Synopses & Reviews
David Lynch is internationally renowned as a filmmaker, but it is less known that he began his creative life as a visual artist and has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing an extensive body of painting, prints, photography, and drawing. Featuring work from all periods of Lynchand#8217;s career, this book documents Lynchand#8217;s first major museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together works held in American and European collections and from the artistand#8217;s studio. Much like his movies, many of Lynchand#8217;s artworks revolve around suggestions of violence, dark humor, and mystery, conveying an air of the uncanny. This is often conveyed through the addition of text, wildly distorted forms, and disturbances in the paint fields that surround or envelop his figures. While a few relate to his film projects, most are independent works of art that reveal a parallel trajectory. Organized in close collaboration with the artist,
David Lynch: The Unified Field brings together ninety-five paintings, drawings, and prints from 1965 to the present, often unified by the recurring motif of the home as a site of violence, memories, and passion. Other works explore the odd, tender, and mincing aspects of relationships. Highlighting many works that have rarely been seen in public, including early work from his critical years in Philadelphia (1965and#150;70), this catalog offers a substantial response to dealer Leo Castelli's comment when he enthusiastically viewed Lynchand#8217;s work in 1987, and#147;I would like to know how he got to this point; he cannot be born out of the head of Zeus.and#8221;
Published in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Review
"Engaging, especially when addressing topics that remain urgent today, such as net art and the representation of black artists. Seeing the visual creations laid out from Schwartzand#8217;s perspective, the decade appears energetic and imaginative again."
Review
"The essays . . . are engaging . . . backs its insights up with enough visuals to earn readers' attention."
Review
"This impeccable collection of art confirms Lynchand#8217;s position as a gifted polymathand#8212;and one of the countryand#8217;s most important artists working today."
Review
"Expands greatly the scope of our knowledge of auteur and impresario Lynch."
Review
"Lynchand#8217;s last Philadelphia canvases are brutally textural, integrating cigarette butts and filters, matted horse-hair, and bits of unidentifiable petrified organic matter. His more recent work, characterized by broad paint strokes and large-scale dramatic canvases, is more polished in its perversity."
Review
"Lynch is at his best when grasping just how unsavory we can find deterioration disrupting the mundane areas of our life, especially when evoking it as a reflection of human good and evil, and that holds true in his visual art. . . . Thereand#8217;s a definite vision and storytelling with the mix of text and image in the galleries."
Review
"He was, and remains, fond of biomorphic shapes, the incorporation of texts, working with textures, playing with dimensionality . . . David Lynch began as a painter and#8212; he still is a painter."
Review
"Late works find him tapping into primal fantasies of the psychotic annihilation of self and the other."
Review
"Impressively curated by Robert Cozzolino, The Unified Field makes a case for considering Lynch as 'an artist who happens to make film as part of his expression.'"
Review
"it is fascinating to see Lynch's noncinematic work, especially the earliest canvases . . . from January 1966 through the spring of 1967."
Review
andquot;A solid summary of American art of a recent decade, as curated by the major museums.andquot;
Review
andquot;Invaluable to all students and scholars seeking an art historical account of contemporary art.andquot;
Synopsis
Born to a prominent family in Havana but exiled to the United States as a girl, Ana Mendieta (1948and#150;1985) is regarded as one of the most significant artists of the postwar era. During her too-brief career, she produced a distinctive body of work that includes drawings, installations, performances, photographs, and sculptures. Less well known is her remarkable and prolific production of films. This richly illustrated catalogue presents a series of sequential color stills from each of twenty-one original Super 8 films that have been newly preserved and digitized in high definition for the 2015 exhibition, combined with related photographs, and reference still images from all of the artistand#8217;s 104 filmworks; together these illustrations sample the full range of the artistand#8217;s film practice from 1971 to 1981. The book includes Mendietaand#8217;s first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph. The first book-length treatment of Mendietaand#8217;s moving-image practice,
Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.
Published in association with the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota.
Synopsis
One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern Californiaand#151;first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s.
A Rose Has No Teeth demonstrates that Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary during this period and that he laid the groundwork for fundamental ideas he addressed throughout his oeuvre, such as the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over its form. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents. This book shows that Nauman was at the forefront of these revolutionary changes and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist.
Copub: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Synopsis
Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s is the first major museum survey to historicize art made in the United States during this pivotal decade. Showcasing approximately sixty-five works by forty-five artists, the book includes installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, video, sound, and digital art.
Come as You Are offers an overview of art made in the United States between 1989 and 2001, a period bookended by two indelible events: the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. The book is organized around three principal themes--the and#147;identity politicsand#8221; debates, the digital revolution, and globalization; its title refers to the 1992 song by Nirvana and to the issues of identity that were complicated by effects of new technologies and global migration. All the artists in the exhibition made their initial entry into the art historical discourse during the 1990s, and they reflect the increasingly heterogeneous nature of the art world during this time, when many women artists and artists of color attained unprecedented prominence. Contributors include Huey Copeland, Jennifer Gonzand#225;lez, Suzanne Hudson, Joan Kee, Frances Jacobus-Parker, Kris Paulsen, Paulina Pobocha, and John Tain.
Published in association with the Montclair Art Museum
About the Author
Constance M. Lewallen is Senior Curator for Exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and author of
Ant Farm, 1968-1978; The Dream of an Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), both from UC Press;
Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retropective; and
Joe Brainard: A Retrospective. Robert Riley, independent curator and writer concentrating on contemporary
media and time-based Arts, served as Founding Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1986-2000. Robert Storr is a critic, artist, and Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. Anne Wagner is Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley.
Table of Contents
Foreword (Lora S. Urbanelli)
Lenders to the Exhibition
Chaotic Input: Art in the United States, 1989and#150;2001 (Alexandra Schwartz)
Unfinished Business as Usual: African American Artists, New York Museums, and the 1990s
(Huey Copeland)
Costume: Come as You Arenand#8217;t (Jennifer A. Gonzaand#180;lez)
After Endgame: American Painting in the 1990s (Suzanne Hudson)
As the World Turns in 1990sand#8217; America (Joan Kee)
Ill Communication: Anxiety and Identity in 1990sand#8217; Net Art (Kris Paulsen)
Event Horizons: Gabriel Orozco and the 1990s (Paulina Pobocha)
A Place to Call Home: Artists In and Out of Los Angeles, 1989and#150;2001 (John Tain)
Plates
1989and#150;1993
1994and#150;1997
1998and#150;2001 (Alexandra Schwartz)
Selected Chronology: Art, Culture, and Society in the 1990s (Frances Jacobus-Parker)
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments (Alexandra Schwartz)