Edited with text by Katherine Brinson. Text by Susan Thompson.
Danh Vo brilliantly dismantles the structures and privileges of belonging
Danh Vo’s conceptual, installation-based practice dissects the cultural forces and private desires that shape our experience of the world. He often employs found objects, images and texts to animate personal narratives that refract global political histories. Published to accompany the most comprehensive museum survey to date of the Danish artist’s work, this catalog presents for the first time an illuminating overview of Vo’s work from the past 15 years.
Organized around nearly 30 major projects and installations, the volume ranges from Vo’s early performative works such as Vo Rosasco Rasmussen (2003), in which he married and divorced acquaintances in order to add their surnames to his own, to his recent sculptural hybrids of classical and Christian statuary. A lead essay by Katherine Brinson probes the artist’s roving, research-based process in which historical study, fortuitous encounters and personal relationships are woven into psychologically potent tableaux. Significant recurring subjects include the legacy of colonialism and the fraught status of the refugee, as well as the image of the United States in its own collective imagination and in that of the world.
Danh Vo lives and works in Mexico City and Berlin. He represented Denmark at the 2015 Venice Biennale and received the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, for which he developed the project I M U U R 2 at the Guggenheim Museum (2013). Vo’s major solo exhibitions include presentations at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015–16); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014–15); Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2012); Artists Space, New York (2010); Kunsthalle Basel (2009); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008).
Katherine Brinson is Daskalopoulos Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Susan Thompson is Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Cultured
Dense with symbolic weight, layered with contradictions.
Hyperallergic
Christopher Lyon
A visual poem that enmeshes the viewer, it presents of a decade of Vo’s installations, which have propelled him to a prominent position in the contemporary art world...Take My Breath Away is an elegy for a disintegrating ideal of democracy.
Artforum
James Meyer
Vo's objects are testaments to public and private histories so intricately interwoven they must be explained.
Featured image, whose 262-word, profanity-laden title begins, "You're gonna die up there / Keep away! The sow is mine," and ends, "Why Dimmy?" is reproduced from Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away, the catalogue to the midcareer survey currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, which The New York Times' Roberta Smith called singular, odd and inspiring. This particular work, whose title refers to a series of lines spoken by the demon in William Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist, is shown suspended within the domed glass atrium of the Museo Reina Sofia's Palacio de Cristal, in its original installation in 2015. It is comprised of more than 600 Pleistocene-era mammoth fossils suspended from the ceiling, all surrounding a single seventeenth-century ivory Christ figure. This work hints at the complexity, critique and play that characterize all of Danh Vo's oeuvre. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.25 x 11.75 in. / 348 pgs / 250 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 GBP £57.00 ISBN: 9780892075393 PUBLISHER: Guggenheim Museum Publications AVAILABLE: 3/27/2018 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Edited with text by Katherine Brinson. Text by Susan Thompson.
Danh Vo brilliantly dismantles the structures and privileges of belonging
Danh Vo’s conceptual, installation-based practice dissects the cultural forces and private desires that shape our experience of the world. He often employs found objects, images and texts to animate personal narratives that refract global political histories. Published to accompany the most comprehensive museum survey to date of the Danish artist’s work, this catalog presents for the first time an illuminating overview of Vo’s work from the past 15 years.
Organized around nearly 30 major projects and installations, the volume ranges from Vo’s early performative works such as Vo Rosasco Rasmussen (2003), in which he married and divorced acquaintances in order to add their surnames to his own, to his recent sculptural hybrids of classical and Christian statuary. A lead essay by Katherine Brinson probes the artist’s roving, research-based process in which historical study, fortuitous encounters and personal relationships are woven into psychologically potent tableaux. Significant recurring subjects include the legacy of colonialism and the fraught status of the refugee, as well as the image of the United States in its own collective imagination and in that of the world.
Danh Vo lives and works in Mexico City and Berlin. He represented Denmark at the 2015 Venice Biennale and received the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, for which he developed the project I M U U R 2 at the Guggenheim Museum (2013). Vo’s major solo exhibitions include presentations at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015–16); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014–15); Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2012); Artists Space, New York (2010); Kunsthalle Basel (2009); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008).
Katherine Brinson is Daskalopoulos Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Susan Thompson is Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
