Germano Celant

“For fifty years I’ve been practicing different kinds of writing: scripture: a theoretical one for essays, one for the production of books and catalogues, and one focused on the exhibitions. The story of (my) exhibitions aims to draw attention to this last kind of writing”. - Germano Celant This book, which Germano Celant (Genoa, 1940 - Milan, 2020) had been working on for years, is published posthumously and represents the professional and spiritual testament of this well known and internationally respected curator. It tells the story of the exhibitions that characterised Celant’s work presenting, in chronological order, a selection of 34 exhibitions: from Arte povera - Im-spazio, Genoa, 1967, to Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics - Italia 1918-1943, Milan, 2018, passing through Identité italienne - L’art en Italie depuis 1959, Paris, 1981; Futuro Presente Passato, 47 - Venice International Art Exhibition, 1997; When Attitudes Become Form - Bern 1969/Venice, 2013; and Arts & Foods. Rituals since 1851 - Milan, 2015. The books retraces the exhibitions through over 400 pictures of the actual displays and the critical texts that were published in the respective catalogues. Thus emerges the evolution in Celant’s curatorial practice, from personal interpretation to his focus on historical documents, with an eye always turned towards non-traditional media (book, record, photography) and towards the encroachments between different languages (art, architecture, design). Text in English and Italian.

Arman was a US-naturalised French painter. This book covers the first twenty years of Arman's artistic production, from the Accumulations of industrial objects and series products to the Poubelles, documenting consumer society's waste; from the famous Colères, Coupes and Combustions, which through different processes dematerialise objects depriving them of their functionality, to paintings, to actions and monumental works adhering to the 'poetic of things'.

This catalogue documents the first exhibition in the Middle East by KAWS (Brian Donnelly, born 1974, USA). The solo show explores his career and vast oeuvre and features paintings and sculptures made over the past 20 years. KAWS' imagery has long possessed a sophisticated, dark humour, revealing the interplay between art and consumerism, referencing both art history and pop culture. Donnelly began his career in street art in the 1990s, becoming synonymous with the name KAWS, a tag that became a staple in his 'sub-vertisments' (modifications of commercial works). In addition to more than 40 major pieces exhibited in the Garage Gallery, examples of commercial collaborations designed by KAWS, among them sneakers, skateboards, and toys are on view in a separate archive above Café 999. A massive 5-meter-tall sculpture, COMPANION (PASSING THROUGH) (2013), in the Fire Station courtyard and an inflatable 40-metre public artwork at the Dhow Harbour, HOLIDAY (2019), also serve to highlight the exhibition.

A cycle consisting of about fifty paintings. A clear reference to the artist's experiences in the United States. De America is a series of some fifty paintings on paper and canvas created by Emilio Vedova in Venice between 1976 and 1977, subject of the exhibition organized by the Galleria dello Scudo and the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova. The title of the wirk is an allusion to the artist's experience in the USA. After the war, New York encouraged a dialog between American Abstract Expressionism and European art activities. It happened between Venice and America, too. Industrious collectors came to Venice to acquire the best proposals of the time and the Biennale also oundertook an intense activity of promotion in South American countries. This exhaustive catalog offers an occasion for reconstructing the steps of an -American- itinerary in which Vedova's painting was influenced by the radical transformations wich, above all in the 1960s and 1970s, deeply affected the country's social context.

Celebrating ten years since the founding of the historic Performa biennial in 2005, Performa 15 once again explored the most exciting innovations in contemporary visual arts, dance, film, radio, sound and architecture. This edition brought together a total of more than 30 artists from 12 countries around the world—premiering new works by artists Robin Rhode (South Africa), Pauline Curnier Jardin (France/The Netherlands), Edgar Arceneaux (United States) and Erika Vogt (United States), Performa alums Jérôme Bel (France) and Jesper Just (Denmark), and Francesco Vezzoli (Italy) in special collaboration with dancer David Hallberg (United States), among many others. Performa 15 documents all of Performa’s programming along with significant texts from leading art historians and curators. Fully illustrated with works and performance photos, and featuring interviews with the curators and artists, Performa 15 captures a critical juncture in the evolution of performance art and the world’s leading performance biennial.

Michele Zaza (Molfetta, 1948) has never defined himself as a photographer - even though he mainly uses the photographic tool - but more as 'a thinker of images'. In a period, the seventies, characterised by an analytical attitude towards the structure of the artistic language, Zaza pursued one of the most interesting researches with his peculiar use of photography. Although his culture is strongly anchored to the Mediterranean world - his origins are from the south of Italy - the artist adopts an operative strategy in which every emotional or rhetorical overload is cancelled. In the name of a rigorous research whose basic foundation is the knowledge of philosophical discourse, the imaginary sequences of Zaza are constructed using recurrent symbols: the body - his own and his parents' - the earth, the stones, the stairs, the lightbulbs, clocks and bread. These are essential elements that convey the artist's meditative need to investigate the profound meaning of life, whose only possibility of being unveiled is the recourse to primary forces, especially that of the human figure deprived of any cultural overload.

Curator Germano Celant presents the largest exhibition in Europe of works by American artist, Richard Artschwager (1923-2013), commencing Italy, then in Spain. Turning to the understanding of space, everyday objects and perception, the poetics of Artschwager has established itself as a unicum in the art of the 20th century. His works deal with the representation of utilitarian instruments reproduced with industrial materials such as formica, celotex, acrylic painting, aluminum. To these fundamental aspects is added the attention to pure geometric form and pictorial illusionism, resulting in paintings and sculptures that suspend the categories of the image and objects in a limbo between the space they physically occupy, the usefulness they refer to and their artistic representation. Text in English and Italian.

Considering the activity of the numerous foundations that contributed in spreading new expressive languages, today appears to be a fundamental operation in view of an interpretative widening of art history. Starting from this consideration, this publication - in two volumes - traces the path of the Murray and Isabella Rayburn Foundation, established in New York in 1982 with the aim of promoting Italian art in the United States.

Dedicated to American artist Sandy Skogland, this book accompanies her first anthological exhibition at CAMERA in Turin, Italy. It retraces the entire path of the artist interweaving her biography with her professional progress, documented with the reproduction of her entire oeuvre. From the first photographic series produced in the mid-seventies to the great compositions of the early eighties, up until the brand new Winter, which the artist has been working on for over ten years: visionary and surreal works, which arise from the meticulous construction of a set that the artist then photographs, in a process that explains the rarefied production of the artist and the peculiarity of her visual path, merging installation, sculpture and photography.

Giovanni Gastel, by Germano Celant, presents the creative path of the Milanese photographer through the intertwining of his professional and biographical events, by making reference to the international fashion scene as well its complex communication system. The 'imaginary' journey that Gastel has developed through publication in magazines - from Vogue Italia to Harper's Bazaar - advertisement campaigns - from Dior to Guerlain - and exhibitions - from Gastel per Donna to Maschere e Spettri - is displayed through the reconstruction of forty years of experimental and commissioned work, in which 'serial' ensembles and individual products highlight the features of his storytelling, his unique use of light and his comparisons between people and objects. The goal is to document his operating method, based on the analysis and presentation of a subject in series: still life, portrait, fashion shot and personal research.

On the centenary of his birth, this volume traces the entire work of Mimmo Rotella, a major Italian Pop Artist on the international scene of the twentieth century. Published to coincide with an exhibition at GNAM, Rome, 30 October 2018 - 10 February 10th 2019. Rich in critical contributions and a vast iconographic apparatus, the book traces every stage of Mimmo Rotella's career: from the first abstract works to the informal experiences of the 50s, from the relationship with Pierre Restany's Nouveau Réalisme to the tangencies with Pop Art and his relationship with America. Extensive detail is dedicated to his most famous research, the one revolving around the décollages and the back of posters, but also to Rotella's relationship with cities such as New York, Rome, Paris and Milan, with the critics and his contemporaries. This book is published on the occasion of Mimmo Rotella's centenary, and coincides with the largest ever exhibition dedicated to the artist (Rome, GNAM, 30 October 2018 - 10 February 2019). Texts by: Clare Bell, Tobia Bezzola, Paola Bonani, Ester Coen, Vincenzo De Bellis, Veronica Locatelli, Lola Lorant, Elizabeth Mangini, Gianfranco Maraniello, Massimo Mininni, Luca Pietro Nicoletti, Massimo Romeri, Paul-Louis Roubert, Francesca Pola, Marta Sironi, Antonella Soldaini, Chiara Spangaro, Francesco Tedeschi, Giulia Tulino & Riccardo Venturi.

A detailed overview of the work of Marco Bagnoli, one of the most representative artists on the Italian scene in the 1970s, in a gorgeous monograph that presents his complete production arranged in chronological order. A sort of catalogue raisonne, this volume presents 350 reproductions of installations that utilize various techniques: drawing, painting, print and sculpture.

The definitive book on a creative force who continues to influence sculpture and installation art Jessica Stockholder has long broken down the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore the body in social and cultural space - using found objects intertwined with profusions of vivid colours. This revised, updated edition spotlights the extraordinary evolution of her career, and examines the pivotal role she has played in shaping some of the most fundamental ideas around which contemporary sculpture and painting revolve today.

This publication is an attentive analysis of the work of Mimmo Paladino, one of the most innovative and established contemporary artists in the world.This book covers his entire oeuvre from 1963 to 2015 and his role in renewing painting that, after including environmental interventions, shifted to photography and sculpture, architecture and cinema, opera and theater.The publication is also full of memories and poetry and a comprehensive iconographic section enriched by previously unpublished material regarding different periods of his life as an artist. It is a thorough view of the many artistic languages Paladino adopted to express his vision on the relationship between memory and the present.

Chus Bures creates miracles. Each piece of jewellery that emerges from his workshop boasts a complex genesis, stemming from an intersection between his genius-level thought processes and his maverick lifestyle. From exploring the versatility of buttons, to accentuating the geometric planes of the human body (Infinity Lines, 1990), and using minerals to emulate and exaggerate human features (seen in the striking 'Mae Nam' Collection of 2000), Bures' work is always perplexing, always stimulating, and always innovative. He refuses to be cowed by convention, and delights in challenging his clients and models. The bodily focus of his work makes every piece a startling, and often uncomfortable, insight into humanity. Bures may be a maestro of metal - the gauzy chainmail-esque veils in his Crochet collection, 2000, attest to that. Yet he has mastered the emotional dimensions of his jewellery as well as its physical properties. The relationship between his pieces and the people who collect and cherish them is essential to his artistic praxis. In Chus Bures, Portraits & Jewellery (2016), this is realised through a series of intense portraits by Antoine d'Agata, Alberto Garcia-Alix, and Andres Serrano. These pictures reveal a transgressive melding of jewel and subject: man becomes metal and metal becomes man. Watch ideas take on physical form, and immerse yourself in Bures' world of wearable art.

Divided into four volumes, the catalogue raisonnE dedicated to Mimmo Rotella's oeuvre looks at the career, spanning almost sixty years, of one of the great interpreters of Italian and international contemporary art. This first volume of the catalogue raisonnE focuses on the period from 1944 to 1961.

This book on Virginia Dwan and her galleries in Los Angeles and New York tells for the first time the unique story of a fundamental player on the global art scene, who has rarely been explored. The Dwan Gallery opened in Los Angeles in 1959 and showed works by artists such as Arman, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely, becoming a West Coast point of reference for international art. In 1965, Virginia Dwan also opened a gallery in New York, where she exhibited pieces by the protagonists of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Through a rich collection of images and rare testimonies published for the first time, as well as a detailed chronology, in this volume Germano Celant recounts the years 1959-1971 in the Dwan Gallery, whose shows were as important as those organized by figures such as Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, also focusing on earlier and subsequent events in Virginia Dwan's career up to the present.