Born in Missouri in 1927, Bishop has lived in Paris since the 1950s. One of the most sensitive lyrical abstract painters, he has devoted the last three decades to small paper works that are transparent, compact, fluid and spatially ambiguous. Herein, works on paper since the 1960s and several paintings.
This collection of quiet, intense black-and-white portraits contains three groups of photographs of American citizens in relation to U.S. war missions during the past 30 years. The most recent pictures present people who demonstrated in 2006 or 2007 against American involvement in the current Iraq war. They are accompanied by shots, made more than 15 years earlier, of soldiers who were just about to leave for their initial deployment in the first Gulf War. The third series, spanning from 1983 to 1984, was made at the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It presents individual portraits of visitors paying tribute to the victims of war in Southeast Asia. None of the close-up shots gathered here conveys allegiance to any particular political orientation. Each simply expresses the irreplaceability of the individual and the importance of honoring his or her memory as the most basic form of humanity. In his catalogue essay, Heinz Liesbrock writes, "Her black-and-white photographs concentrate entirely on the human physiognomy in order to reveal the subjects' inner reality. The pictures dispense with all topical attributes which would make it possible to read an external context, such as profession, social position or any kind of concrete contextual intention, into them. We are therefore in a certain sense left alone with these pictures."
Joachim Brohm Bwas' "Ruhr" documents the industrial decline of the West German valley from which it takes its name--an area that was once home to Germany's coal mining and steel production centers, as well as other heavy and light manufacturing, and later became famous for its high degree of air pollution. This work, made between the late 1970s and the mid-80s, made Brohm one of the first German photographers to engage with the issues raised by American landscape photography--both that of the nineteenth century and the topographical work being done from 1970 onwards--and to transport it into the European context in which it has since thrived. "Ruhr" is an integral link between U.S. and European photography, whose significance is confirmed with its first complete publication here.
From the outset, the paintings of Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) were from the start defined by clear, geometric forms. An encounter with Josef Albers in the late 1930s greatly influenced Reinhardt's subsequent approach to color, and the two artists maintained a lifelong respect for one another's work (in 1952 Albers offered Reinhardt a guest professorship at Yale, where he was then teaching). The sympathies between their arts lie in the extremity of their geometric reductions, which Reinhardt eventually also applied to color by reducing it to minutely differentiated squares of black on a five-square-foot canvas; but both Albers and Reinhardt envision painting as an art of geometric combinations of color. Reinhardt's statement that his black paintings were "the last paintings anyone can make" betrays his debt to Albers, for his works do indeed seem to conclude the investigations opened by Albers' Homage to the Square series. This volume surveys their affinities.
This is a series of 50 landscape photographs, which are presented here on full page plates.
For many years, Ian McKeever has undertaken extensive walks all over the world. His experiences are reflected in his artistic imagination.Vastness, light and a complex experience of space are the structural parameters with which his pictures can be understood. However, he limits himself to only a few colours: white, black, grey, red and blue. His painting is mainly in large formats and captures experiences of landscape in a mediated way.Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ian McKeever: Hartgrove. Paintings and Photographs at Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, 3 June – 2 September 2012.English and German text.