Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Individual Artists - Essays

Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913--1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him -- along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline -- an influential abstract expressionist of the "gestural" tendency. In the late 1960s, with works like T "he Studio" came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing "coolness" of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for...

Director-dramatist Howard Barker is a restlessly prolific, compulsively controversial, provocative multi-media artist.

Beyond his internationally acclaimed theatrical productions for his award-winning theatre company The Wrestling School, Barker is also a poet, a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally, and a philosophical essayist on the power of art to provoke moral speculation, and on the theatricality of the human being in crisis. In France, his drama was the subject of a major retrospective season, 2009-10, comprising no less than seven theatrical...

The Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte (1898 1967) is well known for his thought-provoking and witty images that challenge the observer s preconditioned perceptions of reality. Magritte and Literature examines some of the artist's major paintings whose titles were influenced by and related to works of literature. Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Goethe's Elective Affinities, and Poe's The Domain of Arnheim are representative examples of Magritte's interarts dialogue with literary figures.

Despite these convergences, the titles subvert the...

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge's thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.

Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of...

Since the late 1970s, the Berlin-based contemporary artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948) has produced a body of work that is remarkable for its formal and material inventiveness. In her sculptural practice, Genzken has developed an expanded material repertoire that includes plaster, concrete, epoxy resin, and mass-produced objects that range from action figures to discarded pizza boxes. Her heterogeneous assemblages, a New York Times critic observes, are "brash, improvisational, full of searing color and attitude." Genzken, the recent subject of a major retrospective at MoMA, offers a...