Edited with text by Diana Nawi. Text by Grace Deveney, Michael Stone Richards. Interview by Franklin Sirmans.
An intimate minimalism: McArthur Binion’s permutational uses of abstraction, collage and autobiography
Chicago-based painter McArthur Binion (born 1946) combines collage, drawing and painting to create autobiographical abstractions. He paints minimalist grids and patterns over copies of his personal documents and photographs, including pages from his handwritten address book and his birth certificate, as well as images of his childhood home and photographs of his hands. This book explores Binion’s DNA series and includes reproductions of more than 80 of his paintings and works on paper, as well as essays investigating this series through the lens of art history, labor, music and writing.
Offering in-depth formal analysis and contextualizing his trajectory within the interdisciplinary cultural scenes of New York and Chicago, McArthur Binion: DNA provides insight into the rigorous and experimental spirit that has defined the artist's larger practice and illuminates his place within a critical history of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries.
"DNA:Study," 2019, is reproduced from 'McArthur Binion: DNA.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Bookforum
Albert Mobilio
McArthur Binion employed his tattered address book, containing nineteen years’ worth of annotated contact information, as the substrate of numerous paintings and prints in his series “DNA.” [...] While he says the address book contains “the loves, the hates, everything I am,” the paintings and prints offer only oblique clues—and even these are masked by the rigorously deployed grids. This is intimacy that invites yet frustrates scrutiny. [...] The book’s images still adequately represent a visual rhythm that feels both insistent and meditative.
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"DNA:Study:Zero" (2014, courtesy The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection) is reproduced from staff favorite new release, McArthur Binion: DNA, published by DelMonico Books. Collecting the artist's minimalist DNA paintings collaged over copies of personal documents and photographs, this volume explores the series through the lenses of art history, labor, music and writing. "Part of the satisfaction of engaging with the DNA series derives from the kinship the works have with musical improvisation," Grace Deveney writes. "The subtleties and quiet variations of the visual tactile pleasure they offer necessarily exceed the language created to describe them because of their dynamic relationship between rigid structures and free play. This pleasure also derives from the possibility that there is something in these works that defies expectations about the very nature of repetition and the practice of everyday life. The result feels directly related to the outcomes of improvisation in jazz and experimental music, or the new grammars of poetry that are touchstones for Binion. When the artist arrives at the studio to add to the DNA series, he cocreates with the past—the network of contacts from his address book, his familial origins evoked by his birth certificate, and finally, with the limits of his hand and the forms and materials he has engaged with since the 1970s. The DNA series gestures to both the internal facets of each painting, as well as the world beyond the studio." continue to blog
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FORMAT: Hbk, 9.75 x 12.5 in. / 192 pgs / 150 color / 3 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $84 GBP £53.00 ISBN: 9781942884828 PUBLISHER: DelMonico Books AVAILABLE: 1/12/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
An intimate minimalism: McArthur Binion’s permutational uses of abstraction, collage and autobiography
Published by DelMonico Books. Edited with text by Diana Nawi. Text by Grace Deveney, Michael Stone Richards. Interview by Franklin Sirmans.
Chicago-based painter McArthur Binion (born 1946) combines collage, drawing and painting to create autobiographical abstractions. He paints minimalist grids and patterns over copies of his personal documents and photographs, including pages from his handwritten address book and his birth certificate, as well as images of his childhood home and photographs of his hands. This book explores Binion’s DNA series and includes reproductions of more than 80 of his paintings and works on paper, as well as essays investigating this series through the lens of art history, labor, music and writing.
Offering in-depth formal analysis and contextualizing his trajectory within the interdisciplinary cultural scenes of New York and Chicago, McArthur Binion: DNA provides insight into the rigorous and experimental spirit that has defined the artist's larger practice and illuminates his place within a critical history of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries.
