Book of the Day Posted Mar 04, 2022

Book of the Day > Pieter Hugo: Solus Volume I

● Purchase ● Portraits of uncommon beauty from the author of the acclaimed La Cucaracha
 
In Solus Volume I, South African photographer Pieter Hugo (born 1976) reflects on the values implied by the fashion industry’s shifting aesthetics through portraits of street-cast models found in diverse locations such as London, Paris, New York and South Africa. Hugo found himself captivated by sitters with unconventional and atypical looks, particularly before they underwent the machinations of wardrobe, makeup and hair. Drawn to this uniqueness and recalling the sense of not-belonging that is part of the intense experience of youth, Hugo’s invitation to the models was: “simply present yourself.” The resulting photographs embrace vulnerability and frailty as much as they do the agency and idealism of their subjects. Hugo’s typological study questions fashion’s commodification of youth and the “outsider,” while embracing the beauty of peculiarity worn with acute awareness and the paradox of craving both difference and conformity.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 03, 2022

Book of the Day > Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines

● Purchase ● An exploration of the personal and artistic connections between two icons of twentieth-century art
 
Keith Haring (1958–1990) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) changed the art world of the 1980s through their idiosyncratic imagery, radical ideas, and complex sociopolitical commentary. Each artist invented a distinct visual language, employing signs, symbols, and words to convey strong messages in unconventional ways, and each left an indelible legacy that remains a force in contemporary visual and popular culture. Offering fascinating new insights into the artists’ work, Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat reveals the many intersections among Haring and Basquiat’s lives, ideas, and practices.
 
This lavishly illustrated volume brings together more than two hundred images—works created in public spaces, paintings, sculptures, objects, works on paper, photographs, and more. These rich visuals are accompanied by essays and interviews from renowned scholars, artists, and art critics, exploring the reach and range of Haring and Basquiat’s influence.
 
Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat provides a valuable look at two artistic peers and boundary breakers whose tragically short but prolific careers left their marks on the art world and beyond.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 02, 2022

Book of the Day > Mary Weatherford: Canyon—Daisy—Eden

● Purchase ● This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation.
 
Over the last three decades, Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice, from her early 1990s target paintings based on operatic heroines, to the expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that brought attention to her practice in the 2010s. Mary Weatherford: Canyon—Daisy—Eden presents a survey of Weatherford’s career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989 and 2017. As constant experiments with color, scale, and materials, these works as a whole reveal the continuity of Weatherford’s interest in human experience, both personal and historical.
 
Featuring 120 full-color plates and expansive installation views, this volume—published by Gagosian in association with the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College—documents an exhibition presented at the Tang and at SITE Santa Fe.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 01, 2022

Book of the Day > Elliott Landy: Photographs of Janis Joplin On The Road & On Stage

● Purchase ● Celebrated photographer Elliott Landy presents an intimate look at the legendary female singer-songwriter, Janis Joplin.
 
Landy's iconic images of Janis, both on the road and in concert, capture and preserve her pure essence as well as her onstage magnificence. Photographs of Janis Joplin: On the Road & On Stage features beautifully reproduced large format images, many never before published.
 
Janis's own words, taken from recorded interviews by David Dalton, are used as extended captions and paired with photographs to provide insight into the woman behind the legend.
Book of the Day Posted Feb 25, 2022

Book of the Day > Pep Bonet: Hellbangers

● Purchase ● The Hellbangers are the “enfants terribles” of a sleepy, diamonds rich country.
 
Photographer Pep Bonet (°1974, Mallorca) has been following Overthrust, a heavy metal band from Botswana, Africa, and shows us a growing, exciting and thoroughly organic heavy metal community. Ten years ago, one group existed. Today there are more than ten – and their fans are growing every year.
 
The inhabitants of Botswana portrayed in this book are tattooed, wear loudly and proudly leather jackets, leather trousers and play heavy death metal music. Imagine the DIY ingenuity of their ‘costume creation’ involving harvested animal skulls and other natural elements.
 
With names like Demon and Gunsmoke, it would be easy though to think they are thugs, but “We try to be examples. Rock is a wild thing, but also something for the heart”, says Gunsmoke, the heavy metal head. Here too, the lyrics of the songs are very critical towards societies, just like their western peers. Metal in Botswana is rebellious movement against authorities. This is the story of what looks at first to be an unlikely union, yet one which powerfully illustrates how music, how heavy metal music, has become a positively unifying force in an unlikely part of the world.
Book of the Day Posted Feb 24, 2022

Book of the Day > Mark Steinmetz: Rivers & Towns

● Purchase ● The photographs in Mark Steinmetz's expansive new book Rivers & Towns were made in the 1980s in working class towns and cities in Connecticut, USA.

"The brooding factories and mills built alongside rivers had seen their heyday and were beginning to decline. I was moved by these places and wanted to describe the bridges, houses, and streets, and to show something of people's inner lives. At the same time, I was trying to discover myself as a photographer." - Mark Steinmetz
Book of the Day Posted Feb 22, 2022

Book of the Day > Giger / Sorayama

● Purchase ● This super book published by KALEIDOSCOPE accompanies a two-artist exhibition co-curated by Alessio Ascari and Shinji Nanzuka, bringing together for the very first time the work of Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama and Swiss artist HR Giger. Touring from PARCO Museum in Tokyo to PARCO Event Hall in Osaka between December 2020 and February 2021, the exhibition coincides with the 80th anniversary of Giger’s birth and features over 50 works ranging from the late 1960s to the present day.
 
The catalogue, designed by Swiss-based art direction firm Kasper-Florio with Samuel Bänziger, features a foreword by co-curator Alessio Ascari, a critical essay by Venus Lau, an interview with the late HR Giger by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Patrick Frey, and a recent interview with Sorayama by Ascari. It comes with a 50x70cm two-sided poster, and two 20cm die-cut stickers.
 
Born and trained at opposite ends of the world, Sorayama and Giger are apparently at odds—one’s bright colors are swallowed by the other’s dark chiaroscuro; one’s enthusiastic outlook on technology borders with the other’s nightmarish dystopia; one’s “super-realism” challenges the other’s surrealism—yet they share more than meets the eye. Both emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming acknowledged masters of airbrush painting and influential creators beyond the boundaries of the traditional art world, blurring the relationship between commercial and personal work. But more importantly, at the very core of their practice lies a similar concern: an obsessive investigation of AI, eternal life, and the fusion of organic and apparatus. Gynoids (female androids) are predominant subjects, conjuring the post-human and the apotheosis of the woman to reveal an underlying tension between life, death, power and desire.
Book of the Day Posted Feb 19, 2022

Book of the Day > Mona Kuhn: 835 Kings Road

● Purchase ● Mona Kuhn’s lyrical and formally daring portrait of the iconic Schindler House in Los Angeles, supplemented with letters, blueprints and more In 835 Kings Road, Californian photographer Mona Kuhn (born 1969) reconsiders the realms of time and space within the architectural elements of the Schindler House in Los Angeles. Built by Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler in 1922, the house was both a social and design experiment and an avant-garde hub for intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and 1930s.
 
For this project Kuhn collaborated with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara, and gained access to Schindler’s private archives including blueprints, letters and notes. Alongside reproducing some of these for the first time in this book, Kuhn reinterprets the dichotomy between memory and record in a series of color photos, and solarized gelatin silver prints, a technique favored by the surrealists. The enigmatic subject of her solarized pictures is a fictional, ethereal figure inspired by a letter from Schindler to a mysterious woman.
 
Kuhn’s impressionistic photos render this female presence physical, even as it seems to be dematerializing: fleeting images that question the very nature of photography as record.
Book of the Day Posted Feb 18, 2022

Book of the Day > Summer of Something Special 2021

● Purchase ● Summer of Something Special (SoSS) is an annual photo book by Something Special Studios. This is the publication’s third edition. Every edition of SoSS features a new selection of photographers from around the world, each capturing summer as they see it. The resulting photos come together to form a unique group diary - a communal ode to summer. Summer of Something Special Vol.III will feature the following photographers’ work: Bafic, Nathalie Basoski, Robin Bernstein, Kennedi Carter, Jasmine Clarke, Christopher Currence, Ibrahem Hasan, Djiby Kebe, Zhenya and Tanya Posternak, Noah Sahady, Peter Sutherland, Ramona Wang, and Kersti Jan Werdal
Book of the Day Posted Feb 17, 2022

Book of the Day > Chris Stein / HR Giger: Kookoo 1981

● Purchase ● Published on the 40th anniversary of Debbie Harry’s debut solo album KooKoo (1981), this book collects a rarely seen and unpublished body of photographs by Chris Stein (American, b. 1950), capturing the alchemy of the collaboration between artist H.R. Giger and the Blondie frontwoman and lead vocalist.
 
Largely taken on the nightmarish sets designed by Giger while working on the cover art and video clips for the album, these photographs by Stein—Blondie’s co-founder and guitarist and Harry’s life-long creative partner—provide unprecedented access to Giger’s charismatic presence and creative process, which unfolded across a wide array of mediums including airbrush painting, sculpture, scenography, concept design, and performance.
 
The book, designed by Swiss-based art direction firm Kasper-Florio with Samuel Bänziger and featuring a foreword by Alessio Ascari and an essay by Stephanie LaCava, will launch in Berlin with an exhibition at Reference Studios.
 
As LaCava writes in her essay, “Stein’s photos are essential to Giger’s legacy as an artist, and less so as evidence of celebrity friends. These images secure Giger as the maker of proto-special effects, by showing that they are not special effects at all. These are real objects, props and stylings, not animation, files, or digital ledgers. Giger would further this by acting out the physicality of old school illusion with the sarcophagus, his rabbit in the hat. The story is part of the performance.”
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