Gillian Wearing Livres

Omnivorous and indefatigable, suggestible but independent, adolescents don't want to be balanced. They love extremes of everything from fashion and art to music and the Internet. Observed and studied by experts of all kinds, their behavior monitored by psychologists, educators, and marketing executives, adolescents represent a decisive and increasingly valuable segment of the buying public. They adore and consume trendy clothes and brand-new bands; they must be cool regardless of the cost. And adults turn to them more and more for clues on how to remain forever young and hip. The Fourth Sex turns a critical, illustrated spotlight on adolescence, a territory of transition crisscrossed by the most varied creative energies. A series of iconographic materials begins in the 1960s and moves up to the present, revealing clothes, behavior patterns, novels, and visual artworks created or inspired by the transnational tribe that are teenagers.

The ecstatic face of a disco dancer in Berlin; a rural panorama in Derry, where a country road has been made into a Pollock-like canvas of red, white and blue; an ashtray, framed by a lacy spray of blood in a Barcelona toilet. Paul Graham uses and abuses classic genres of photography -- the portrait, the landscape, the still life -- to map a cultural topography. His jewel-like colours and unsettling compositions reveal how social relations and political trauma are inscribed in the everyday. This book brings together for the first time all of Graham's successive series, from his journey along the A1 in Britain to intimate studies of Japan. Graham's work has been celebrated in shows around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London.

What does “family” mean today? Which notions and prejudices come to light with it? How is modern family life shaped these days? In her project A Real Danish Family, the British artist Gillian Wearing asks these questions in ways that are both artistic and thought-provoking. The eponymous sculpture portrays a Danish family selected from 492 participating families of the most diverse composition. The exhibition Family Stories, which will open when the sculpture is unveiled in the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen and was initiated and produced by Kunsthal Arhus, also revolves around the family as the crystallization point for inter-human relationships. Photographs, videos, and sculptures explore relatedness and identity, and include the artist’s own family as an example. In a series of “self-portraits” the artist uses masks to slip into the roles of her siblings, parents, and grandparents. The publication examines Wearing’s work and the theme of the family through the lens of art history, and traces the course of A Real Danish Family, a project that boldly questions patterns of thought in society. Exhibition: 13 October 2017—7 January 2018, Statens Museum for Kunst, Kopenhagen