Beatrix Ruf Boeken

Laura Owens once said of more doctrinaire painters that "the weight of art history is what gets you that crusty, stodgy feeling, when you look at a work of art and you feel that the person hasn't stepped outside, hasn't looked in other wings of the Met, hasn't gone to a natural history museum." There is no danger of that in her own good-natured and elegant works, which seem to emulate Rousseau, Grandma Moses and the aesthetics of the 1960s and of vintage decorative arts at once. Robots in the garden, lions, hunters, romance and war are some of the subjects parading through, under passing influences as wide ranging as Dada performance, Japanese prints and Hindu beliefs. Birds grow larger than the trees they perch on, cats sniff at a pair of skulls and monkeys exchange wary glances. Elsewhere, Owens has broken away from the fine arts to move into wallpaper and textiles. Beyond all this straightforward beauty is constant inquiry into her chosen media. She has rejected naturalism in favor of depiction, representation and an unashamed pleasure in ornamentation, which, with her delight in pictorial grace, affords decoration a new dignity. She combines the abstract with the representational in a highly personal vocabulary, from which she creates an elaborate, elegant and quietly exuberant whole. Laura Owens collects the artist's complete works to date.

A central figure in Glasgow's vibrant art scene, Luke Fowler's cinematic collages break down conventional approaches to biographical and documentary filmmaking. * * Fowler's films have often been linked to British Free Cinema, the distinctive aesthetic that came out of a conscious decision to engage with the reality of contemporary Britain in the 1950s. Avoiding didactic voice-over commentaries and narrative continuity, Fowler similarly uses impressionistic sound and editing. However, Fowler moves beyond simply referencing the work of his predecessors. Intuitively applying the logic, aesthetics, and politics of his subjects onto the film he is making about them, he creates atmospheric, sampled histories that reverberate with the vitality of the people he studies. * * This is the first major publication on Luke Fowler and it provides a comprehensive overview into his artistic production, with color illustrations, an in-depth discussion between Stuart Comer and the artist, as well as an essay by Will Bradley. * * Published with Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, and Serpentine Gallery, London. * *

After studying at Yale University where she explored the relationship between cinema, art, literature, and music, Daria Martin (*1973) has resolutely opted for making films. * * Borrowing from a universe of everyday popular references (sport, games, shows, etc.), in her work she combines elements from avant-garde dance and cinema with a formidable formal elegance. Without falling into the trap of being seduced by the forms, movements, and abstract themes that she uses and one could make her own the words of Jacques Rancière about political work, in the sense that it reveals a „distribution of sensitivity in the social sphere.“ * * Published with the Kunsthalle Zürich and the Kunstverein Hamburg.

Fascinated with the White Cube, the neutral yet ideologically charged, institutionalized container for art, Elmgreen & Dragset's project for the Kunsthalle Zurich transformed the museum into a construction site of sorts--a construction site for art. Taking Place revealed and suspended the state in which non-public, art administrative space is reorganized into public, art presentation space.

Since the early 1990s, Sean Landers has made some of the most fascinating and repeatedly irritating art in circulation. The polar opposites of tormented self-doubt and endless self-aggrandizement run like threads through the artist's practice, as do several masks of failure that Landers uses as a strategy to preserve himself from impending loser-status. As the artist puts it, "My original idea was to make conceptual art entertaining, sloppy, emotional, human, and funny. Over the years I got so far out on this conceptual limb that I went around full circle until I was a traditional artist again. I tried to be ironic about it but eventually became sincere. Now I'm a happy victim of my own charade." This monograph presents an overview of Lander's oeuvre and includes works from 1992 to the present.

The diverse work of American photographer Mark Morrisroe has primarily been discussed alongside his Boston contemporaries, Nan Goldin and David Armstrong. Like them, Morrisroe documented his circle of friends, whose lifestyles were shaped by punk and bohemia. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1982, he moved to New York in the mid-1980s and tragically passed away from AIDS-related illnesses in 1989 at the age of 30. His brief creative period in the 1980s was remarkably productive, characterized by a unique aesthetic. He created painterly portraits and nude photographs, using the Polaroid camera as a reflection of his own body, capturing its illness and decay. In the years leading up to his death, he increasingly shifted his photographic experiments to the darkroom, incorporating pages from porn magazines and X-ray images of himself as negatives. This comprehensive monograph, produced for an exhibition at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and in collaboration with The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection), features many previously unknown works, showcasing his tumultuous punk beginnings and the sandwich prints resulting from extensive laboratory work. The book includes over 500 images, along with newly commissioned essays and a complete biography.

“Suddenly Hirst's head falls, with the neck and the coat. That is – Hirst's body falls over the bar. The straw penetrates his gullet through the nose and violently wakes the shrimp, the calamari, the salad, and the brandy in his stomach. He vomits it all on the bar, and they stream over the smooth brown wood. The gallerist gets up from his chair and goes over to Mr. Hirst. The barman hands him a nylon bag and helps him collect the animals and the juices, both modern and postmodern. He goes back to Jeff's table with an arrogant smile and says they can move. Then he lifts the bag that's dripping with small chunks of phlegm from the sides and says 'Tomorrow at Christie's.'”—Keren Cytter Written in seven chapters and seven styles, this book constitutes the first novel by the Israeli artist and filmmaker Keren Cytter (*1977). Both the grotesque and the absurd become tools to narrate the progression of her main character's life, artist Jeff Steinberg. With the recurring motif of scrambled reels, the story also functions as a reflection on the medium of film. Keren Cytter lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. She is a recipient of The Baloise Art Prize 2006 and has held solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2004), the Kunsthalle Zürich and Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005), and most recently at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin.

This comprehensive survey delves into the extensive thirty-year career of artist Keith Tyson, showcasing his innovative works and artistic evolution. It highlights his unique approach to art, blending science, philosophy, and personal experience. The book features a rich collection of images and critical essays that explore the themes and concepts central to Tyson's practice, providing insight into his impact on contemporary art.

The photographs of Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989) are steeped in fragility, both as material objects scored and pockmarked by the vicissitudes of time, and as forlorn commemorations of brief moments in all too brief lives. In this sense, the photographs are also objects of ephemera, of a piece with Morrisroe's equally fragile magazines, collages and drawings, which this volume compiles for the first time. Containing much previously unpublished work, Mark Dirt includes spreads from Morrisroe's punk zine Dirt ("he sort of invented the Boston punk scene," Jack Pierson later recalled of his former lover), as well as correspondence and notes by the artist, sketches and even his last will and testament. All of these documents have been assembled by Morrisroe's longtime partner Ramsey McPhillips, and represent the most complete survey of the artist's non-photographic works.