Kaari Upson

At her untimely death from cancer in 2021 at the age of 51, Kaari Upson (1970–2021) was widely regarded as one of the most significant and versatile American artists of her generation with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, performance, film and painting. Though her career was cut short, she left behind a rich, intense and strongly personal body of work that revolves around identity, body, sex, relationships, memory, illness and loss. Published on the occasion of the Louisiana’s retrospective exhibition, the catalogue comprises the Los Angeles–based artist’s most important works: from her dollhouses to The Larry Project, where she conducted something close to a criminological "investigation" of a person who once lived across from her childhood home in San Bernardino, California; her Mother’s Legs tree trunk installation and her never-before-shown large series of "foot face" drawings that she made just before she died.

Based on her posthumous 2022 exhibition Never Enough at the DESTE Foundation in Athens, this publication celebrates American artist Kaari Upson (1970–2021), who worked across mediums—including sculpture, video, drawing and painting—to probe the depths of our collective psyche. Over her brief yet prolific 15-year career, Upson developed an elaborate universe woven out of memory, conjecture, fact and fiction. Imbued with a mystical animism, each work merges personal and collective traumas, desires, fears and fantasies. The colorful design of the exhibition, which featured 31 artworks spanning Upson's career, is faithfully reproduced in the book, which includes an essay by Dakis Joannou about his friendship with the artist and how he acquired the works in the collection, as well as a history of the making of these works by the late artist's close friend and collaborator Michael Benevento.

When Kaari Upson (1970–2021) died of cancer at the age of 51, she left behind an extensive body of unfinished work and a breadth of materials related to her practice, including dozens of notebooks. This facsimile re-creates the one she used to sketch and reflect in the months leading up to her exhibition Go Back the Way You Came at Kunsthalle Basel in 2019—the last to show new work before her death. Alongside a faithful reproduction of each page, the notebook also includes a booklet in which Elena Filipovic illuminates the practice of "doubling" in Upson's work and explains why Upson's notebooks are crucial to understanding her practice: "Upson was a tenacious notetaker; her drawings and notebooks, in which little was held back, act as capacious ledgers that trace the motley cosmos of what she thought, made, or longed yet to make."

This book was published in conjunction with Kunsthalle Basel .

Contained within them are all the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of their owners. Like a shaman, Upson creates her own gateways, using unorthodox techniques to imbue everyday objects such as mattresses and bags with an arcane magic. The result is auratic works that act as powerful symbols of absence, failed aspirations and loneliness.

Part of the 2000 Words series conceived by Massimiliano Gioni and published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, this monograph contains an essay by Ali Subotnick that examines Upson’s pseudoscientific approach to her art that allows her to create confounding work that is simultaneously familiar and foreign.

For The Larry Project (2005–ongoing), she unearthed a well of projected histories, images and artifacts inspired by forgotten fragments from the abandoned personal archive of a man whom she had never met. Upson has continued this forensic approach in subsequent projects. This catalog accompanying her New Museum exhibition features an interview with the artist by Paul McCarthy, a new essay by curator Margot Norton and a text by artist Jim Shaw. It also debuts her newest series, centering around a family living in a Las Vegas tract house.