Barry Schwabsky

Ha Chong Hyun (born 1935) is one of Korea's most acclaimed artists and a leading member of the artistic movement known as Dansaekhwa. Ha's own multifaceted practice was expansive: moving from gestural abstract painting in the style known as "Korean Informel," to geometric nonfigurative painting, to conceptual sculpture and installation that audaciously experimented with materiality and spatiality and revolutionized modern art in Korea. Ha Chong Hyun is the most comprehensive publication to explore the artist's work to date. Hundreds of full-color images gorgeously illustrate Ha's four decades of art making. Major new texts by scholars and art historians Kyung An, H.G. Masters and Barry Schwabsky incisively explore Ha's work and the broader movements in Korean art of which he was a part, from Dansaehkwa to the Avant Garde Association.

In this collection of critical essays, Barry Schwabsky reexamines the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the achievements of "high modernism" remain consequential to it, through tensions between representation, abstraction, and language. Offering close readings of works produced by several generations of European and American artists, he begins with an analysis of the late period of two Abstract Expressionists, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, who saw their own success as a failure of reception and who came to question radically their own work. With the core of the book focused on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mel Bochner, major figures of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art whose works in a variety of media demonstrate a deepening critical engagement with modernism, Schwabsky also studies the work of emerging artists, such as L. C. Amrstrong and Rainer Ganahl, who continue to examine modernism's legacies.

Interviews by, essays about NY-based Canadian artist.

"British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997 while still in her mid 30. This comprehensive, copiously illustrated exhibition catalog documents the first major retrospective of her video and photography based works. One of the young British artists, Wearing is represented in important collections ranging from the Tate Modern to the Guggenheim and the Hammer Museum. The key to unlocking the work of Gillian Wearing is found not in art history but in reality television, writes Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. Not so much the tabloid fodder of the 21st century but the tough stuff from the Sixties and Seventies. Always at the grittier end of the Young British Artists spectrum, she is in essence a documentary film maker and photographer, her work weaving around the line that documentary treads between fact and fiction." --Publisher description.

Juxtaposing broad black lines with bold, flat Liquitex colors, Krushenick created hard-edged abstractions that fill his canvases from corner to corner. His energetic forms used experiments in cut paper collage as a springboard, creating an aesthetic all his own that earned him the title 'father of Pop abstraction.' This book offers a mix of archival writings and interviews with new perspectives on the artist who is largely considered a precursor to Pop Art. Preparatory drawings, early collages, and scenes of Krushenick in his studio offer insight into the artist's creative process, while newly commissioned essays take a fresh look at a remarkable oeuvre.

"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"--