Presenting a world that pulses with excesses and appetites, Cecily Brown explores the breadth of human experience in her tactile oil paintings. Broadly inspired by the history of painting—from Rubens and Veronese to the muscular expressionism of Willem de Kooning—Cecily Brown’s personal vision transcends classical notions of genre and narrative, freeing her subject matter from its original context and positioning it within a new aesthetic reality. Submerged within her vigorous gestural abstractions are scenes in which tangles of flesh dissolve into sensuous textures. Eschewing fixed meaning, Brown’s paintings reflect the flux of life through fragmentary glimpses of form. This volume is published on the occasion of an exhibition of new paintings by the artist held in November 2011 at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome.
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major sculpture exhibition by the late Franz West. West was actively engaged with the preparation of this exhibition up until his untimely death earlier this summer. Belonging to the generation of artists exposed to Actionist and Performance Art of the 1960s and70s, West instinctively rejected the traditionally passive nature of the relationship betweenartwork and viewer. Being equally opposed to the physical ordeal and existential intensity insisted upon by his performative forbears, he made work that was vigorous and imposing yet free and light-hearted, where form and function were roughly compatible rather than mutually exclusive. In the seventies, he produced the first of the small, portable, mixed media sculptures called Adaptives (Passstucke). These ergonomically inclined objects become complete as artworks only when the viewer holds, wears, carries or performs with them. Transposing the knowledge gained with these formative works, he explored sculpture increasingly in terms of an ongoing dialogue of actions and reactions between viewers and objects in any given exhibition space, while probing the internal aesthetic relations between sculpture and painting.
On January 26, 1957, Richard Hamilton wrote a now-famous letter outlining his definition of what “Pop Art Is.” This volume celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Hamilton’s prophetic document, presenting the works of more than forty artists from his own generation of Pop artists (among them Hamilton himself, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol) and from artists of subsequent generations who have contributed to the development and dissemination of Pop Art (Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, and others). A text by Greil Marcus, a photographic essay by Louise Lawler, and an interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown by Dan Graham are included in the book, which illuminates the powerful, international impact of Pop Art throughout the second half of the 20th century. Pop represented a sudden and dramatic expansion of often-contradictory possibilities, and for this reason and others the concept of Pop remains vital in contemporary art.
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