Caroline Bachmann's dawn paintings.

Caroline Bachmann's paintings owe as much to turn-of-last-century Symbolism—in their attempt to depict an infinite stillness, whose synthetic depiction of nature could be mistaken for that of eternity—as to plein air painting. The artist lives and works on the shore of Lake Geneva, where she spends hours contemplating the scenery, recording with a lead pencil on paper minute details of atmospheric events, making notes in the margins of subtle colour changes—not unlike comic book colourists of the pre-digital age, whose job it was to pass on to engravers written codes corresponding to the 64 possible combinations of percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black at their disposal. Back in the studio, the paintings are then built up over a lengthy period of time with translucent glazes of oil paint.

Campo di Marte was devised in March 2020, at a time when Nathalie Du Pasquier was not painting. After cutting out photos of paintings produced between the 1980s and 2020, the French artist then placed them in a sequence as if they were a series of typefaces, focusing solely on their formal qualities and the scope for interpretation offered by their assembly. What comes out is an enchanting game of nonsense, an everyday surrealism in which the images make up sentences of sorts, interwoven with various elements taken from the world of books: titles, poems or mere calculations – times when the artist was lost for words.

As Du Pasquier states: "The book was supposed to come out at the same time as the exhibition opening. That won't be the case, but it doesn't matter as they really are two separate things. This paperback is not a catalogue at all: it's something you can browse through even while sitting on the underground."

Bridget Mullen is the ruler of an unruly roost. Between 2021 and 2023, she gave birth to forty-seven paintings, each twelve-by-nine inches: kin ugly and cute, monstrous, fleshy, repulsive, droopy-eyed, and sneering as they cross the universal threshold into the no less frightening world that awaits. Birthday reunites Mullen's uncanny litter alongside a conversation between the artist and Lucas Blalock.

The paintings in New York-based artist Bridget Mullen's Birthday series utilize two distinct parameters to guide the creation of the iterative works: a vertical orientation at an intimate scale of 12 x 9 inches and a visualization of perhaps the ultimate creative act—the moment of birth. Through this consistent scale and thematic hyper focus, the artist employs endless formal variations in composition, color, and paint application. The result is a series of paintings that share a common structure yet champion individuality.

Contrasting colors provoke a visible tension, one that is at times compressed and, in other moments, elastic. Suddenly, abstract shapes come into focus as human anatomies, capable of expressing emotion. Undulating lines of various thicknesses and layered colors squeeze together, revealing peculiar faces and gestures that emerge from a central point. The repetition of thin lines creates a visual stutter of pigment, alluding to the passage of time or rapid movement.
The works in Birthday build on Mullen's practice, combining color, decisive mark-making, intuition, and experimentation to conjure psychedelic configurations. Sculptural dimensionality and flatness, representation and abstraction, and solidity and fluidity, serve not as dichotomies within these works, but as two complementary halves of a whole. Together, the forms and figures of the Birthday series are imbued with a sense of life, pregnant with agency and potential.

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

New series of paintings by the Swiss artist, that examine the role of humankind in nature and within its social fabric on a philosophical-anthropological level.

"I asked Andriu Deplazes if he had always wished to be a painter. No, he said. For a time, he had trained to be a classical musician, but turned away from music because there was something repellent about the need to demonstrate virtuosity. To be a virtuoso, as the moral world depicted in these paintings clearly shows, is not the same as having virtue. And yet, at the same time, there are still traces of virtuosity in Deplazes' practice: in the idealised landscapes that he renders, and in the easy depiction of animal life. It is only humans that he will not denigrate with such perfection. Their overpainted faces do not allow them to be captured as things, but rather present them as subjects. They elude categorisation because they are responding, in real time, to what they see in us." Adam Jasper

Born 1993 in Zurich, Andriu Deplazes lives and works in Zurich, Brussels and Marseille. His paintings create a kind of parallel cosmos that questions the habitual ways of seeing and expectations of the beholder. Wide landscapes in colourfully powerful large format are the setting for curious characters who sometimes melt into the vegetation around them or appear strangely remote from it. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe since 2015.

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

Published on the occasion of her Aspen Art Museum exhibition, the artist's first solo presentation in an American museum, this catalogue focuses on Amelie von Wulffen's recent work, including paintings created during her time as the AAM's 2012 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence. The artist deploys a host of painterly techniques that—while departing from the photographic collage practice for which she is best known—remain deeply referential, wryly revisiting and reprocessing tactics and tropes of modern painting from European Romanticism onward.

The lavishly illustrated publication features an essay by AAM CEO and Director, Chief Curator, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, as well as a foreword by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz.

Published 2013

A monograph on the German painter Amelie von Wulffen (born 1966).

For more than 20 years, the artist has been developing a formally and stylistically diverse oeuvre (including collages, installations, animated films, drawings, sculptures and paintings) that possesses a remarkable thematic consistency. Amelie von Wulffen: Works 1998-2016 shows the artist returning again and again to the process of coming to terms with the repercussions of German cultural history. These heavy themes are lightened by an acid humor, most obvious in Wulffen's drawings and comics, which spares no sacred cows. Richly illustrated with texts by Bernhart Schwenk and Amy Sillman, Amelie von Wulffen: Works 1998-2016presents the painter as a role model for a younger generation of artists.

In Pink Moon, artist Marcel Dzama (b.1974) presents a raft of new works inspired by travelling through Mexico and Morocco which touch on the wonder that travel and the strange immersion in cultures aside from one’s own can so often engender. Taking visual cues from the evocative textures and colours around him, Dzama successfully captures the spirit of place, while communicating something essentially human in the experience of those places.

Coming at a time of isolation, of stasis for so many, this book engages the imagination in a broad, borderless project, allowing the viewer access to the thrill of discovery and the excitement of the new. Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. With an introduction by Duro Olowu and interview by Craig Taylor.

108 p, ills colour & bw, 22 x 30 cm, pb, English

One of Matt Mullican's central and most consequential inventions, the so-called “Rubbings,” are a kind of “frottages,” a technique the artist uses to produce specific pictures. The book presents a catalogue of the Rubbings on canvas from 1984 to 2015. It comprises around 500 works, documented by images and catalogue entries (the book also contains an essay by Dieter Schwarz).

From the beginning of his career, Mullican looked for pictures that would not be paintings; thus, he used banners, the traditional carriers of signs, posters, and, in 1984, he realized his first Rubbing. He used a cardboard plate on which the canvas was placed; by rubbing with an oil stick the cardboard reliefs, forms became visible on the canvas. This way, Mullican was able to transfer complex representations onto canvas; the result is a picture of something that is not present, it is a form of copy. The cardboard plates may be used for other works and so the imagery can reappear in different configurations. Each Rubbing is a single work and at the same time a reproduction, like a print, part of a sequence which contains picture elements from different sources.

Following the Rubbings from 1984 to recent times, it becomes visible that they represent the motives and themes the artist worked with over the years. The sequence of the Rubbings appears therefore like a diary of Mullican's work.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Nothing Should Exist” at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, from June 11 to October 16, 2016.

Working in the fields of performance, installation, digital technology and sculpture, Matt Mullican (born 1951 in Santa Monica, lives an works in New York) is seeking to develop a cosmological model based on a personal vocabulary combining the formal and the symbolic. Hypnosis and cartography are his principal modes of operation. He explores functional sign systems of his own devising through activities under hypnosis, in a permanent oscillation between the real and its schematization, between fiction and its physical reality.

Edited by Dieter Schwarz.
Text by Dieter Schwarz.
 
published in June 2016

This handsomely designed, concise volume celebrates Agnes Martin's pursuit of beauty, happiness and innocence in her nonobjective art created while living in the desert of New Mexico. From her multicolored striped works to compositions of color-washed bands defined by hand-drawn lines, to the deep gray Black Paintings that characterized her work in the late 1980s, Martin's treatment of color in each of these phases is examined.

A particular emphasis is placed on the latter half of her career and the broadening vision that developed during her years working in the desert, which crystalized her quest to deepen her understanding of the essence of painting, unattached to emotion or subject, yet radiant and meditative in its pure abstraction.

With editorial contributions by a selection of writers whose cross-genre works span art writing, essay and memoir, this book expands an approach to Martin's paintings beyond a purely art historical lens, bringing new voices into the conversations around her career, inviting a rediscovery of her enduring legacy. An essay by author Durga Chew-Bose provides a poetic exploration of color; the writer Olivia Laing (author of The Lonely City) discusses the nature of solitude in her text; and Bruce Hainley uses a 1974 essay by Jill Johnston as a jumping-off point to delve into Martin's life during her years in New Mexico.

Surreal, psychedelic riffs on domestic objects from a trailblazing feminist artist. 

From her beginning in the mid-1960s through the early '70s, German artist Anna Oppermann (1940-1993) - best known for her encyclopedic, immersive installations - created an astonishing series of surreal, almost psychedelic drawings that quietly explode the private space of the home, and her experience within it. These early drawings contribute to a feminist reentering of spheres traditionally associated with women, casting everyday objects as symbolic, consequential protagonists: houseplants sprawl to take over the picture plane, windows and mirrors provide views into other worlds and tables display drawings that themselves open out into new domestic scenes. By placing her own body--her knees, arms, the back of her head--as reference points in the work, Oppermann emphasizes the gendered realms of the home and the relationships that we form to our private spaces.

This volume gathers these drawings and early installations in an English-language publication for the first time.

A new version of After 8 Books' first publication and bestseller: Evelyn’s adventures as a transgender masseuse in Amsterdam, back when she was a young artist, supporting herself by working in a massage salon. The texts are witty, sharp and thoughtful, reflecting a very specific community of friends and coworkers and its counterpart, the male clientele. The drawings illustrating those texts are dreamlike watercolors, perfect companions to Unintended Experience’s diaristic journey.

A series of recent drawings by London-based artist Faye Wei Wei.

Faye Wei Wei (born 1994) is a British artist. She has had solo shows at Project Room, Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna (2020), Cob Gallery, London (2019), SADE Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2018)... She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2016. She lives and works in London.

Shifting between figuration and abstraction, comedy and doubt, order and mess, Amy Sillman's painting has greatly influenced generations of American artists.

New York-based Amy Sillman (born 1955) is one of the most beloved and quietly influential contemporary American artists. The ALL-OVER provides a comprehensive overview of her most recent bodies of work, including painting and serially exhibited large-scale abstractions, as well as diagrams, drawings, animations and sculpture.

The title of the book, and the exhibition it accompanies at Frankfurt's Portikus, refers to a concept often used to describe abstract painting (the classic instance of which is the work of Jackson Pollock). Much of Sillman's oeuvre can be categorized as such, although her abstractions often suggest recognizable forms and figures. In the 24-canvas series Panorama, motifs seem to run continuously around the walls of the exhibition space, but in fact are repeated prints of the artist's drawings with painterly interventions. The materiality is lost through the superimposition of print and oil paint; what remains is pure color and gesture. Also present here are stills from an animation developed by Sillman to be exhibited alongside Panorama and an insert made especially for the book by the artist. Alongside essays by Manuela Ammer, Yve-Alain Bois and Sillman herself. The book includes a conversation with the artist by Fabian Schöneich.

Ranging from figurative representation to gestural abstraction, monumental landscape paintings to more intimate portraits, the oeuvre of American painter Leidy Churchman (born 1979) channels his artistic and literary influences, friendships, moods, surrounding landscapes and the visual iconography of divergent religions and philosophies.

Crocodile highlights the artist's investigations into consciousness in his renderings of anthropomorphic animals and psychological states; his appropriation of existing artworks and aesthetics; and his recasting of various signs and symbols, from his depiction of the Buddhist symbol of the protector deity in Mahakala (2017) to the Mastercard logo in Mastercard (2013).  

Churchman, who divides his time between New York and Maine, emerges here as a dynamic protagonist of contemporary American painting. In addition to collecting 90 reproductions of works, the book features artwork made especially for it, plus texts by Ruba Katrib, Alex Kitnik and Arnisa Zeqo, in addition to a conversation between Churchman and Lauren Cornell.

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."

Heike-Karin Föll’s foundational collection of works on paper refuses, in its totality, to be pinned down. SPEED exists in a sequence of autonomy, embracing simultaneity and resisting typical chronology or logic. A resource library for Foll’s more well known painted works, each page also stands on its own. The “writing” and “rewriting” of these pages is a rejection by the artist to rest on what has already been accomplished, and insists on constantly renewing modes of expression amidst the routine and expected.

SPEED takes the form of visual index, a micro structure of narrative, through the space of the page. Blank spaces (components of in-betweens and not-yets), textual elements, found images, and abstract icons are assembled from a daily stream of computational information and graphics to bring us into the temporal now. The pages slip from medium to medium, relying on short forms and small units as the bases for recontextualisation and variation. Montez Press is honoured to be able to offer an opening for these vast and untamable works by Heike-Karin Föll.

Heike-Karin Föll is painter who is currently based in Berlin. She works with the materiality and mechanics of painting and language, treating textuality as equally a vehicle of content, a visual motif and a material form.

This publication brings together works made between 2010 and 2013 that share the same principle: a method of constructing images of time by layering multiple moments, creating hybrids between photography and other media, documenting something that is positioned beyond our human ability to see.

Each series adds a different parameter to the principle, such as two- and three- dimensional space, scale, perspective, performance, installation and parallel events. The publication also features an alternative view on Mater’s practice with a chapter of research and process material.

With an essay by Maxine Kopsa. Design: Veronica Ditting.

Two clock-faces are staring at each other.
They are two sides of one thing, as different as they are the same.
They move as two bodies revolving around each other, into a tender embrace.
A kiss, made of time, in time.
Mirrored shape shifters, their hour-numbers climbing on each other's shoulders.
Running up against the limits of their own usefulness, clocklikeness.

A book by Katja Mater, with a text by Amelia Groom designed by Elisabeth Klement
79 clocks, 192 pages, open spine, 17 × 21 cm
Printed by Wilco Art Books on Arena White Rough by Fedrigoni 

Text by Eleanor Ivory Weber
Published by Forlaget emancipa(t/ss)ionsfrugten
Edited and produced by Eller med a △ Åbäke 
Edition: 200 ex. 
Format (b*h): 20 * 26,5 cm
Pages: 48 sider 
Print: Grafiche Veneziane
Paper: Munken Pure 170g
Typeface: Base12 by Zuzana Licko

More info at https://www.cecilieskov.com/Works/Wet-With-Dew

This first comprehensive monograph encompasses the manifold painterly practice of Allison Katz. Gathering together Katz's successive bodies of works since the beginning of the 2010s, the publication includes essays by Oakville Galleries director Frances Loeffler, art critic Kirsty Bell, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, and The MIT List Visual Arts Center Director Yuri Stone.

Texts by Kirsty Bell, Allison Katz, Frances Loeffler, Lisa Robertson, Yuri Stone, Camilla Wills.