David Pagel

This catalogue was produced in conjunction with the Renaissance Society's 1993 mid-career survey of this influential painter and teacher, who has worked primarily in Chicago since 1973. The sensuous surfaces and revealing construction methods of Carswell's work expand and explore the component parts of painting--surface, structural support, pigment--in order to better communicate their distinctions and interdependence. Carswell merges his structural analysis with the sheer beauty of his surfaces to create synthesized painting/objects. A must-read for anyone interested in the continued relevance of painting as a beautiful and critical art form.

Blending the reflected cultural climate of his adopted home, Los Angeles, with the multi-layered world of American popular culture, Jim Shaw (b.1952) creates rich, dream-like worlds within distinct bodies of work. Addressing, for the first time, how the artist's oeuvre inter-relates, this substantial monograph argues that the artist's seemingly disparate series actually function together to present a lucid and insightful portrait of America today. Emerging out of the long West-Coast shadows of California Assemblage by way of LA Pop and Conceptualism, Shaw’s narrative-driven art marries art history and contemporary existence, as well as literature and comic books, ancient myths and modern movies, science and its variations in popular psychology — not only blurring the boundaries between art and life, but cultivating that confusion to consider the relationship between fact and fiction that seems to define so much of the world we inhabit today. Giving contemporary viewers an effective way to think about art, this publication is an invaluable resource for those interested in painting today and its interaction with modern life.

"There's one thing you have to know from the beginning-this is a love story." Thus begins the true story of Harold Stevens, who joined the navy as a boy in the closing months of World War II, and during the occupation of Japan encountered a girl who would change his life forever. She was an elite geisha, one of the greatest cultural icons in Japanese society, and his infatuation marked the beginning of a singular journey encompassing forbidden passion, a bold crime, ruinous war, a man's triumphs and tragedies, and in the end, an enduring love.

Cold Feet-the title says it all: Written from the wide-eyed, self-effacing perspective of a mountaineer who pursues epic adventure while locked in a perpetual struggle with fear and self-doubt, David Pagel's stories-featured in Climbing magazine, Ascent, and Rock and Ice magazine-are modern climbing classics chronicling the experiences of an Everyman climber who dreams big. From Africa to Alaska, from the sheer walls of Devils Tower and El Capitan to the icy flanks of the Matterhorn and the mythic North Face of the Eiger, Pagel has never let his status as a run-of-the mill, middling climber (from the Great Plains, no less ) deter him from tackling the world's iconic peaks or seeking out the sport's legendary mountaineers. An insightful and hilarious collection of whimsical climbing stories, profiles, and perspective...including a never-before-published selection of verse

"Damaged Romanticism" features 15 internationally recognised contemporary artists whose work, in painting, sculpture, installations, and photography based media, belongs neither to a style nor a traditional 'school', but is thematically linked by a visual representation of how stubborn optimism, rather than utopianism, triumphs in the face of daily adversity. In her opening essay "Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion", Terrie Sultan offers an overview of the concept behind the exhibition and explains how the chosen works give form to contradictory sentiments of disillusionment, and defiance. David Pagel, in Romanticism's Aftermath, considers the role of Romanticism and Neoclassicism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how 'damaged romanticism' is a reinterpretation of this. The links between art and film are further explored by Colin Gardner in the third essay, From here to eternity. Preceding the main catalogue is a short story by Nick Flynn, a crystal formed entirely of holes, a new work of fiction written especially for this exhibition.