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Joining the painting focus of Vitamin P and the drawing concerns of Vitamin D is this latest in Phaidon’s series of contemporary-art survey volumes. It covers 121 photographers who have made an international mark over the past five years, including the Vancouver artists Tim Lee and Scott McFarland. The introductory essay by Demos makes a cogent case for photography’s central role in the expanded terrain of contemporary art as well as for the resurgence of documentary photo practice.
Macdonald exhibits constantly around the world and is perhaps only still nominally Canadian, but it is nevertheless gratifying to see such a well-produced monograph devoted to a homegrown contemporary artist at mid-career. The essays theorizing the concept of duration as a focal point of Macdonald’s varied work are heavy going, but do not diminish the immense appeal of his understated, accessible and witty drawings and videos.
Artist, performer and judo instructor, Yves Klein held a mystical belief in art that throws a wrinkle into any understanding of him as a second-generation Dadaist. This comprehensive guide to his work comes with a host of fine illustrations and a set of essays that look at the impact of his short (just seven years) career. Klein launched performance and conceptual art but he also returned art to its beginnings as essential ritual. Berggruen's essay is particularly lucid regarding the devotional aspect of Klein's work and its unrelenting stretching of material and aesthetic boundaries.
In this book, Harr, an award-winning journalist, turns his reporter's techniques on the personalities involved in an early- 1990s effort to identify a misattributed Caravaggio masterpiece. The venerable art-history expert, the enterprising graduate student and the dogged art restorer turned amateur art historian who play the key roles in the story present a lively, multi-faceted image of the art world at work. Caravaggio's life and career are rendered succinctly and anecdotally throughout the book and he functions within it as a troubled muse who motivates a professional milieu very different from his own. As the pages turn, it is fun to imagine the same time and effort going into future research on contemporary art.
The uncanny, erotic imagery of the Surrealists has been so frequently reproduced that it has become all too easy to overlook the movement's vital position within the avant-garde. Mahon, a Cambridge art historian, does a remarkably thorough job of reminding us of Surrealism's radical agenda of liberating Eros in an effort to counter bourgeois values, fascism and post-Second World War shock. She places special emphasis on four international Surrealist exhibitions spanning roughly 30 years, stressing the importance of the politics of display and performance in an account that challenges many firmly held conceptions about the movement and decisively attests to Surrealism's continued reach.
The art historian's 1983 book The Art of Describing was a tour de force about 17th-century Dutch painting. Her new book returns to the same terrain, looking at representations of the artist's studio in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, with a mind to situating art as a discovery practice akin to science and philosophy. An extensive section on Velázquez's remarkable The Spinners looks at painting's capacity to speak past its own historical time and frame wider issues that provoke contemporary audiences.
Eliasson's The Weather Project has proven to be one of the most memorable installations in Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall. The 2003 work, just one of 146 projects detailed in this impressive catalogue of the Danish-born artist's 2004 exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, manipulated lights, mirrors and fog to give the effect of an imposing setting sun within the gallery's entrance. Essays by Holger Broeker, Gijs van Tuyl, Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Crary and Annelie Lütgens trace Eliasson's varied and sublime use of light, placing his practice within the tradition of 20th-century light-and-space art.
The Canadian think tank Alphabet City gets to the heart of post-9/11 existence with this pocket-sized gem focused on the figure of the suspect: an impressive roster of contributors debate suspecthood and the related concepts of surveillance and human rights from perspectives ranging from art and fiction to criminology, philosophy and law. The Toronto symposium that accompanied the book's publication last winter proved how valuable Alphabet City's insistence on interdisciplinarity could ultimately be in enriching and broadening the parameters of humanistic public debate.
Kudos to the Vancouver Art Gallery for initiating and producing the first major survey exhibition of the work of homegrown international art star Brian Jungen (granted, getting scooped by a foreign museum would have been a minor national disgrace). Jungen is a familiar name for art watchers in Canada, but not all of his celebrated recent work was seen in this country prior to this show; assembled, it confirms that the acclaim that follows him is not overstated. This catalogue draws attention to new dimensions of Jungen's art; among its many delights is Cuauhtémoc Medina's nuanced essay, which will stand as the definitive statement on Jungen's much-discussed hybrid Nike-mask sculptures
The National Gallery of Canada's Norval Morrisseau retrospective has generated a heightened interest in his enigmatic, spiritual paintings. Originally published in 1997, this book has been released in a new edition with previously unpublished works by the Ojibwa artist. It is compiled in the form of a catalogue, complete with essays by Robert Houle, Donald C. Robinson, Joseph Weinstein and the artist himself. While the images are centred around the 1990s—a period marking a departure from Morrisseau's earlier uses of complex design and muted tones—the book's commentary sheds light on the deep historical meaning behind his work.
Full talks and tours schedule, Douglas Coupland conversation info, and magazine launch details posted for free day of activities
Applications due May 9 for $55,000 in prizes
Free art tours for high-school students to take place in April and May
New writers on contemporary art encouraged to apply by June 1
Dates already set for next year’s Toronto festival
Applications for this $7,000 student award are due April 6
Event to feature a conversation with Douglas Coupland, gallery tours, a magazine launch and more
Films on Shary Boyle, Elmgreen & Dragset, Michel de Broin and Jon Gnarr set to open the festival on March 22
Opening-night celebration and art-industry talks highlight fifth year of fair
Don’t miss the North American premieres of films on Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, happening February 23
The 85-year-old artist Arnaud Maggs nudged out Fred Herzog and Alain Paiement as winner of the second annual Scotiabank Photography Award, announced last night in Toronto. This $50,000 win follows the opening of a major Maggs survey at the National Gallery of Canada.
As one of the primary exhibitions for Contact 2012, “Public: Collective Identity | Occupied Spaces” is ambitious. Charlene K. Lau observes that the two-venue show mirrors the fractures of contemporary life: public and private, visible and invisible, place and non-place.
In this review, writer and artist Joni Murphy considers Abbas Akhavan’s current solo show in Montreal, which activates a variety of themes—war and art, destruction and nation building, human and animal—with a distinctively light touch.
Melding William Morris-style ornamentation with more contemporary concerns, artist Luke Painter detours around dry academicism for something more vibrant and visceral. Mariam Nader reviews his current Toronto show at LE Gallery, finding depth in decoration.
Frieze opened its first New York edition last week with some surprising highlights: sculptures that were free for public viewing outside the big commercial tent. Canadian Art art director Barbara Solowan was there, and brought back this slideshow.
