Catherine Craft

Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures presents an extensive look into the contemporary artist’s work over the past five years and her ongoing exploration of scale, color, material, and artistic traditions of the twentieth century. Bove’s recent work engages the conceptual concerns of mid-century sculpture, such as spontaneity, industrial materials, and the potential of painted sculpture. However, within this space of familiar sculptural traditions, Bove has discovered new approaches that lead to places previously unknown. Bove’s “collage sculptures” are created from scrap metal and stainless steel that has been carefully worked into sinuous forms and are frequently painted. Considering the hard rigidity of the steel, the works possess an appearance of almost impossible softness, as if steel could become as pliable as clay. Such works range from small pedestal sculptures to large, imposing compositions. Bove’s interest in scale and how a viewer’s understanding of an artwork shifts depending on its context are explored through a selection of small works from the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Sculpture. Published by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the catalogue features beautiful reproductions of Bove’s work and an introduction as well as an essay by curator Catherine Craft on the development of the collage sculptures and their relationship to other artists and traditions of modern sculpture. Also included is an essay by Lisa Le Feuvre that explores Bove’s complex work by means of a thematic alphabet related to the artist’s interests.

The perfect introduction to the life and work of Robert Rauschenberg

The term Neo-Dada surfaced in New York in the late 1950s and was used to characterize young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose art appeared at odds with the serious emotional and painterly interests of the then-dominant movement, abstract expressionism. Neo-Dada quickly became the word of choice in the early 1960s to designate experimental art, including assemblage, performance, pop art, and nascent forms of minimal and conceptual art. "An Audience of Artists" turns this time line for the postwar New York art world on its head, presenting a new pedigree for these artistic movements. Drawing on an array of previously unpublished material, Catherine Craft reveals that Neo-Dada, far from being a reaction to abstract expressionism, actually originated at the heart of that movement's concerns about viewers, originality, and artists' debts to the past and one another. Furthermore, she argues, the original Dada movement was not incompatible with abstract expressionism. In fact, Dada provided a vital historical reference for artists and critics seeking to come to terms with the radical departure from tradition that abstract expressionism seemed to represent. Tracing the activities of artists such as Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock alongside Marcel Duchamp's renewed embrace of Dada in the late 1940s, Craft composes a subtle exploration of the challenges facing artists trying to work in the wake of a destructive world war and the paintings, objects, writings, and installations that resulted from their efforts. Providing the first examination of the roots of the Neo-Dada phenomenon, this groundbreaking study significantly reassesses the histories of these three movements and offers new ways of understanding the broader issues related to the development of modern art.