Böcker utgivna av Washington University, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

A critical investigation of Adam Pendleton's deep engagement with abstraction.   Adam Pendleton's exploration of abstraction-through painting, drawing, screen printing, sculpture, language, book arts, and film-over the past five years constitutes the core of this study and the exhibition that spawned it. The book features essays by exhibition curator Meredith Malone and senior scholars Hal Foster and Joshua Chambers-Letson along with a conversation between Pendleton and the critic and theorist Isabelle Graw. These texts illuminate the artist's fundamental understanding of abstraction as a conscious articulation of unimagined alternatives and a mechanism of both resistance and active engagement.   Painting is a central focus of Pendleton's work, and Isabelle Graw, in her interview with the artist, elucidates painting as a "primary form" for Pendleton, noting how the medium conceptually and theoretically informs how he moves through and operates in other forms as well as how his works address viewers as "cognizant participants." Hal Foster takes up Pendleton's engagement with bookmaking as another form of activation, arguing that the artist's creative compilations of texts and images activate readers and viewers, existing as resources to help us not only survive but flourish. Joshua Chambers-Letson's close reading of Pendleton's experimental film What Is Your Name? Kyle Abraham, A Portrait stimulates consideration of how artistic practice can be a means to negotiate with, dance with, and live with grief at the intersection of Black and queer love and loss. Meredith Malone contextualizes Pendleton's recent work, examining his multifaceted approach to abstraction as a "philosophical disposition" as well as a device to realize a more expansive, chaotic, and fluid space for both artist and viewer.   With more than 1,400 high-quality reproductions and full transcripts of two of the artist's recent films juxtaposed with extensive stills from each, To Divide By is Adam Pendleton's most ambitious publication to date. It is published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis in fall 2023.

In 1959, Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri pioneered an inventive new series of artist-created editioned multiples to be broadly distributed. While artists have long created editioned multiples of artworks--from prints and handmade books to sculptures--Spoerri's project placed a radical focus on multiplication and movement. His Edition MAT (Multiplication d'art transformable) presented a selection of works by key figures in postwar kinetic and Op art, including an array of artworks that could be manipulated, moved, and altered optically, electrically, or through physical interaction. Multiplied is the first in-depth English-language study of this seminal project in the history of kinetic and postwar art. The catalog presents the entirety of Edition MAT's three collections--from 1959, 1964, and 1965--that together consist of forty-nine artworks by thirty-five European, North American, and Latin American artists, including leading figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Dieter Roth, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Jean Tinguely, alongside lesser-known artists. With three essays, artwork entries, and an appendix of newly translated historical texts, this volume sheds light on under-studied artworks as well as the body of critical thought connecting art, commerce, and display in the postwar period.

Over the past two decades, the Chinese conceptual artist, activist, and exile Ai Weiwei has created art that addresses complex and sensitive themes of political, ethical, and social urgency. His artworks, which call upon both Western and Chinese cultural traditions, are deeply engaged with the history of art, drawing particularly on conceptualism and minimalism. Informed by the readymade--central to the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol--his work questions the status of the work of art itself, blurring the lines between art and non-art, invention and appropriation, structure and openness, even fiction and fact. From the start of his multifaceted career in the late 1970s, Ai has envisioned artistic practice as a deeply human, moral, and political endeavor. This volume--a hybrid between a scholarly study and an exhibition catalog--presents the artist's work in dialogue with theoretical texts by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt alongside interpretive essays that illuminate the artist's work on human rights, his engagement with historical Chinese artifacts, and his critical consideration of the effects of globalization. The book includes a new essay on human rights by Ai Weiwei and an interview in which he discusses his artwork and activism. It also features installation photographs of the corresponding exhibition. By exploring Ai Weiwei's artistic practice in dialogue with philosophies, theories, and concepts that connect human life and political power, this publication offers new insights into one of the most important artists working today.

The first monograph on the work of the American painter Arthur Osver (1912-2006), this publication explores Osver's entire oeuvre, from early urban realism to decades of engagement with abstraction. His long and productive career took him from Chicago to New York to Europe and back, interweaving with the art of his time, and his paintings have been collected and exhibited all over the world. Nevertheless, he remained firmly rooted in the American Midwest, settling in St. Louis to teach and paint from 1960 until his death in 2006. Beautifully designed and printed, this book includes more than one hundred full-color illustrations of Osver's work throughout his life as well as an illustrated biography and selections from an interview with the artist from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, this title presents the work of contemporary video artists from around the world who use their medium to probe traumatic experiences and their aftermath.

Known for collaborating with remote or marginal communities such as blue-collar workers of the twenty-first century, as she did in Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break I, the artist also blurs the line between photography, video art, and documentary. This title examines the work of acclaimed video artist and photographer Sharon Lockhart.

Explores thematic connections between some of the most influential artists working in Germany. This title examines works by Franz Ackermann, Cosima von Bonin, Charline von Heyl, Thomas Demand, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Sergej Jensen, Michel Majerus, Manfred Pernice, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Corinne Wasmuht.

Features the Cologne-based artist Cosima von Bonin's signature textile paintings, architectural sculptures, and absurdly outsized stuffed animals. This title presents a selection of colorful images of Cosima von Bonin's playful yet deeply thoughtful and suggestive work.

Focusing on the handmade and performative aspects of history and material culture, this title re-stages, refigures, and replays the role of traditional crafts in large-scale installations that reconsider the construction of collective memory and identity.

Explores how artists used chance in modernist art from the beginning of the twentieth century through the early 1970s. This title brings together a broad range of artistic practices that cede an element of authorial intent.

War and disaster have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century, both in the United States and throughout the world. This title includes works that consider the ways in which war and conflict around the world affect - or fail to affect - our everyday life.

Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. This title marks the artist's first major museum show.