Connie Butler

In a time of unfettered waste, global artists contend with excess and its effects Accompanying the major exhibition at MoMA PS1, The Gatherers brings together original texts on issues relating to waste, accumulation and excess. In a time when social and political lives are shaped by the glut of garbage and information, the exhibition draws methodological parallels between 14 artists across four continents. This compendium features full-color illustrations of their artworks, which span sculptural installation, assemblage, painting, video and performance. In a longform essay, Ruba Katrib contextualizes their practices within the promises and failures of neoliberalism, the shifting constructions of East and West and the explosion of new technologies. Additionally, the catalog situates their practices within larger art historical trends, from Greek asàrotos òikos and Dutch still lifes, to 20th-century Surrealism and postwar assemblage. With newly commissioned texts on each of the participating artists by leading curators, theorists and writers from across the globe, the catalog offers incisive critical writing on issues in contemporary art and the 21st century. Artists include: Karimah Ashadu, Tolia Astakhishvili, Miho Dohi, Andro Eradze, He Xiangyu, Samuel Hindolo, Geumhyung Jeong, Klara Liden, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Nick Relph, Selma Selman, Ser Serpas, Emilija Škarnulyte.

In Sophie Tottie s recent work re-workings of previous work, text material and leftover products like paint and brush cleaner are incorporated and reused in new work. Tottie s works function as prisms that weigh, measure, and materialize something that seems to belong to an inner, intangible reality but which manifests itself in an outer material and physical existence. The work in AiWHEtL circles around the act of learning, where one main question is not what it is about but how it works. The book includes four texts that discuss Tottie's work from the 1990s up to the present a work that is not a conglomeration of facts and an end point, but which remodels through actions, ongoing contemplation and re-evaluations of what has been said and done. I Sophie Totties senaste arbeten används omarbetningar av tidigare arbeten, textmaterial och restprodukter som penseltvätt i nya arbeten. Totties konst fungerar som ett slags prismor som väger in, mäter och materialiserar det som kan tyckas tillhöra en inre, opåtaglig verklighet med en yttre materiell och fysisk tillvaro. AiWHEtL utgår från ett lärande där frågan inte är vad något handlar om utan hur det fungerar. Boken innehåller fyra texter som diskuterar Totties arbete från 90-talet till idag ett arbete som inte är ett konglomerat av fakta och en slutpunkt utan något som omdanar i handlingar, pågående betraktande och omprövande av det som gjorts och sagts.

One of the most prolific and exuberant painters of the past three decades, Lari Pittman creates works that mirror the social fabric of his time. This dazzling volume follows Pittman's trajectory as his visual language evolved and his technical mastery grew ever more sophisticated. From his early works- defiant affirmations of identity in the increasingly conservative 1980s-to his more recent subjects that feature emblems of cultural regression and commercialism, Pittman's paintings are uniquely operatic and ambitious. This book features over sixty paintings and thirty drawings, including Pittman's mural- scale series Flying Carpets. Alongside these illustrations are essays that place Pittman's imagery within both Modernism and recent histories of Los Angeles; and examine the work's political commentary as well as its many literary references. Serving as a cipher for the political tensions around the body and transcultural identity, Lari Pittman emerges as an artist who speaks truth to power through a visual language that reflects the contemporary world.