Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
Whitney Museum of American Art Curator Scott Rothkopf was previously Senior Editor at ARTFORUM. He was a guest curator at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, where he
organized Mel Bochner Photographs 1966-1969 (2002), a survey of Bochner’s photographic works and related drawings, which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. At the Fogg, Rothkopf was also co-curator, with Linda Norden, of Pierre Huyghe’s This Is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004), a site-specific installation, performance, and film made by Huyghe in response to Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Rothkopf was a contributing curator of the 2007 Lyon Biennial, for which he selected and installed the work of Wade Guyton.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Vinzenz Brinkmann, Isabelle Graw, Joachim Pissarro, Matthias Ulrich, Scott Rothkopf, et al.
Jeff Koons (born 1955) is probably the most famous artist of the 1980s, and certainly one of the most notorious and controversial. In the summer of 2012, the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt are collaborating on a bold and unprecedented simultaneous overview of Koons’ sculptural and painterly oeuvre. The Liebieghaus show, titled Jeff Koons: The Sculptor, creates a dialogue between Koons’ sculptures (both world-renowned and recent works) and the nineteenth-century villa whose collection spans 5,000 years of sculpture, from Ancient Egypt to the present. The artist fell in love with the Liebieghaus after visiting the city on his way to the German company Arnold, which produced his oversize works in polished steel, such as the Balloon Flower sculptures of the 1990s. The Schirn’s exhibit, Jeff Koons: The Painter, focuses on the artist’s monumental paintings, whose motifs draw upon the most varied sources of high and popular culture, from Manet to Popeye. In recent years, following the success of his flower and balloon dogs, Koons has revisited his painting practice, declaring, “I like the sense of warmth that comes from an actual painting and that’s why I returned to making paintings.” Boasting 270 color reproductions from the breadth of the artist's 30-year career, this publication is comprised of two volumes--one devoted to the sculptures, the other to the paintings--that together constitute a marvelous and ambitious Koons overview.
Published by Haunch of Venison. Text by Carter Ratcliff, Scott Rothkopf, Sarah Bancroft.
This substantial new catalogue is a major addition to existing scholarship on the important American artist James Rosenquist. Featuring numerous gatefold images, different papers and a silk ribbon, it contains commissioned essays by Carter Ratcliff--who argues that to label Rosenquist a Pop artist is to deny the complexity of his oeuvre and diminish his achievement--and Sarah Bancroft, who suggests that the notion of abstraction is key to understanding all of Rosenquist's work, from 1960 onward, and not just the "overtly abstract" paintings of the past seven years. In addition, in a wide-ranging interview with Scott Rothkopf, the artist discusses the place of political engagement in his work, the importance of collage, his ongoing fascination with time and the element of excitement: "It's like taking drugs. It has to be exciting to be able to paint it. You have to feel it's worthwhile doing it, to really pull it off."
PUBLISHER Haunch of Venison
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11.75 x 10 in. / 78 pgs / 65 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/31/2009 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2009 p. 103
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781905620135TRADE List Price: $75.00 CDN $90.00
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Yves Aupetitallot, Anne Pontegnie. Text by Bob Nickas, Scott Rothkopf, Anne Pontegnie.
New York-based artist Kelley Walker hacks advertising and displays its inner workings as art. His large-scale prints appropriate iconic cultural images, digitally altering them to expose their underlying agendas. In “Black Star Press: Black Star, Star Press Star” (2004), Walker combined nondigital collage processes to reference abstract painting: He smeared newspaper photos of the Birmingham race riots with melted chocolate and toothpaste, scanned them into a computer and made photographic prints from the results. Such hybridized work is neither quite post-Pop nor just appropriation. In the past few years, Walker has emerged as one of the most innovative and rigorous young artists in New York and has become much in demand not only for his solo work but for his collaborations with fellow New Yorker Wade Guyton. This monograph is a valuable introduction to Walker’s technical processes, and essays by maverick critic and curator Bob Nickas and writer Scott Rothkopf lend much insight into his practice.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Text by Rod Mangham, Beatrix Ruf, Gloria Sutton. Interviews by Alex Katz, Elizabeth Peyton, Mary Heilmann, Scott Rothkopf.
Laura Owens once said of more doctrinaire painters that "the weight of art history is what gets you…that crusty, stodgy feeling, when you look at a work of art and you feel that the person hasn't stepped outside, hasn't looked in other wings of the Met, hasn't gone to a natural history museum." There is no danger of that in her own good-natured and elegant works, which seem to emulate Rousseau, Grandma Moses and the aesthetics of the 1960s and of vintage decorative arts at once. Robots in the garden, lions, hunters, romance and war are some of the subjects parading through, under passing influences as wide ranging as Dada performance, Japanese prints and Hindu beliefs. Birds grow larger than the trees they perch on, cats sniff at a pair of skulls and monkeys exchange wary glances. Elsewhere, Owens has broken away from the fine arts to move into wallpaper and textiles. Beyond all this straightforward beauty is constant inquiry into her chosen media. She has rejected naturalism in favor of depiction, representation and an unashamed pleasure in ornamentation, which, with her delight in pictorial grace, affords decoration a new dignity. She combines the abstract with the representational in a highly personal vocabulary, from which she creates an elaborate, elegant and quietly exuberant whole. Laura Owens collects the artist's complete works to date.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior, Janneke de Vries. Interviews by Yilmaz Dziewior, Daniel Baumann, Scott Rothkopf, Janneke de Vries.
This first monograph on the prominent New York City artist, Wade Guyton, whose name has lately been appearing on the international art circuit with increasing regularity (often together with his sometimes-collaborator, Kelley Walker), features a selection of Guyton's chromatically cool, large-format serial prints on canvas. These object-like, Minimalistic "paintings," which sometimes connect directly to Bauhaus aesthetics, sometimes to Constructivism, Concrete, Appropriation or Conceptual art, convey a particular kind of humor and beauty, conjuring a re-formation and re-structuring of Modernist art and decor. Incorporating scanned pictures of flames, stripes, squares, points and holes drawn in the computer, as well as typed U's and X's, the works feel resolutely undefined and open to interpretation, even as the book's title refers directly to the advertising slogan for Olympus digital cameras: "Color. Power. Style. Find your Verve." Amen.
Published by Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Introduction by Claudia Gould. Text by Ingrid Schaffner, Scott Rothkopf, Joel Lobenthal, Dominic Molon, Wayne Koestenbaum.
Published on the occasion of the first major museum survey of Karen Kilimnik's work, a traveling exhibition with stops in Philadelphia, Miami, Aspen and Chicago, this chic but scholarly catalogue is the most substantial on the artist to date. It highlights an important American artist whose work objectifies mass-cultural desire with glittering poignancy and includes a nuanced selection of 15 years worth of collage-based activity in the realms of painting, drawing, photography, sculptural installation and object-making, as well as new work. Fully illustrated at 180 pages, it features an essay by exhibition curator Ingrid Schaffner which analyzes the development of the artist's work and its historic contexts as well as four contributions from authors who address a theme or image within the work. Thus, cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum addresses gossip; dance historian Joel Lobenthal writes on ballet; Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Dominic Molon, focuses on influence; and Artforum Senior Editor Scott Rothkopf considers Kilimnik's titles. Includes a complete bibliography and an illustrated exhibition chronology. Called "sharp and witty" and "long overdue" for major recognition by The New York Times' Holland Cotter, Kilimnik is an important international artist with an extensive publication and exhibition history. Born in Philadelphia in 1955, she studied architecture at Temple University and continues to live in the region. Since 1991, her work has been represented by 303 Gallery in New York. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Ireland, and White Cube, London. In 1992, ICA Philadelphia presented Kilimnik's first museum show as part of its "Investigations" series.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Scott Rothkopf, Meredith Martin.
Art history becomes Karen Kilimnik. As much as paint on canvas, it is the raw material of her pictures--though she wears it lightly, and with great élan. The title of this mini exhibition catalogue, published on the occasion of Kilimnik's show at London's Serpentine Gallery, derives from a popular sub-genre populated by "link boys" and "cottage girls." For when looking at Kilimnik's work since the late 1980s, and especially that of the last 10 years, one cannot help but be struck by her engagement with the history of painting. In this lightly illustrated volume, Meredith Martin, a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, speaks with Scott Rothkopf on Kilimnik's relationship to art history: if history is her raw material, then Kilimnik points as much to painting's future as its past, as much to our own world as to a bygone day.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Essays by Michael Duncan, Robert Hobbs, Robert S. Lubar and Scott Rothkopf. Introduction by Isabelle Dervaux.
While Surrealism became unfashionable in Europe in the 1930s, it enjoyed increasing popularity across the Atlantic at the same time. Surrealism USa, the catalogue to the exhibition of the same name at the National Academy of Design, traces the history of this movement in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s by examining its manifestations throughout the country--from Social Surrealism and California Post-Surrealism to Magic Realism and the beginning of Abstract Expressionism. It chronicles the wide influence of Dalí on American art, the Surrealists' response to war and fascism, and the relationship between Surrealism and abstract art. With over 100 paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, this definitive survey brings together the work of American artists like Joseph Cornell, Peter Blume, Kay Sage, Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, and Jackson Pollock--with that of Europeans in exile during World War II, including Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, André Masson and Max Ernst.
Published by Mitchell-Innes & Nash/Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Artwork by Roy Lichtenstein. Edited by Rick Moody. Contributions by Jack Cowart. Text by Scott Rothkopf.
Twelve years ago, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Arts for Transit commissioned Roy Lichtenstein to create a mural for the Times Square subway station at 42nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Fabricated by Lichtenstein in 1994, the mural was finally unveiled on September 5, 2002, a gift from the artist to all New Yorkers. Standing 6 feet high and 53 feet long, the mural provides a skyline view of a futuristic metropolis, as represented through Lichtenstein's trademark benday dots and comic book flair. The development of the mural is explored here through an essay by Harvard University scholar Scott Rothkopf and “Report on Miniaturization (Metropolis, 2030 A.D.),” a new, specially commissioned short story by Rick Moody. In this appropriately oversized book, viewers get a glimpse of Lichtenstein's creative process, interweaving motifs, and visionary themes, and of the four decades of art making and rich associations that went into the making of the Times Square Mural.
Published by Gagosian Gallery. Artwork by Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann. Edited by Germano Celant. Contributions by Bob Monk. Text by Scott Rothkopf, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Judith Goldman, Linda Norden, Lane Relyea, Petrus Graf Schaesberg, Rainer Crone, Dave Hickey, David Shapiro.
A giant, soft drum set by Claes Oldenburg, a white alphabet by Jasper Johns, a combine painting with radio attached by Robert Rauschenberg, a composition with a halved peach, a Buick and a naked lady by James Rosenquist, rows of Campbell's soup cans by Andy Warhol, pin-up girls by Mel Ramos, and a graphic explosion by Roy Lichtenstein: the works gathered here pack more of a big bang than a pop. With signature pieces by the movement's stars, the John and Kimiko Powers Collection of Pop Art is considered one of the most extensive in private hands. Accompanied by individual essays on each of the represented artists.
PUBLISHER Gagosian Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 10.75 x 12.25 in. / 144 pgs / 28 color / 15 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/2/2002 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2002
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781880154526TRADE List Price: $80.00 CDN $95.00
James Rosenquist
Kelley Walker
Laura Owens
Wade Guyton: Color, Power & Style
Karen Kilimnik
Karen Kilimnik's Fancy Pictures:
Surrealism Usa
Roy Lichtenstein: Times Square Mural
Pop Art: The John And Kimiko Powers Collection