Los Angeles-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp has developed a painting practice characterized by its rigorous process and attentiveness to the medium's possibilities. Using layers of black watercolor pigment, she builds up delicate surfaces, producing subtle variations in density and a powerful sense of atmosphere. Otto-Knapp's exhibition at the Renaissance Society, In the waiting room, presented a new group of large-scale free-standing paintings in that evokes a multidimensional stage set. Some depict silhouetted bodies while others introduce scenic elements reminiscent of painted backdrops. Offering a close look at the exhibition, this volume includes an array of illustrations, a conversation between curator Solveig Øvstebø and the artist, and four newly commissioned essays by Carol Armstrong, Darby English, Rachel Hann, and Catriona MacLeod, grounded in art history and performance studies.

This book is published on occasion of the parallel exhibitions Silke Otto-Knapp presented in two markedly different locations: on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, and at the Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna. The contrasting influences of place--between rural and urban, new and old world--is evident in the selection of works presented and compiled in this catalogue. The partnering of these exhibitions clearly brings into focus questions about art and its contexts. The tensions between nature and culture provide an appropriate figure for the artwork: a context imagined and devised for the circumstances of its own activation. Questions of Travel includes essays by Susan Morgan and Vanessa Joan Müller and a conversation between Otto-Knapp and Nicolaus Schafhausen. Müller reflects on how the tensions Otto-Knapp's artwork engenders are the substance of its experience, while Morgan approaches the work via three significant influences: the cultural geographer J. B. Jackson; avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; and the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. In the conversation with Schafhausen, Otto-Knapp likens the art exhibition to "a theatre situation that is both distinctly separate from reality and engaged with it at the same time." As the activating element of an exhibition, the viewer could also be said to embody the reality of a work's engagement. Otto-Knapp took the title for this project, "Questions of Travel," from Bishop's poem of the same name, which has been reprinted for this catalogue. Published on the occasion of Otto-Knapp's exhibitions "Questions of Travel (Wien)," Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, March 12-May 25, 2014, and "Questions of Travel (Fogo Island)," Fogo Island Gallery, April 16-August 31, 2014. Copublished with Fogo Islands Arts and Kunsthalle Wien Contributors Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Morgan, Vanessa Joan Müller, Nicolaus Schafhausen

A new look at the art of one of the most charming and idiosyncratic personalities of early 20th-century New York Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was a New York original: a society lady who hosted an avant-garde salon in her Manhattan home, a bohemian and a flapper, a poet, a theater designer, and above all an influential painter with a sharp satirical wit. Stettheimer collaborated with Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, befriended (and took French lessons from) Marcel Duchamp, and was a member of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe's artistic and intellectual circle. Beautifully illustrated with 150 color images, including the majority of the artist's extant paintings, as well as drawings, theater designs, and ephemera, this volume also highlights Stettheimer's poetry and gives her a long overdue critical reassessment. The essays published here--as well as a roundtable discussion by seven leading contemporary female artists--overturn the traditional perception of Stettheimer as an artist of mere novelties. Her work is linked not only to American modernism and the New York bohemian scene before World War II but also to a range of art practices active today. Flamboyant and epicurean, she was an astute documenter of New York and parodist of her social milieu; her highly decorative scenes borrowed from Surrealism and contributed to the beginnings of a feminist aesthetic.

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 (Velzquez, 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.

Anniversary publication of the Belvedere The Belvedere in Vienna epitomizes the changes that have taken place over the course of three centuries in the concept of what constitutes a museum. Originally built by Prince Eugene of Savoy to enhance his prestige as a prince, under Maria Theresa, the Upper Belvedere became one of the world’s first public museums. The idea of presenting Austrian art in an international context, which in 1903 motivated the establishment of the Modern Gallery in the Lower Belvedere, remains the key objective of this world-famous cultural institution. In this critical homage, renowned authors explore enduring questions that transcend the different epochs, such as : What ordering concepts are evident in art presentation ? How contemporary were these presentations in an international context ? What kind of public were they aimed at ? Anniversary publication of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere: a critical homage to a place of art with a diverse history spanning centuries Exhibition until January 7, 2024 With contributions from Johanna Aufreiter, Björn Blauensteiner, Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Christiane Erharter, Nora Fischer, Anna Frasca-Rath, Antoinette Friedenthal, Martin Fritz, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Sabine Grabner, Katinka Gratzer-Baumgärtner, Cäcilia Henrichs, Alice Hoppe-Harnoncourt, Christian Huemer, Georg Lechner, Stefan Lehner, Gernot Mayer, Monika Mayer, Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, Georg Plattner, Matthew Rampley, Luise Reitstätter, Stella Rollig, Claudia Slanar, Franz Smola, Nora Sternfeld, Silvia Tammaro, Wolfgang Ullrich, Leonhard Weidinger, Christian Witt-Dörring, Luisa Ziaja, and Christoph Zuschlag

A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist's pioneering and influential work, with each copy featuring a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens's studio Since the early 1990s, Laura Owens (b. 1970) has challenged traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction in her pioneering approach to painting. Created in close collaboration with the artist on the occasion of her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, this inventive and comprehensive book features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to Owens's broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens's fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist's personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Strikingly, each copy also features a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens's studio, giving readers the opportunity to own an original work of art. Together, all of these elements provide a rare and intimate look at how an artist might make her way in the world as well as how art gets made, movements take hold, and relationships evolve over time.

Intersecting art, science and the scenographic mise-en-scène, this book provides a new approach to anatomical drawing, viewed through the contemporary lens of scenographic theory. Sue Field traces the evolution of anatomical drawing from its historical background of hand-drawn observational scientific investigations to the contemporary, complex visualization tools that inform visual art practice, performance, film and screen-based installations. Presenting an overview of traditional approaches across centuries, the opening chapters explore the extraordinary work of scientists and artists such as Andreas Vesalius, Gérard de Lairesse, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Dorothy Foster Chubb who, through the medium of drawing dissect, dismember and anatomize the human form. Anatomical Drawing examines how forms, fluids and systems are entangled within the labyrinthine two-dimensional drawn space and how the body has been the subject of the spectacle. Corporeal proportions continue to be embodied within the designs of structures, buildings and visual art. Illustrated throughout, the book explores the drawings of 17th-century architect and scenographer Inigo Jones, through to the ghostly, spectral forms illuminated in the present-day X-ray drawings of the artist Angela Palmer, and the visceral and deeply personal works of Kiki Smith. Field analyses the contemporary skeletal manifestations that have been spawned from the medieval Danse Macabre, such as Walt Disney's drawn animations and the theatrical staging, metaphor and allegorical intent in the contemporary drawn artworks of William Kentridge, Peter Greenaway, Mark Dion and Dann Barber. This rigorous study illustrates how the anatomical drawing shapes multiple scenographic encounters, both on a two-dimensional plane and within a three-dimensional space, as the site of imaginative agency across the breadth of the visual and performance arts. These drawings are where a corporeal, spectacularized representation of the human body is staged and performed within an expanded drawn space, generating something new and unforeseen - a scenographic worlding.