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BOOKS FROM THE SHELVES BY ARTBOOK | D.A.P.

Our dear friend Luke Brown from ARTBOOK | D.A.P in New York found some time while navigating his way through a ton of new books at the beginning of the Spring 2012 art book season. He dug out three must haves from the forthcoming season. Thanks Luke!

ARTBOOK | D.A.P. is America's premiere source for books on twentieth century art, photography, design and aesthetic culture. Founded in 1990 in downtown New York, the company has grown over the last two decades into a major hub for publications from the world's most respected publishers and museums like MoMA PS1 and the Guggenheim Museum.

SEAN LANDERS | 1990-1995, Improbable History | JRP Ringier

SEAN LANDERS (born 1962) has always had an uncanny knack for portraying himself so well that one inevitably sees oneself. Through using media as diverse as paintings, calendars and video, the New York-based artist articulates his personal self-doubts and presents the human artist as a canvas that can be worked with.

Theses stills are from Landers' 1993 video Narcissus, and feature in JRP|Ringier's monumental new monograph with the title SEAN LANDERS: 1990-1995, IMPROBABLE HISTORY. This comprehensive monograph includes almost all of Landers' early oeuvre, from 1990 to 1995. It offers an overview on the text and cartoon works on paper, the first paintings and sculptures, as well as the video and audio works of his beginnings. It thus presents itself as a companion volume to the reference monograph published in 2005 and reprinted in 2008.

Landers' onanism, both literal and literary, was partly a response to the analytical and propositional use of language in the work of artists such as Lawrence Weiner and On Kawara. His stories are articulations of emotion and empathy - always with a glimmer of hopefulness that makes them so telling. If we look at the images we see the theatrical self that poses questions of how to define the line between what is private and public in times of brutal self-exhibitionsim.

SEAN LANDERS: 1990-1995, IMPROBABLE HISTORY is edited by Paul Ha. Text by Dominic Molon, Matthew Higgs. Published by JRP Ringier with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

The American photographer FRANCESCA WOODMAN (1958–1981) spent a brief portion of her childhood in the countryside around Florence, living with her parents in an old farm whose dilapidated interiors were later to influence the backdrops of her mesmerising self-portraits.

While studying at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence she returned to Italy in 1977. During this tenure, Woodman found five tattered school exercise books, printed in 1906, side-stapled and inscribed in fine cursive penmanship with notes from physics lectures or poems in English and Italian. To these found objects Woodman added her characteristic black-and-white photographs. With the technique of mounting paper prints and transparent film onto the page WOODMAN creates beautiful objects and gives us an unprecedented insight into the emphatically narrative logic of her photography. Housed in a lightweight printed box, it includes an afterword by George Woodman, Francesca’s father, that contextualises the work within the photographer’s artist’s book production.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN'S NOTEBOOK is published by Silvana Editoriale. Afterword by George Woodman.

The featured image is reproduced from FRANCESCA WOODMAN'S NOTEBOOK.

CHRIS MARTIN | Staring into the Sun | Walther König

This is the first comprehensive publication on the work of CHRIS MARTIN (born 1954), one of America’s finest contemporary abstract painters. Martin’s enormous, sunny canvases are enthusiastic in execution, heroic in scale while also expressing something of the rogue spirit of outsider art.

Many of them are dedicated to pop greats as well as those who work at or beyond the boundaries of the zeitgeist,such artists and musicians as Harry Smith, Frank Moore and James Brown, whose names are inscribed in coarse strokes upon the works. Such dedications placed Martin’s expansive compositions on the foundation of a social frame of reference, are gestures of reverence and solidarity. Martin’s paintings are underlain with such everyday detritus as stuck-on coins, vinyl records, banana skins, newspaper articles and slices of bread. Despite such rough, utterly profane surfaces, it is a spiritual tradition of abstraction that Martin’s work draws from: Native American folklore, religious mysticism, anthroposophist symbolism, the landscape painting of North American romanticism--and the great melting pot of New York City itself, where Martin has lived since 1975.

Chris Martin just recently had his first institutional exhibition outside the United States. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf curated by Elodie Evers and Gregor Janson concentrates particularly on the early works that have never before been shown in such a comprehensive form.

CHRIS MARTIN: Staring into the Sun is published by Walther König. Foreword and introduction by Gregor Jansen. Text by Elodie Evers, Lars Bang Larsen, Alexander Koch, Bob Nickas.

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