Dominic Molon

This substantial new monograph on Perth-born, London-based artist Tim Braden presents paintings and works on paper produced over the past twenty years. Featuring new and recent texts by Matt Incledon and Thomas Marks, along with abridged versions of key texts by Jennifer Higgie and Dominic Molon, the publication has been designed by Joe Gilmore and is co-published by Frestonian Gallery and Anomie Publishing, London. Tim Braden’s work sits at the meeting point of restlessness and order. His London studio mirrors this balance: serene white walls and clear worktables face shelves crammed with books, pinned postcards and sketches, racks of brushes and pigments, odd sculptures and suspended remnants of installations. That duality – calm structure alongside eclectic curiosity – animates his painting practice. Across two decades, Braden has resisted linear progression. Within weeks he might move from fine ink drawings to rich oil interiors or expansive acrylic abstractions. His exhibitions are curated like group shows – varied yet unified by a refined command of colour and the interplay between abstraction and figuration, each mode constantly informing the other. Braden’s subjects are equally diverse: mountains and interiors, books, posters, craftspeople and travellers, all rendered through a vivid and enquiring gaze. A formative visit to his cousin Patrick Heron’s studio sparked his lifelong fascination with colour; later influences, including Josef and Anni Albers and the Bauhaus legacy, deepened his engagement with craft, design and teaching. His landscapes – particularly mountains – form a language of peaks, lakes and snow through which he explores structure, scale and the subtleties of tone. Sometimes Western in perspective, sometimes aerial and Eastern in approach, they turn apparent emptiness, such as snow or sky, into delicate fields of chromatic activity. Human presence appears fleetingly – houses, figures or traces of printed media – reminding us that perception is always mediated. Braden’s North African works, especially from Tangier and Algiers, question how artists look at the ‘exotic’. He acknowledges the legacy of Orientalism by painting both the beauty and the filters through which it is seen, often embedding postcards or reproductions within his compositions. His working process preserves the immediacy of sketches even when scaled up, maintaining freshness and spontaneity. A parallel thread, explored in Making is Thinking, celebrates the artistry of labour. Braden paints weavers, gardeners and ceramicists – frequently women – paying homage to forms of making often dismissed as craft. He treats the act of creation as a shared human impulse, echoing Anni Albers’ belief in listening to ‘what the materials want to do’. Whether depicting the studios of admired painters, domestic interiors or his own home, Braden transforms rooms into quiet temples of colour and reflection. His garden scenes likewise suggest care and contemplation in an overstimulated world. Even his travel works – real or imagined – translate distant times and places into present moments of luminous equilibrium. Restless yet disciplined, Braden’s art embodies a profound, ongoing fascination with colour, making and seeing.

This volume is an expanded edition of JRP-Ringier's popular 2006 reference monograph on Philadelphia-based artist Karen Kilimnik (born 1955). In the 1980s Kilimnik's jumbled narrative installations were compared by critics to the "scatter art" of the previous decade, but have become a cult for a younger generation of artists and exhibition curators. Her drawings and paintings from the beginning of the 1990s were included in the then-current discussions on art and glamour, and on the emergence of women artists whose sensibility was not driven by feminist theory. The source of numerous misunderstandings, the diversity of her work has veiled the internal coherence of a practice which increasingly attests to the continuous links between all these mediums. This book offers the complete panorama of Kilimnik's production and affords a view that goes beyond the distinctions between painting, drawing or installation.

The first critical reader on one of today's most pivotal (and perplexing) contemporary artists.Liam Gillick emerged as part of the generation of "Young British Artists" who energized the British art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. He is now one of the most influential (and perplexing) artists in all of contemporary art. Gillick's discursive mode of art practice-often associated with "relational aesthetics"-complicates object production, embraces the exhibition as medium, and explores the social role and function of art. His body of work includes variations on "discussion platforms" (architectural structures that question or facilitate social interaction), text sculptures, and published texts that reflect on the increasing gap between utopian idealism and the real world. Artist, writer, curator, and provocateur, Gillick explores how an artistic practice can be conducted and represented, while at the same time questioning curatorial practice and the conventions of applied design. This reader coincides with a year-long, multi-venue, mid-career retrospective that serves both as a continuous investigation into Gillick's practice and an in-depth study of his work to date. The book offers a range of critical perspectives on Gillick's work. Among them: political scientist Chantall Mouffe develops her notion of radical democracy and antagonism; sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato (whose theorization of immaterial labor influenced Gillick) comments on the current economic crisis; philosopher and artist Benoit Maire links Gillick to continental philosophy; and Johanna Burton questions Gillick's practice in the context of feminist critique.ContributorsPeio Aguirre, Julieta Aranda, Johanna Burton, Nikolaus Hirsch, John Kelsey, Maurizio Lazzarato, Maria Lind, Sven Lutticken, Benoit Maire, Chantall Mouffe, Barbara Steiner, Marcus Verhagen