarcom and Dan Graham.

Like Marcel Broodthaers’s eagles, the testicular imprints also delineate a critical archive, acting like stamps of inclusion. What Guagnini establishes through this process are the relationships between Patriarchy, Private Property, Power, Progress, Position, Packaging and Personality in 20th-century art production. The geniuses that shaped the century – Picasso, Duchamp, Joyce, and le Corbusier – are paraded alongside Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the atomic attack on Hiroshima. Minimalism, Postminimalism, Conceptual art, Abstract Expressionism, experimental film, Lettrism, Situationism, and other significant outgrowths are integrated, illustrating their instrumentality in becoming history.

A stunning, focused document of Nate Lowman’s work from the past four years

“Brewing the good, the bad, and the ugly of consumerist modern life in his masterful paintings, Lowman draws a portrait of the times that is equally mischievous and somber.” —BOMB Magazine

With an archive of source material amassed and processed over time, Lowman creates slippery, layered images that transform visual referents found in the news, media, and art history. In this volume, Lowman plays with cataclysmic imagery that probes the tensions between the everyday and the extreme, presence and absence, and violence and representation. In his vibrant paintings of digitally rendered hurricane imagery and crime scene photography cataloging the aftermath of the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, he considers the physicality of his medium in connection to the chaos of his subject matter.

Spotlighting Lowman’s exhibitions at David Zwirner in London and New York along with other recent work, this monograph includes a text by Lynne Tillman that provides a unique perspective across all bodies of Lowman’s oeuvre. In an interview with Andrew Paul Woolbright for The Brooklyn Rail, Lowman discusses his engagement with representation and meaning, twentieth-century gestural and pop art, slow painting, and American violence.

This is a limited catalog box for a group exhibition focusing on photographic book-works produced in the ’70s by nine international conceptual artists: Nobuyoshi Araki, Christian Boltanski, Braco Dimitrijevic, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Paul-Armand Gette, Gilbert & George, Jean Le Gac, Urs Lüthi, NE Thing (Ian Baxter).

There was a proliferation of photographic activity in the 70s by artists who were not generally categorized as photographers. It is our assumption that this particular strain of imagery was best wed to the book and conversely the book itself acted as the neutral territory for a hybrid photographic practice that fell outside the established disciplines — documentary, photo-journalism, fine art. We explore the unique relationship between photography and the book; not the traditional photographic monograph, rather a more experimental, slight, imperfect deviation — an artist book, which in essence questions the meaning of photography and its peculiar relationship to time. As Simon Anderson writes in “Suitably Seventies,” published in the accompanying catalogue: “These books tend to share the common language of photography, which, almost by virtue of freezing a measurable fraction of time, leads to speculations about the passage of time. Our individual experience of duration is ill-measured by our mechanical concept of time. And just as the passage from time to duration leads us from physics to metaphysics, photography that deals with time takes us from the realm of the formal into the conceptual.”

The period covered by this exhibition saw fascinating developments in the art world. The introduction of fast and cheap methods of reproduction along with efficient international communication via airmail led to an expanded Zeitgeist of ideas and aesthetics. Included here are works by artists from France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, Canada, and Japan. This ensemble shares in questioning the nature of representation: Whether humorously, as with Gilbert & George’s blurred bottle shots from their heavy drinking period or Braco Dimitrijevic’s ludicrous comparisons; or rather more formally, as with Paul Armand-Gette’s pseudo-scientific recording. All wrestle with some form of truth carried by the photographic medium. Perhaps in reaction to the anti-establishment politics left over from the previous decade or to the grand-standing gestures of the “Art World,” these artists rejected authority to develop a new visual language — personal and radical.

Characterized by compositions of various types of steel, Bove’s ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” begun in 2016, amalgamates theoretical and art-historical influences across time periods and disciplines. To create these lyrical and abstract assemblages, Bove pairs fabricated tubing that has been crushed and shaped at her studio with found metal scraps and a single highly polished disk. Luminous color is applied to parts of the composition, transforming the steel—more commonly associated with inflexibility and heft—into something that appears malleable and lightweight, like clay, fabric, or crinkled paper.

Bove’s new works are smaller in scale and elaborate on the “collage sculptures,” with more complex forms that twist, fold, and bend into postures that belie their material construction. She manipulates steel to varying degrees, rendering gentle folds in some, and extreme, almost anthropomorphic contortions in others. Their contrasting textures—matte, glossy, or rough—create a further sense of visual play, heightening the surface tension throughout.

Featured spread—containing photographs of one woman at the border wall in Nogales, Arizona, in 2017, and another, Lorin Linder, at California's Lockwood Animal Rescue Center in 2013—is from Mitch Epstein: Sunshine Hotel, published by Steidl and editor Andrew Roth's PPP Editions. Spanning Epstein's entire career, 1969 to 2018, this beautifully printed, 12.25 x 12-inch clothbound volume contains almost 200 color and black-and-white images, half of which have never been published before. Intuitively sequenced by Roth, it is the ultimate overview of this pioneering American photographer's work, touching on all of his important series and themes.

This is a limited-edition zine with text by Alex Kitnick.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt is a Danish painter best known for her abstractions. Inspired by the landscapes of her childhood home in the coastal region of Zealand in Denmark, Engelhardt channels her memories of a difficult childhood and her Christian spirituality to create loosely geometric, cumulus paintings. There is often a bright white or dark mass in the center of her canvases, portraying an inner light, or darkness, which hints at representation without ceding qualities of abstraction. “I hope that my images are universal and metaphysical visions of light, air, soil and ocean,” the artist has said. “These are abstract snapshots instead of concrete illustrations of biblical acts." Born on May 2, 1956 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, she grew up on the Odsherred peninsula with abusive parents and two younger sisters. After graduating from the Funen Art Academy in 1980, she moved to a suburb of Paris, where she began her career and received immediate recognition. Engelhardt’s works are in the collections of the Ball State Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, among others. The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

This is a catalog of her work, produced by Elizabeth Harris Gallery and printed by Narayana Press in Denmark.

Josh Smith: Emo Jungle looks at the artist’s vigorous repetition of particular motifs, illuminating his approach to painting as an exploratory medium for image production. Published on the occasion of Smith’s critically acclaimed first exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue features a new body of work that marks an important evolution for the artist. In these paintings, Smith sets the stage for a new mode of self-reflective commentary on image making, acknowledging that “the meaning perhaps arises in the making.”

A new essay by curator Bob Nickas treats the Reaper, Turtle, and Devil figures from Emo Jungle as ciphers through which to understand Smith’s work. Nickas demonstrates how these new paintings re-stage and personalize the artist’s more abstract earlier works and illuminates the ways in which repetition functions within Smith’s practice. With more than one hundred illustrations, this book serves as the ideal introduction to Smith’s disruptive oeuvre.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt is a Danish painter best known for her abstractions. Inspired by the landscapes of her childhood home in the coastal region of Zealand in Denmark, Engelhardt channels her memories of a difficult childhood and her Christian spirituality to create loosely geometric, cumulus paintings. There is often a bright white or dark mass in the center of her canvases, portraying an inner light, or darkness, which hints at representation without ceding qualities of abstraction. “I hope that my images are universal and metaphysical visions of light, air, soil and ocean,” the artist has said. “These are abstract snapshots instead of concrete illustrations of biblical acts." Born on May 2, 1956 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, she grew up on the Odsherred peninsula with abusive parents and two younger sisters. After graduating from the Funen Art Academy in 1980, she moved to a suburb of Paris, where she began her career and received immediate recognition. Engelhardt’s works are in the collections of the Ball State Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, among others. The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

This is a catalog of her work, produced by Elizabeth Harris Gallery and printed by Narayana Press in Denmark.

The photographs featured in Viscidity by Boris Mikhailov were completed and sequenced in Kharkov in 1982 but only now published as a book. Reproduced at their original scale, we have added translations from the Russian to English. In addition, the book features “I was walking through a field,” an original bilingual essay by Mikhailov illuminating the history of the work and written specially for this edition.

One of three early and critical image-text works, Viscidity was completed after Horizontal Pictures and Vertical Calendars (1978-1980) and shortly before Unfinished Dissertation (1984). As Mikhailov states: “At first the texts tautologically repeated what was visible in the image, as though they were simply drawing attention to the photograph (the first book)… gradually the texts changed and became poetic and deeper (the second book)… then I added quotations in addition to my own reflections on photography (the third book).”

Viscidity was produced during a time of “deep political stagnation. Nothing is happening — nothing at all is interesting … There was a kind of certainty that society was at the threshold of something unknown, something everyone was anticipating. Many people felt this way.”

Mikhailov is best known for provocative self-portraits and politically charged color photographs, from the earliest works in Red Series (1968–75) to the gut wrenching yet seductive images of the homeless in the Soviet Union, published in Case Studies (Scalo, 1999). A prolific and experimental artist, Mikhailov’s work rests naturally beside the most respected conceptual artists of his generation. Photographs from Viscidity have been exhibited widely throughout his career, most importantly in 2004 in the critically acclaimed exhibition and accompanying catalogue at the Serralves Museum in Portugal by Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov and Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art.

The 2014 exhibition “Ana and Carl and some other couples” presented a printout of an article published in the New York Times on February 12, 1988, detailing Carl Andre’s acquittal on the charges that he pushed his wife, Ana Mendieta, to her death from the window of their 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village. The exhibition also included 126 books, cut through with circular holes, one to four inches in diameter. Embedded within these holes, at varying depths, was imagery extracted from 1960s and 1970s pornography magazines, exhibiting a variety of positions and possibilities within human sexual interaction — a catalogue of fetishes.

To coincide with the exhibition, PPP Editions has published Ana and Carl and some other couples in an edition of 126 copies. Bound without covers and printed on perforated paper, each of the 126 original book-collages is paired on every double-page spread with a centered black circle, which expands in diameter as the book progresses until it fully covers the final pages in solid black. The multiple mappings of these holes suggest the camera coming at the viewer, who finally is absorbed within a larger circle that eventually exceeds the bounds of the book. Each edition is signed and numbered in white marker by the artists and housed in a black glassine wrapper affixed with a wafer seal.

In the twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him.

In 1971, Moriyama accompanied his friend and celebrated graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo on a trip to New York for one month. He shot over 2000 half-frame negatives that he contact printed upon his return to Tokyo. A small selection of ten images from the series appeared in the Japanese photographic periodical Asahi Camera in 1972, and in 1974, he created his landmark photocopy book Another Country in New York reproducing a mere 80 photographs. The contact sheets were then put into storage and only recently revisited.

To coincide with the 2002 exhibition, Andrew Roth in association with PPP Editions has published ’71-NY, a hefty, bilingual edition printing 210 reproductions in 428 pages.

In Big Sur, in 1964, Walter Chappell shot a series of photographs of Sharon Tate that freeze her as she has since been frozen by fate, as a tragically and eternally young heroine. For 35 years those photographs remained hidden; here they appear in all their gauzy, morbid beauty.

A 20-page newspaper published to coincide with the 2001 exhibition. Formatted after the pages of the New York Times, The New Yokoo Times is a spoof on current affairs seen through the filter of an altered consciousness, with a distinct absurdist bent. In one collage titled “Who Cares” featured on the Editorials/Letters page, we view an image of a seascape. Large in the foreground is a group of 19th-century Japanese women lounging in striped swimming suits, adrift in a boat. Behind (and heading straight for them) is a group of American tourists in leisure wear, packed into a speedboat on a fishing expedition. And in the distance, yet a third vessel, an antique clipper is speeding across the frame through shark-infested waters towards a swimmer dashing by as if in a race. The headlines read: “Managing the Yokoo Incident,” “The Battle Over Money in Heaven,” “Gravel Sushi,” and “A Time of Testing.” The texts are appropriated from the New York Times and various Japanese tabloids.

Justin Allen’s Language Arts takes up writing as an integral part of an interdisciplinary art practice. Across poems, essays, lyrics, screenwriting, and drawings, works touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more, bringing together Allen's numerous influences into one collection.

Sweet Home Yokosuka revisits Ishiuchi’s three early works that in retrospect may be considered as a trilogy. Together, the photographs manifest a personal document primarily of her hometown Yokosuka, a place of compromised identity, accommodating two large American Naval bases since the late 1940s.

Apartment documents both exteriors and interiors of new and old dwellings, generally focusing on the buildings themselves not their inhabitants. They are in some respects anthropomorphic portraits of the architecture: The repairs on the walls are like veins, and the cracking and peeling of old paint are like the scars on aging skin. Yokosuka Story describes Ishiuchi’s wanderings in her native city, confronting locations that although changed, still hold the memories of her childhood. Endless Nights documents the popular “love hotels,” as abandoned; the physical structure of the places themselves and their furnishings, stairways, corridors and empty beds echo the intimate stories that unfolded there.

What is most compelling about this work is not necessarily what Ishiuchi photographed or the seductive rendition of reality into black and white, but rather how she conceptualized the act of picture-taking. Ishiuchi was less interested in finding her unique vision, more comfortable “using” the medium as a means to confronting herself and her past. This methodology was reinforced by the ideas discussed among her peers from the Provoke movement, Moriyama, Takanashi and Taki Koji, who questioned whether the photographic medium was capable of capturing any version of empirical truth.

“I sense that a numbing and mysterious pain raced through Ishiuchi with every snap of the shutter, as though she was killing something. What she was killing was the guts of our country, not just in Yokosuka but everywhere in Japan. No matter how beautiful the façade, behind it you can always find something festering and lifeless. How will Ishiuchi’s confessional poem, reverberating from within, speak to the future?” — Nishikawa Miwa.

Ishiuchi Miyako represented Japan in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Her photographs are included in the collections of SF MoMA, MFA Houston, the Getty Museum, ICP, to name but a few.

This is an exhibition for Copied, held by Andrew Roth from May 7 to June 20, 2014.

In the traditional matrix of an original and a copy, proximity to the touch of the maker’s hand is everything. The assumption here is that an original work—imbued directly with the value of its maker’s labor—accumulates value, while a copy of the work is bereft of its singular emanations, though it may serve as a vehicle to distribute its ideas. Or, to leave aside economic terms and look to philosophical ones, at one time it was widely held that originary Form was ideal, transcendent, and celestial, whereas the copy (its terrestrial version) must be limited, even degraded, by its material nature. Presently, we tend to think of this binary in reverse: an immaterial copy derived from existing form—digital pixels or coded information calculated from material instantiation—persists untainted, capable of generating nearly identical physical manifestations. Such dematerialization of information has changed the ease with which certain types of copies can be made; even as Walter Benjamin famously mourned mechanical reproduction’s leaching away of aura, he also recognized the emancipatory potential of such technologies, particularly the “revolutionary use value” that widely distributed images might possess.

A superb facsimile of the only known notebook of legendary artist Anni Albers, this publication offers insight into the methodology of a modern master.

Beginning in 1970, Anni Albers filled her graph-paper notebook regularly until 1980. This rare and previously unpublished document of her working process contains intricate drawings for her large body of graphic work, as well as studies for her late knot drawings. The notebook follows Albers's deliberations and progression as a draftsman in their original form. It reveals the way she went about making complex patterns, exploring them piece by piece, line by line in a visually dramatic and mysteriously beautiful series of geometric arrangements.

An afterword by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, contextualizes the notebook and explores the role studies played in the development of her work.

“Bernhardt has always been impressive for her ability to combine the immediate, seductive properties of paint with the infectious humor of topical pop culture.” —Hyperallergic

Bernhardt’s boundless visual appetite has established her as one of the most exciting painters working today. Thinking about the relationship between art, objects, and commerce, Bernhardt spotlights iconic motifs of cartoons and cultural symbols. Colors and lines bleed and pool together, revealing Bernhardt’s brisk and improvisational process. Monumental in size, subject matter, and vibrancy, her works demand attention.

Expanding on the exhibition at David Zwirner, London, in 2022, this catalogue includes additional paintings and works on paper in which Bernhardt develops her ongoing body of work. With many details of paintings, this significant publication gives the artist’s work ample space to play. Suzanne Hudson’s essay considers Bernhardt’s work from an art-historical perspective and explores the artist’s work and life.

The Outlands, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s lens: vibrant colors and a profound sense of nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images—a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home—The Outlands is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.

Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.

Images from 1960s to 1980s, including black-and-white photographs shot at night in dance and strip clubs in Shinjuku, along with excerpts of Watanabe’s writing from Discology, published in 1982.

Marco Breuer makes photographs without using a camera. In a process similar to that used to make photograms, one of the oldest photographic forms, Breuer directly exposes photo-sensitive paper to light and heat and materials like spit, blood, nail clippings, Windex, jello, beer, mold, kitchen matches, bomb fuses and hot coals. The result produces nearly pure abstractions that hover somewhere on photography's outer limits. This two-volume set presents Breuer's cameraless photographs together with a wide range of responses written by fiction writers, a psychiatrist, a poet, a composer and a chemical laboratory. Volume I contains images, volume II contains text, and both are spiral bound, providing an intimate, mysterious and coolly elegant notebook-sized package.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt is a Danish painter best known for her abstractions. Inspired by the landscapes of her childhood home in the coastal region of Zealand in Denmark, Engelhardt channels her memories of a difficult childhood and her Christian spirituality to create loosely geometric, cumulus paintings. There is often a bright white or dark mass in the center of her canvases, portraying an inner light, or darkness, which hints at representation without ceding qualities of abstraction. “I hope that my images are universal and metaphysical visions of light, air, soil and ocean,” the artist has said. “These are abstract snapshots instead of concrete illustrations of biblical acts." Born on May 2, 1956 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, she grew up on the Odsherred peninsula with abusive parents and two younger sisters. After graduating from the Funen Art Academy in 1980, she moved to a suburb of Paris, where she began her career and received immediate recognition. Engelhardt’s works are in the collections of the Ball State Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, among others. The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

This is a catalog of her work, produced by Elizabeth Harris Gallery and printed by Narayana Press in Denmark.

Ancart often paints subjects that naturally invite contemplation, such as the horizon, clouds, flowers, flames, and icebergs. His newest body of work captures the experience of landscape seen in motion or from a distance: trees blurred while driving past, a far-off inky-black sea, an evocative Martian mountain range. Recalling René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart blurs form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction.

Reproduced here in magnificent foldouts, two multipanel canvases situate the viewer between a mountainscape and a seascape, both monumental in scale. Ancart segments the seascape with a stark horizon line, dividing sky and ocean. Like other comparable motifs within the artist’s oeuvre, the vividly colored cloudy sky functions in an anthropomorphic way, alluding to the endless possibilities and personalities of organic forms.

Including an interview with the artist by Bob Nickas, this catalogue offers insight into Ancart’s frank reflections on painting, writing, nature, and more. The publication also features a new essay by Laura McLean-Ferris. Taken together, the works in Traveling Light meditate on the expansive possibilities of painting.

Inspired by film, pop culture, and the history of fashion, Wylie harnesses a union of high and low culture with a bold technique of mark making. Her unique practice of material overlay and erasure creates fantastic compositions. Playing with the conceptual tensions between formal and informal aesthetics, Wylie also employs the visual elements of text as crucial details in her paintings.

With beautiful swiss binding, this monograph compiles work from five exhibitions at David Zwirner, offering an impressive view of Wylie’s most recent work. Giving insight to Wylie’s feminist and rebellious impulses, Judith Bernstein writes an accompanying text on how she relates to Wylie’s ambitious and playful energy. This publication also features a foreword by Nicholas Serota and new essays by David Salle and Barry Schwabsky, in addition to an enlightening interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments have captured the imaginations of millions of museum and gallery visitors around the world. Her quintessential polka dots, organic shapes, and optical environments that become hypnotic, merging concepts of flatness and depth, presence and absence, and beauty and the sublime. The paintings on the cover and endpapers of Kusama’s first Artist Journal provide the perfect motivation for any creative pursuit.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt is a Danish painter best known for her abstractions. Inspired by the landscapes of her childhood home in the coastal region of Zealand in Denmark, Engelhardt channels her memories of a difficult childhood and her Christian spirituality to create loosely geometric, cumulus paintings. There is often a bright white or dark mass in the center of her canvases, portraying an inner light, or darkness, which hints at representation without ceding qualities of abstraction. “I hope that my images are universal and metaphysical visions of light, air, soil and ocean,” the artist has said. “These are abstract snapshots instead of concrete illustrations of biblical acts." Born on May 2, 1956 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, she grew up on the Odsherred peninsula with abusive parents and two younger sisters. After graduating from the Funen Art Academy in 1980, she moved to a suburb of Paris, where she began her career and received immediate recognition. Engelhardt’s works are in the collections of the Ball State Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, among others. The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

This is a catalog of her work, produced by Elizabeth Harris Gallery and printed by Narayana Press in Denmark.

This highly anticipated catalogue, accompanying Gerhard Richter’s first exhibition with David Zwirner, presents Richter’s last paintings along with his recent explorations in drawing, printing, and sculpture.

“[His last paintings] can feel almost like exquisite texts to be read. . . . Their freshness and spontaneity feels like a new beginning.” —Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Known for his abstract and realist paintings, Gerhard Richter has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to the medium and its formal and conceptual possibilities. This remarkable book celebrates the breadth of Richter’s newest bodies of work and archives a historical moment in the artist’s career.

Full-color plates and installation views showcase a selection of the artist’s final works on canvas—made just before he announced his retirement from oil painting in 2017—alongside an expansive suite of new drawings made with ink, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, a remarkable series of chromatic inkjet prints titled mood, and a stunning glass sculpture that debuted at the exhibition in New York. A newly commissioned essay by Dieter Schwarz, one of the foremost experts on Richter’s oeuvre, illustrates the artist’s path toward his newest bodies of work. Schwarz describes Richter in his studio, revealing the creative process behind his iconic practice.

Myths & Mortals documents a selection of paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture.

Alongside these paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus & Adonis (1593) by Hafid Bouazza (2016). Myths & Mortals is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

untitled sequences a group of snapshots culled from Vince Aletti’s collection of found photographs. Also included are a number of pictures made by photographers at physique studios from the 1950s onward. Among the most accomplished and distinctive are Bob Mizer (Athletic Model Guild), Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), Don Whitman (Western Photography Guild), Chuck Renslow (Kris), and Walter Kundzicz (Champion).

anonymous presents a suite of images by an unidentified photographer culled from an archive of over 300 black-and-white 2-1/4 inch contact prints and one binder with images and negatives affixed to a dozen loose sheets. To accompany this group, Aletti has written a 1,500-word essay reflecting on their significance, placing them within the history of Times Square imagemakers and questioning the motivation of the photographer himself.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt is a Danish painter best known for her abstractions. Inspired by the landscapes of her childhood home in the coastal region of Zealand in Denmark, Engelhardt channels her memories of a difficult childhood and her Christian spirituality to create loosely geometric, cumulus paintings. There is often a bright white or dark mass in the center of her canvases, portraying an inner light, or darkness, which hints at representation without ceding qualities of abstraction. “I hope that my images are universal and metaphysical visions of light, air, soil and ocean,” the artist has said. “These are abstract snapshots instead of concrete illustrations of biblical acts." Born on May 2, 1956 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, she grew up on the Odsherred peninsula with abusive parents and two younger sisters. After graduating from the Funen Art Academy in 1980, she moved to a suburb of Paris, where she began her career and received immediate recognition. Engelhardt’s works are in the collections of the Ball State Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, among others. The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

This is a catalog of her work, produced by Elizabeth Harris Gallery and printed by Narayana Press in Denmark.

Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono is an adaptation of the first opera, Dafne, composed and written by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598. Drawing on the myth of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a story of unrequited love, patriarchal possession, conquest, and transformation—Mobarak’s multimedia and multispecies reimagining splinters the opera’s Italian libretto. Alongside English and Greek versions, it is translated into some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages—Abkhaz, San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and !Xoon—and Ovid’s original Latin. In this process, the narrative—and an artifact of Western culture—is dismantled, metabolized, and rendered into unruly utterances that shape the sensorium as much as they do the capacity for sense-making. These voices are given material form by a cast of mycelium sonic sculptures whose rhizomatic compositions and broadcasted recordings resemble the formation and mutation of language over time, reconstituting speech into a new, polyphonic body politic, composed of voices whose striking, poetic utterances transfix and transcend meaning.

With a preface by the artist, libretti, and an essay by Anahid Nersessian.

Hughes’s heart-warming description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is seen through the eyes of one grandmother, Sister Mary Bradley. As she guides the reader through the lives of those around her, we imagine the babies born, families in struggle, children yet flourishing. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem as seen through her learned and worldly eyes, expressed here through Hughes’s poetic prose. As she states, “I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” DeCarava’s photographs lay open a world of sense and feeling that begins with his perception and vision. The ruminations go beyond the limit of simple observation and contend with deeper meanings to reveal these individuals as subjects worthy of art. While Hughes states “We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” the photographs bring us back to this lively dialogue and a complex reality, to a resolution that stands with the optimism of the photographic medium and the certainty of DeCarava’s artistic moment.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a moving, photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration, reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. First published in 1955, the book, widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature, was reprinted by public demand several times. This fourth printing, the Heritage Edition, is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing the history and ongoing importance of this book.

This is a book by Roger Newton and Vera Lutter. It features an essay by Jonathan Crary entitled "Visionary Operations."

This catalogue, written by Marvin Heiferman, for Andrew Roth LLC‘s inaugural exhibition, is comprised of vintage photographs and books by Ed Ruscha and Robert Adams.

A comprehensive look into the fascinating life and enduring legacy of Juan Muñoz and his enigmatic installations

“Walking between these figures feels like an interruption; being a spectator is itself a performance. They seem to know more than we do, about the status of being an artwork and the place of the viewer. The joke, if there is one, is on us.” —The Guardian

Muñoz’s revolutionary oeuvre evokes emotional narratives through sculpture, installation, drawing, writing, and sound. Situating viewers between his work and among one another, he creates an intimacy between art and its audience. Muñoz thought deeply about art history and, in particular, the tradition of Spanish painting. Before his untimely death at the age of forty-eight, he produced an extensive, powerfully evocative body of work that uniquely explores the narrative and philosophical possibilities of art.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2022, this catalogue provides an expansive overview of Muñoz’s career from the 1980s onward. In an accompanying text, the art historian and curator Guillaume Kientz contextualizes Muñoz’s influences within the art-historical canon. The acclaimed writer Siri Hustvedt contributes a thoughtful response to the artist’s iconic Conversation Piece. In an imagined interview between Muñoz and himself, Maurizio Cattelan further propels the artist’s momentum and potential in the time before his death. Also featured is a never-before-published interview between Muñoz and the art historian Michael Brenson that took place in 2000.

This publication reproduces covers of 100 British punk fanzines from the Mott Collection and features two essays: “Glue Was All Over My Fingers” by Toby Mott and “We Are the Writing on the Wall” by Victor Brand.

The zine is mass-produced graffiti, a love letter to an anonymous public, a black-and-white shout into the wilderness. As a product, it goes hand in hand so perfectly with the autochthonous priorities of the punk movement that it seems in retrospect almost inevitable. The youth of the United Kingdom — under- and unemployed, adrift and disillusioned in the aftermath of ‘60s utopianism — were the writing on the wall in the mid-1970s. The kids of punk weren’t all right: Punk was the return of the repressed. Even if they were only talking to themselves, they could express themselves without censorship through music and grainy, handwritten pamphlets.

The scrapbook has long been used as a storehouse for memories — to preserve a lock of hair, a sentimental piece of correspondence, a magazine clipping, or a beloved snapshot. Finding a historical precedent in the 17th-century commonplace book, in which bits of scripture might be jotted down alongside literary quotations and recipes, the scrapbook evolved into a highly crafted visual record, a diary not just of thoughts, but also of things. Artists began to engage with the scrapbook in earnest in the postwar period, using the page as variously as the canvas, albeit on a smaller scale. As the title Paperwork suggests, this book explores how contemporary artists have used the scrapbook to forge an intimate artistic identity, in opposition to the bureaucratic, administrative papers that provide official identification.

If the conventional scrapbook originally was a place to store memories, the artist’s scrapbook often trades in nascent ideas, both visual and textual, which may or may not grow into a more finished work. Such books allow an informal view into the process of thinking that goes before making; the collecting that comes before facture. William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin (whose three exceptional scrapbooks form the backbone of this exhibition) used oversize books to intertwine visual ideas and threads of stories: news clippings and shards of advertisements woven among watercolor paintings and excerpts from manuscripts — arrangements which fed into Burroughs’s dreams and back out into his cut-up narratives. Other artists, such as Al Hansen, carried small notebooks for organizational jottings, quick sketches, and humorous musings, making collages on the fly and tucking away daily detritus for safekeeping. Richard Prince collected tear sheets from magazines in plastic portfolios, archiving his images of biker chicks and catalog models for later use. Carolee Schneemann kept long-running scrapbooks, documenting both her domestic life and her burgeoning artistic career.

But the scrapbook can also be a finished work itself, in which the tightly conceived and carefully constructed sheets form a complete whole. Isa Genzken’s I Love New York, Crazy City is one such example: made during a year she spent in New York in the mid-1990s, the book is a madcap conglomeration of color snapshots, faxes, and letters affixed to the pages with electrical tape. The French artist Jean-Michel Wicker makes byzantine scrapbooks, often excising pages from store-bought notebooks at the gutter and taping in replacement patchworks of found images, Internet printouts, and hand-lettered phrases. A classic scrapbook purportedly made by Ray Johnson when he was a teenager features kitsch images of babies, puppies, and western landscapes; it was later repurposed in an edition by Brian Buczak, who xeroxed particular spreads, creating degenerated Pop facsimiles.

Paperwork illustrates three to four spreads from these scrapbooks, among others, and includes two essays: “Patterns and Scraps” by Alex Kitnick and “Glue and Cum” by Richard Hawkins, plus fully annotated descriptions of each scrapbook by Claire Lehmann.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt is a Danish painter best known for her abstractions. Inspired by the landscapes of her childhood home in the coastal region of Zealand in Denmark, Engelhardt channels her memories of a difficult childhood and her Christian spirituality to create loosely geometric, cumulus paintings. There is often a bright white or dark mass in the center of her canvases, portraying an inner light, or darkness, which hints at representation without ceding qualities of abstraction. “I hope that my images are universal and metaphysical visions of light, air, soil and ocean,” the artist has said. “These are abstract snapshots instead of concrete illustrations of biblical acts." Born on May 2, 1956 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, she grew up on the Odsherred peninsula with abusive parents and two younger sisters. After graduating from the Funen Art Academy in 1980, she moved to a suburb of Paris, where she began her career and received immediate recognition. Engelhardt’s works are in the collections of the Ball State Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, among others. The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

This is a catalog of her work, produced by Elizabeth Harris Gallery and printed by Narayana Press in Denmark.

In Numbers is a survey of serial publications produced by artists from around the world dating from 1955 to the present day. Amid historical groundswells like the rise of the little press in the 1960s, the correspondence art movement of the early 1970s, and the DIY culture of zines in the '80s and early '90s, professional artists seized on the format of magazines and postcards as a site for a new kind of art production. In large part, these are young artists operating at the peripheries of mainstream-art cultures or established artists looking for an alternative to the marketplace. These are not publications that feature news items, criticism, or reproductions of artworks, but are themselves artworks, often collaborative and idiosyncratic. This survey then is the first to define a neglected art form that is neither artists’ book nor ephemera, but is entirely its own unique object.

The survey begins with Wallace Berman’s Semina and continues through Joe Brainard’s C Comics, Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, Robert Heinecken’s modified periodicals, the magazine of the Japanese Provoke group, Art-Language, Raymond Pettibon’s Tripping Corpse, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Ohio, and contemporary examples such as North Drive Press and Continuous Project. Approximately 60 publications are surveyed in total. The diversity of the list is reflected in the backgrounds of the producing artists and in the wide range of techniques, nationalities, and media; the survey does not attempt to be exhaustive, but simply to define the genre’s contours and identify certain thematic threads. In Numbers documents the history of each publication (its inception, production, distribution, and significance) together with a thorough bibliography. In addition, several longer essays and interviews by experts, such as Clive Phillpot, Nancy Princethal, Vince Aletti, William S. Wilson, and Neville Wakefield, will complement the individual entries to provide a historical context and overview.

In her debut book Repose, Amelia Zhou poses the question, “How do I perform or not perform?” Weaving together poems, fiction, and lyric essay, Repose follows an unnamed woman grappling with the limits of the self on the everyday stage of labor and routine, charting her emergent modes of resistance. She is already steps ahead, deftly shifting between worker and dancer, roving through the haunted space in which a performance has just ended, the ruins of a house, or a skyscraper aflame. Seeking the edges of form—where it exceeds itself, where it breaks down—Repose offers a narrative of girlhood invigorated by the mutual possibilities of dreaming and defiance.

Amelia Zhou works with writing and movement, with an interest in exploring their various intersections as they arise in forms such as poetry, prose, or performance. In 2021 she was awarded Gold Prize at the Creative Future Writers’ Awards (UK) and was a recipient of the Ultimo Prize (Australia), both for prose. Her work has been published most recently in Overland, LUMIN Journal, and Ambit; exhibited at Orleans House Gallery; with further writing in numerous UK and Australian publications. She holds a MA in Creative Practice from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance (2020) and is an incoming PhD student in English at the University of Cambridge. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she now lives in London.

MALE features photographs and artifacts from the collection of the renowned photography critic, curator, and collector Vince Aletti. Amassed over the last 30 years, the collection features a blend of anonymous and iconic imagery from the present back into the 19th century. This visual cacophony distinguishes Aletti’s taste and appetite as a collector. He surrounds himself with his collection in his apartment, but for the first time, in February 2008, Aletti assembled a selection of images at White Columns in New York. A sampling from this public display is featured in MALE along with a gatefold documenting the collection as it is installed in his home.

Collier Schorr, contemporary artist and author, has contributed a 2,500-word essay on the history of homosexual imagery and the impact viewing Aletti’s collection had on her as an image maker. In “A Male is a Male as well as being a Male,” she states, “Aletti’s collection — as seen in his book, in his home and in an exhibition space — creates a Cosmos: at once a microcosm of gay male life, a personal fantasy, and the infinite, enveloping World. The collection is not concerned with the Unique. There is no sense of one-upmanship, each new picture is not there to be better than the last. There is no holy grail.”

Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s celebrated romantic comedy intertwines multiple narratives under the influence of transformation and witchcraft. The play is often staged with actors wearing animal masks, an aspect that appeals particularly to Dzama, whose work is characterized by the fusion of human and animal, fantasy and reality.

As the second title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series, this book revisits this ultimate fairy tale through the eyes of a contemporary artist who feels a special affinity for its imagery.

This is an exhibition catalogue reproducing ten black-and-white photographs in tri-tone, all taken between 1954 and 1978, culled predominantly from a small group of photographs that survived the 1963 fire that destroyed most of Chappell’s prints and negatives.

Includes a poem by Robert Creeley, composed for Chappell in 1973, and “Time Lived,” an essay by Peter Bunnell, curator of photography at the Princeton Art Museum. Bunnell succinctly reviews Chappell’s work by stating that “Chappell has always believed firmly in the duality of the corporeal and the spirit … The fundamental principle in [his work] is that the tenuous connection to photographic reality is not severed. Each subject is re-presented in such a way that our perceptual limitation is expanded. Each image suggests an inner reality, a kind of scar of the past, a reflection of an act or event once lived.”

Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, this groundbreaking publication charts the reception of the photographer’s work and offers comprehensive insight into the critical conversations, as well as misconceptions, around this highly influential artist.

Best known for her penetrating images exploring what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singularfigure in American postwar photography. Arbus’s black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach. Critics and writers have described her work as “sinister” and “appalling” as well as “revelatory,” “sincere,” and “compassionate.” Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, Diane Arbus Documents charts the reception of the revolutionary photographer's work.

Illuminating fifty years of evolution in the field of art criticism, Documents provides a new template for understanding the work of any formidable artist. Organized in eleven sections that focus on major exhibitions and significant events emerging from Arbus’s work, as well as on her methods and intentions, the sixty-nine facsimiles of previously published articles and essays––an archive by all accounts––trace the discourse on Arbus, contextualizing her inimitable oeuvre. Supplemented by an annotated bibliography of more than six hundred entries and a comprehensive exhibition history, Documents serves as an important resource for photographers, researchers, art historians, and art critics, in addition to students of art criticism and the interested reader alike.

Likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, The Tempest brings together various themes the Bard explored in his prior plays, including magic, revenge and forgiveness, order and society, and nature versus art. The shipwreck and remote island, the spirits, and the dukes and their children offer rich material for Wylie’s works on paper and canvas.

As the third title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series, this book pairs a complex narrative with equally layered works by a contemporary artist who approaches the play and art making from a unique perspective. Also included is an introduction by the writer Katie Kitamura.

The Chinese artist Liu Ye’s meticulous, colorful canvases convey his love of literature in the first publication dedicated to his paintings of books.

Beijing-born painter Liu Ye (b. 1964) investigates the intersections of history and representation through a distinct vocabulary that transcends time and place, evoking distinct conceptual and emotional registers of meaning. Carefully balanced and lushly rendered, his works encompass a diverse range of aesthetic and cultural sources, from literary and artistic inspirations to his family and pets. In this new publication devoted to his book paintings, the artist examines the book as both a physical object and cultural totem. Playing with geometry and perspective, Liu creates extraordinary and disorienting portraits of this most familiar subject.

Liu’s Book Painting series, begun in 2013, depicts close-up views of books that are turned open to reveal empty pages, an approach that emphasizes the object’s form over its content. Rendering books’ material structure—endpapers, binding, spine—in sensual detail, these paintings indicate an obsession with the book as an object and a lifelong love of literature. Liu’s father was a children’s book author who introduced him to Western writers at a young age, fueling his curiosity and imagination. Many of the books in Liu’s father’s collection were banned in Cultural Revolution–era China and the artist read them secretly throughout his childhood. This formative experience figures in his popular Banned Books series and in his book paintings in general.

Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020, this catalogue includes new writing by the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu, who traces the evolution of the book form in Liu’s work, as well as an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Liu is known for his precise, deftly rendered representational paintings. Drawn from contemporary culture and old master painting, his wide-ranging visual touchstones include Piet Mondrian, Miffy the Bunny, Balthus, and Rogier van der Weyden. In this new publication devoted to his book paintings, the artist examines the book as both a physical object and cultural totem. Playing with geometry and perspective, Liu creates extraordinary and disorienting portraits of this most familiar subject.

Liu’s Book Painting series, begun in 2013, depicts close-up views of books that are turned open to reveal empty pages, an approach that emphasizes the object’s form over its content. Rendering books’ material structure—endpapers, binding, spine—in sensual detail, these paintings indicate an obsession with the book as an object and a lifelong love of literature. Liu’s father was a children’s book author who introduced him to Western writers at a young age, fueling his curiosity and imagination. Many of the books in his father’s collection were banned in Cultural Revolution–era China and the artist read them secretly throughout his childhood. This formative experience figures in his popular Banned Books series and in his book paintings in general.

Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition presented at David Zwirner New York in 2020, this catalogue includes new writing by the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu, who traces the evolution of the book form in Liu’s work, as well as an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.