Barry Schwabsky

Presents the work of 114 contemporary artists in an A-Z sequence.

New Perspectives in Painting

Vitamin P

"The idea of contemporary art sometimes allows us to pretend we have made a clean break with the past. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understanding of art's present must also account for the ongoing life and changing fortunes of its past. In surveying the art world of this past decade, Schwabsky attends not only to its most significant newer faces--among them, Kara Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ai Weiwei, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson--but their forebears, both recent (Jeff Wall, Nancy Spero, Dan Graham, Cindy Sherman) and more distant (Velázquez, Manet, Matisse, and the portraitists of the Renaissance). "The art critic," Schwabsky writes, "formalizes and deliberately exemplifes the role of the spectator who realizes the artist's work, not by leaving it just as it is, but by adding something to it, making a personal contribution." Despite the hysterical pronouncements of criticism's demise, Schwabsky's rich and subtle considerations of art's complexly intertwined traditions are an indispensable contribution to understanding our present moment"--

Art in the Unfinished Present

The Perpetual Guest

Mark Hix

Jennifer Higgie

Valeria Napoleone

Collector Valeria Napoleone has built up a collection of work by contemporary women artists, including a red clock by Pae White and the sculpture Madam Blavatsky by Goshka Macuga. Now she has decided to edit some of her favourite recipes of her Italian homeland together with her favourite works of contemporary art.

Valeria Napoleone's Catalogue of Exquisite Recipes

Todd Bradway

Whether as a reaction to our technological present or as a manifestation of fears concerning our environmental future, depictions of the natural world in painting have never seemed more pertinent or urgent. Some of the most ambitious, crucial and intellectually vibrant paintings being created in this century involve the landscape - from a more traditional, perceptual based approach for rendering vistas to a looser, topography-inspired gestural abstraction that blurs the line between form and space, to many other modes in between. Surprisingly, there has not been an ambitious and wide-reaching publication on the subject - until now. The result of several years' worth of research, Landscape Painting Now is the first book to explore the very best contemporary landscape painting. Featuring artists from nearly twenty-five countries born over seven decades, it includes some of the brightest stars of the contemporary art world. It is introduced by an essay from Barry Schwabsky, who discusses the history of landscape painting, exploring how the genre developed through the 20th century to today, and how it has become increasingly relevant to art now. He also explores the notion of what is actually called a landscape painting today, and looks to expand beyond commonly held preconceptions concerning the genre.

Landscape Painting Now

Jeremy Sigler

David Totah

Steppenwolf

Alejandra Pizarnik

J. H. Prynne

Nick Totton

Caroline Clark

Osip Mandelstam

Francis Ponge

Naoya Shiga

Paul Holman

Charles Wilkinson

D. S Marriott

Ralph Hawkins

Alexander Dickow

Sheree Chen

Rebecca Hodgkinson

Kumiko Kiuchi

Bibiana Mas

Pei Ane Yeoh

Poetry. Drama. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Latinx Studies. Art. Film. Music. Contributors include Caroline Clark, Gillian Carnegie, Nancy Collins, Sheree Chen, Alexander Dickow, Timothy Harris, Ralph Hawkins, Rebecca Hodgkinson, Paul Holman, Kumiko Kiuchi, June Leaf, Osip Mandelstam, D. S. Marriott, Bibiana Mas, Will Nash, Alejandra Pizarnik, Francis Ponge, J. H. Prynne, Barry Schwabsky, Shiga Naoya, Pete Smith, Nick Totton, Charles Wilkinson, and Pei Ann Yeoh.

Snow Lit Rev

Isabelle Graw

Eric Troncy

Gesine Borcherdt

At first glance, Shara Hughes's (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh's brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes's work. Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.

Shara Hughes

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Warren Neidich

Introduction by Barry Schwabsky; Warren Neidich interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paris, June 4, 2005.

Earthling

Poetry. Barry Schwabsky was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and presently lives in London. His previous collection is OPERA: POEMS 1981-2002 (Meritage Press).

Book Left Open in the Rain

In this collection of critical essays the well-known critic Barry Schwabsky reexamines the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the achievements of "high modernism" remain consequential to it, through tensions among representation, abstraction, and pictorial language. With the core of the book focused on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mel Bochner, Schwabsky also studies the work of emerging artists who also continue to examine modernism's legacies.

The Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art

The Widening Circle

Apartment (Athens)

Daniel Sturgis

The 20 book reviews and essays in this new title from Barry Schwabsky, longtime

Criticism, History, Theory, Practice

Words for Art

Leading art critic explores the connections between art’s past and present Contemporary art sometimes pretends to have made a clean break with history. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understanding of art’s present must also account for the ongoing life and changing fortunes of its past. Surveying the art world of recent decades, Schwabsky attends not only to its most significant newer faces—among them, Kara Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ai Weiwei, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson—but their forebears as well, both near (Jeff Wall, Nancy Spero, Dan Graham, Cindy Sherman) and more distant (Velázquez, Manet, Matisse, and the portraitists of the Renaissance). Schwabsky’s rich and subtle contributions illuminate art’s present moment in all its complexity: shot through with determinations produced by centuries of interwoven traditions, but no less open-ended for it.

Martin Herbert

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Ralph Rugoff

Text by Ralph Rugoff, Kaja Silverman, Barry Schwabsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Martin Herbert.

1960s to Now

The Painting of Modern Life

Louisa Elderton

Michael Bracewell

Marius Bercea

Blain/Southern (Gallery : London, England)

This is the first monograph on Romanian painter Marius Bercea, featuring over 60 colour images, three new essays and an interview with the artist.Marius Bercea was born and grew up in Cluj, Romania. At the age of 10 years old he experienced the demise of the communist period as the USSR disintegrated and the 1989 Romanian Revolution took place.The effects of this history are evident in the pictorial space that Bercea creates as he alludes to a post-communist, early-capitalist Romania.The artist's works are highly distinctive, as memory, recollection and reality seemingly merge upon the canvas' surface, giving rise to a visual sensuality that has made Bercea one of the leading artists of the Cluj School.Published to accompany the exhibition Marius Bercea: Hypernova, at Blain Southern, London, 28 March - 17 April 2014.

The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b. 1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work. Carnegie's work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique, in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude - all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie's paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting her work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

Gillian Carnegie

Florence Derieux

Clare Lilley

The first true monograph on the work of celebrated French conceptual artist and sculptor Bernar Venet Bernar Venet is one of France's most celebrated living artists. Having emerged from the late 1960s avant-garde scene in New York, Venet developed a personal aesthetic based on an innovative use of mathematics and science, where control, chance, and chaos converge to form a fine equilibrium while investigating their relationship with the environment. Conversant in many media, Venet is mostly known for his monumental outdoor sculptures in major cities worldwide and, in fall 19, his Arc Majeur is due for completion at a site in Belgium - at almost 200 feet in height (60 metres), Venet's sculpture will be taller than New York's Statue of Liberty.

Bernar Venet

A collection of writings on art by Barry Schwabsky.

On Contemporary Painting

The Observer Effect

Introduction by Terence Riley Texts by Ábalos & Enguita, Joerg Bader, Catherine Hürzeler, Hans Irrek, Barry Schwabsky, Martin Tschanz, Jeff Wall

Architecture Without Shadow

Dominic Molon

Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Ill.)

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing has emerged as one of the foremost British artists of her generation, creating video installations and photographic works that document the shocking, amusing, and tragic stories and behavior of the ordinary people of Britain. Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997, Wearing has exhibited extensively around the world. This full-color monograph, covering the period 1992 to 2002, represents the most eagerly anticipated, up-to-date, and incisive survey yet published of Wearing's painfully affecting art: art that holds an exacting and often unbearable mirror to the absurdity, ennui, and anxiety of everyday life, demonstrating the maddening impossibility of ever truly understanding the complexity of the human psyche.

Barry Schwabsky

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