The book offers an illustrated exploration of Mary Heilmann's captivating 1979 abstract painting, featuring a striking palette of hot pink and black. It delves into the artistic elements and emotional resonance of "Save the Last Dance for Me," providing insights into Heilmann's creative process and the themes present in her work. The analysis highlights the painting's unique aesthetic and its significance within the broader context of contemporary art.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson examines how cotton became a subject for nineteenth-
century art by tracing the symbolic and material correlations between cotton
and Black people in British and American visual culture.
The penultimate installment in Skira's five-volume Barkley Hendricks survey reveals the artist's little-known work in photography Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) revolutionized postmodern Black portraiture. This volume, the fourth in a five-part series dedicated to Hendricks' career, focuses on the artist's photographic oeuvre. Hendricks credited photography as a key facet of his practice, both as a tool for documenting his own work and as a source of inspiration for his paintings. Influenced by his experiences under Walker Evans' tutelage at Yale, Hendricks frequently took to the streets to capture the world as he saw it, with his subjects in their element as they lingered in front of stores or performed in jazz clubs. As in his paintings, Hendricks' attention to graphic composition and ability to capture his subjects' dynamism are stunning. For the first time, Hendricks' considerable body of photographic work is collected in a single volume, revealing an essential though underdiscussed dimension of his art.
This monograph dedicated to Wyatt Kahn (b. 1983, New York) encompasses his painting production from 2010 to 2017, and introduces his recent exploration of photography. Kahn is primarily known for his investigations into the visual and spatial relationship between painting and sculpture, drawing inspiration from the body, urban architecture, and the natural world. Using unprimed canvases stretched over wooden frames, he assembles complex wall-mounted works in which the gaps between the individual canvases give rise to abstract or pictorial compositions. Rather than tracing the lines and shapes directly onto the canvas itself, he turns them into physical components of the artwork. Referencing the tradition of minimalist abstraction, Wyatt Kahn;s monochrome multi-panel paintings are informed by a desire to explore non-illusory forms of representation. In essence, their subject becomes the interplay between two and three dimensions, as experienced via shifts in surface, structure, and depth. In Kahn's work, the wall upon which the work is hung becomes an integral part of the composition. Interested in a painting's potential to function as the very embodiment of the object it depicts, Kahn has also developed works in which the shaped stretchers combine to create the form of an actual object, while a synthesis of hand-drawn motifs and words epitomizes its essential qualities
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
