Artbook Image Gallery

“Thin Air” (2016) is reproduced from Shara Hughes: Landscapes, a staff pick for Earth Day 2021. Featuring 120 color reproductions, an interview of the artist by Ian Alteveer and a text by Mia Locks, this gorgeous book also happens to be the first in-depth survey of the acclaimed Brooklyn painter. “Despite having produced hundreds of landscape paintings since 2014, Shara Hughes isn’t a landscape painter per se," Locks writes. “These paintings are less concerned with depicting nature than they are with creating intimate, imaginary, and emotionally charged spaces. Hughes isn’t as interested in landscape as a subject as she is in using the genre of landscape painting as a frame for the tensions inherent in the act of painting. These works, no matter how charming or picturesque, are containers for ongoing struggle, and giving form to these conflicts is her way of creating space, literally and figuratively—not for catharsis or externalizing emotion as an end in itself, but for testing compositional strategies. To this end, Hughes’s landscape paintings are models for working with and through consciousness as an artistic process. This is pretty serious work.”

A remarkable new artist's book from Michael Stipe

Featured photograph, of poet and performance artist John Giorno, is reproduced from Michael Stipe, the third in Damiani’s series of photo-based artist’s books by Stipe. Collecting “portraits” of Stipe’s most beloved, fearless and resilient friends, family and heroes—whether as photographs or rendered as vases by ceramicist Caroline Wallner or book covers by master printer Ruth Lingen—the book also functions as a poem and a surprisingly powerful self-portrait. Whatever form, this is the one book where we can encounter Tilda Swinton, Claude Cahun, Breonna Taylor, Thurgood Marshall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gus Van Sant, Jonas Mekas, Sophie Calle and Greta Thurnberg in one place, accompanied by a unique QR code that allows the reader to link to descriptions of the process of creating the images and the book.

'Tauba Auerbach — S v Z' is a book to be reckoned with, slowly, with an open mind

"Untitled (Fold)" (2013) is reproduced from Tauba Auerbach — S v Z, the ever-more-intriguing catalog for the 16-year survey opening at SFMOMA in Winter 2021. As in all things Tauba, this book is also an experiment, fitting neatly into her practice as an artist's book maker and inveterate question-asker. Beginning with the title—in which the "v" does not stand for "versus," but instead calls upon the mathematic symbol for "and/or"—and extending to the deeply satisfying custom-marbled black-and-white edges of the book block, this is a volume to be reckoned with slowly and with a very open mind. Created by the artist and David Reinfurt, who designed a new typeface based on Auerbach's iconic, back-slanting handwriting, it is filled with material, spatial and temporal ideas, structures, reflections, problems and solutions. For example, in the Folds, Auerbach attempts to conjure nothing less than four-dimensional space. "The Fold paintings are my effort to construct a portal through which to summon—or at least imagine—this inaccessible hyper-spatial territory," they are quoted. "My hope is that if these paintings can successfully efface the boundary between two-and three-dimensionality, then by analogy they imply the possibility of eroding the boundary between three-dimensional space and beyond. Even if it remains physically impossible to experience four-dimensional space, I believe we can use this 'logic' to approach or inhabit it in our minds."

IMAGE GALLERY

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