Bob Nickas

A comprehensive look at the thought-provoking, eye-catching and mind-expanding work of this visionary West Coast artist.

The most comprehensive overview of artist Josh Smith’s radicaltechnicolor paintings. Josh Smith: Emo Jungle looks at the artist’s vigorous repetition of particular motifs, illuminating his approach to painting as an exploratory medium for image production. Published on the occasion of Smith’s critically acclaimed first exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue features a new body of work that marks an important evolution for the artist. In these paintings, Smith sets the stage for a new mode of self-reflective commentary on image making, acknowledging that “the meaning perhaps arises in the making.” A new essay by Bob Nickas treats the Reaper, Turtle, and Devil figures from Emo Jungle as ciphers through which to understand Smith’s work. Nickas demonstrates how these new paintings restage and personalize the artist’s more abstract earlier works and illuminates the ways in which repetition functions within Smith’s practice. With more than one hundred illustrations, this book serves as the ideal introduction to Smith’s disruptive oeuvre.

A diaristic glimpse of a zeitgeist on the brink, from the influential New York curator and writer Widely recognized for his bold, dissenting and prolific criticism and curation, Bob Nickas has been a fixture of the New York City art scene for nearly 40 years, having organized more than 120 exhibitions since 1984. He has left an indelible impression on the artistic milieu as the founding editor of index magazine; a regular contributor to Artforum; a curatorial advisor for MoMA PS1; and the author of several collections of writing and interviews, including Theft Is Vision, Live Free or Die, The Dept. of Corrections and Komplaint Dept. Nickas’ most recent undertaking, Bob Nickas: Yesterworld, consists of hundreds of diary entries written over the course of 2019. Part memoir, part social commentary, Yesterworld is a richly detailed, intimate account of the New York art world in the final years of the Trump administration and in the final months before the advent of Covid-19. Nickas reflects on significant exhibitions, openings, major news headlines, recently published books and his own social escapades.

Pieces-Meubles is the title of a two-part exhibition, held in 1995 and 2016, curated by New York art critic Bob Nickas at the invitation of Galerie Patrick Seguin. The 1995 exhibition compared contemporary art with 20th-century design, inviting around 20 artists to choose a piece of furniture to interact with their work or to integrate it by creating a new work. The 2016 exhibition was centered around Jean Prouve, whose 6x6 dismountable house, the Maison des Sinistres de Lorraine, had been installed at Galerie Patrick Seguin. Among the invited artists, some of whom participated in both exhibitions, were John Armleder, Richard Artschwager, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Adam McEwen, Albert Oehlen, Haim Steinbach, Rudolf Stingel and Franz West. This book illustrates these two innovative exhibitions. Introduced with a substantial preface by Nickas, Pieces-Meubles is abundantly illustrated with in-situ photographs, as well as archival images for the furniture and architectural components of the shows.

In this volume compiling Ugo Rondinone's Stripe paintings (1999-2011), artist and writer Phong Bui retraces the genealogy of stripe paintings from Barnett Newman to Rondinone, while art critic Bob Nickas thoroughly examines the making and meaning of painting in his work.

This book brings together for the first time an influential series of sculptures made with department store mannequins that American artist and writer John Miller created, often in collaboration with Austrian artist Richard Hoeck. The book is built around beautifully reproduced full-page photographs of all the mannequin works, which were widely praised when first exhibited and have proved enduringly influential since. Rounding out the book is a revealing interview with Miller by curator and critic Bob Nickas, a longtime friend of Miller. The result is a book that will appeal to any fans of contemporary art.

In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker about the exhibition No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984–1989 at David Zwirner in New York, “the show’s cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era.” With an eye to canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of international art scenes that were based in Cologne—arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time—and New York. While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner, and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler, and Monika Sprüth showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. The works of these German artists were exhibited along with the latest contemporary art from the US by artists like Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the works of German artists were presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring, Augustine & Hodes, and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work being produced and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this ongoing dialogue, among them Europa / Amerika (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1986) and A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland (New Museum, New York, 1986). Big, bold, and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color over one hundred immensely varied artworks by the twenty-two international artists included in this massive exhibition—one of the largest in David Zwirner’s history. Beyond its stunning visual components, the book features crucial new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, and an illustrated chronology of the decade by Kara Carmack. The book also includes an arsenal of compelling archival material, from documentary photographs from the period to reproductions of Cologne’s culture magazine Spex. Taken as a whole, this ambitious exhibition catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart, and “dissonance of styles”—in the words of Schjeldahl—embodied by this fascinating and fecund moment in global art history. Artists featured in the book include Werner Büttner, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Günther Förg, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Albert Oehlen, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, and Christopher Wool.

The definitive survey of contemporary abstract painting, featuring eighty of the most innovative painters from around the world.