Andrea Viliani

With a chronological plate section and detailed texts, this is the first monograph on the widely acclaimed German-born, New York-based painter Kerstin Bratsch (born 1979), a star of The Museum of Modern Art's 2014 show and catalogue The Forever Now. It surveys her expanded painterly practice, which includes paintings on paper and mylar foil, glass works and marblings, but also performances and collaborative projects as Das Institut (with Adele Roder) and Kaya (with Debo Eilers and Kaya Serene). Throbbing with bright color and thick, writhing forms, Bratsch's paintings are often installed in a manner that further intensifies their physicality--hung by magnets, draped or framed in between sheets of glass and then leaned against the wall. For the first time, this book highlights the developments and connections between her various bodies of work.

Bill Beckley is an American conceptual artist and one of the first artists to use photography as a means of artistic expression. In the early 1970s he was part of a loose-knit group of conceptual artists that used images and fictional texts in a form that came to be known as Narrative Art. I was basically writing a story and taking pictures at the same time. The text evolved with the photos, he says. In the 1980s he experimented with various materials and his work became more sculptural and pictorial. By the end of the decade, he had found a way to integrate these materials with photography, and this integration became a very important aspect of all his works. In 2019 he produced the Neapolitan Holidays series, inspired by cards dated between 1915 and 1972, sent to or from Naples, Italy. The artist responded to the text on the postcard with an email or a text message an old postcard receiving a response, sometimes even after a hundred years.