ARTIST MONOGRAPHS

Kaari Upson

Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays


  

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

Kaari Upson: Never Enough

DESTE FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Edited by Karen Marta. Text by Michael Benevento, Massimiliano Gioni, Dakis Joannou.

Astonishing sculptures and canvases from a classically trained artist who embraced failure and repetition, experimenting with unorthodox approaches to casting and painting

Hbk, 10.25 x 13.25 in. / 224 pgs / 242 color / 14 bw. | 9/30/2025 | Awaiting stock
$55.00


Kaari Upson: Go Back the Way You Came (Notebook)

INVENTORY PRESS
Text by Elena Filipovic.

A facsimile of one of Kaari Upson's notebooks, offering a moving glimpse into the raw immediacy of her thinking and the layered intensity of her practice

Hbk, 5.5 x 8.5 in. / 160 pgs / 160 color / 16 pg insert. | 7/22/2025 | Awaiting stock
$50.00


    

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED

Kaari Upson: Dollhouse

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner. Introduction by Anders Kold. Text by Elena Filipovic, Michael Ned Holte, Paulina Pobocha, Johan Holten.

Upson's first museum exhibition following her untimely death shows the range of an artist already well on her way to becoming a modern classic

Hbk, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 240 pgs / 115 color / 40 bw. | 9/30/2025 | Awaiting stock
$45.00


   

ACTIVE BACKLIST

Kaari Upson: 2000 Words

DESTE FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Ali Subotnick.

For Los Angeles–based sculptor, painter, filmmaker and installation artist Kaari Upson (born 1972), possessions are the gateway into the human psyche.

Pbk, 7.25 x 10 in. / 152 pgs. | 4/24/2018 | In stock
$22.00


Kaari Upson: The House

UCCA/KOENIG BOOKS
Edited by Karen Marta, Brian Roettinger.

Pbk, 6.75 x 9 in. / 224 pgs / 130 color / 65 bw. | 4/28/2015 | Out of stock
$30.00


Kaari Upson: DollhouseKaari Upson: Dollhouse

A Retrospective

Published by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner. Introduction by Anders Kold. Text by Elena Filipovic, Michael Ned Holte, Paulina Pobocha, Johan Holten.

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.



PUBLISHER
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 240 pgs / 115 color / 40 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Forthcoming

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2025 p. 102   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788793659872 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CAD $68.00 GBP £38.00

AVAILABILITY
Awaiting stock

STATUS: Forthcoming | 9/30/2025

This title is not yet published in the U.S. To pre-order or receive notice when the book is available, please email orders @ artbook.com

Kaari Upson: Never EnoughKaari Upson: Never Enough

Published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.
Edited by Karen Marta. Text by Michael Benevento, Massimiliano Gioni, Dakis Joannou.

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.



PUBLISHER
DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 10.25 x 13.25 in. / 224 pgs / 242 color / 14 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Forthcoming

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2025 p. 105   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9786185039431 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CAD $78.00 GBP £44.00

AVAILABILITY
Awaiting stock

STATUS: Forthcoming | 9/30/2025

This title is not yet published in the U.S. To pre-order or receive notice when the book is available, please email orders @ artbook.com

Kaari Upson: Go Back the Way You Came (Notebook)Kaari Upson: Go Back the Way You Came (Notebook)

Published by Inventory Press.
Text by Elena Filipovic.

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 .



PUBLISHER
Inventory Press

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 5.5 x 8.5 in. / 160 pgs / 160 color / 16 pg insert.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Forthcoming

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2025 p. 105   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781941753859 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CAD $70.00 GBP £40.00

AVAILABILITY
Awaiting stock

STATUS: Forthcoming | 7/22/2025

This title is not yet published in the U.S. To pre-order or receive notice when the book is available, please email orders @ artbook.com

Kaari Upson: 2000 WordsKaari Upson: 2000 Words

Published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.
Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Ali Subotnick.

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.



PUBLISHER
DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 7.25 x 10 in. / 152 pgs.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 144   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9782839920896 TRADE
List Price: $22.00 CAD $30.50 GBP £20.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

in stock  $22.00


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Kaari Upson: Good Thing You Are Not AloneKaari Upson: Good Thing You Are Not Alone

Published by New Museum.
Edited with text by Margot Norton. Text by Jim Shaw. Interview by Paul McCarthy.

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.



PUBLISHER
New Museum

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 7.25 x 9.5 in. / 152 pgs / 51 color / 11 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 144   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780915557134 TRADE
List Price: $24.00 CAD $33.00 GBP £21.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

Kaari Upson: The HouseKaari Upson: The House

Published by UCCA/Koenig Books.
Edited by Karen Marta, Brian Roettinger.

For her first artist book, Kaari Upson (born 1972) took an amalgamation of source materials, automatic drawings and sketches, which systematically, through different combinations and organizational systems, manifested itself as a revealing psychosexual graphic novel. Following in the great artist book tradition of John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha, the UCCA has called on Kaari Upson along with LA artists Kathryn Andrews, Aaron Curry, Alex Israel, Matthew Monahan, Sterling Ruby, Ryan Trecartin, and Kaari Upson to make individual artist books for The Los Angeles Project in Beijing.

PUBLISHER
UCCA/Koenig Books

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6.75 x 9 in. / 224 pgs / 130 color / 65 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2015 p. 140   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783863356248 TRADE
List Price: $30.00 CAD $40.00

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.