Robert Slifkin

For nearly four decades, Ari Marcopoulos has broken conventions with his candid and raw style. His photo- graphs documenting subcultures such as skate- boarding, snowboarding, and hip-hop; his tendencies to photograph stark landscapes, portraits of artists, and celebrities; and his extremely quiet and intimate photos of his family and friends have all been hugely influential in helping to establish the visual rawness of youth culture, as well as the ephemeral aesthetic of contemporary photography. Ari Marcopoulos: Not Yet is an unprecedented journey through the artist's celebrated career, from skate- boarding and snowboarding to rural landscapes and cityscapes. This volume includes both iconic and never-before-published photographs from the 1980s to now. Each chapter is edited by a different cele- brated artist or family member-all close to Marcopoulos-and it is through these personal reflec- tions on the artist's work that this monograph takes on a deeper level of intimacy, drawing a more complete portrait of his oeuvre.

Focusing on the thirty-three paintings that Philip Guston exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, this in-depth account reconsiders the history of postwar American art and the conception of figuration in modern art history. Through a myriad of cultural touchstones, including evidence from literary and musical vogues of the period, Robert Slifkin examines the role of history as both artistic medium and creative catalyst to Guston's practice as a painter. Slifkin employs a wealth of visual examples, archival materials, and original scholarship to situate Guston's paintings within broader artistic debates of the time, using the cultural movement of "the sixties" as its orienting foreground. This historical framework provides an interface between the notions of time in art and time in the material world. Lively and edifying, Slifkin's comprehensive text productively complicates the prescribed traditions of postwar art history and, in turn, shifts our perception of Guston and his place in the domain of modern art.

This special edition featuring a slipcase is available in a limited run of 300 hand-numbered copies. The newest book from the widely revered Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama features her latest monumental and vibrant work and is the first to explore the experience of seeing it from the lens of the visitor. “My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.” —Yayoi Kusama One of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since the 1950s, she has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements—such as dots—to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes. Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural maze of pumpkin walls, a lush garden of towering flowers, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, the result is a book that offers the sense of experiencing the work in person for readers who have not had the chance. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin looks at how Kusama innovates and complicates art historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama’s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.

The newest book from the widely revered Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama features her latest monumental and vibrant work and is the first to explore the experience of seeing it from the lens of the visitor“My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.” —Yayoi KusamaOne of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since the 1950s, she has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements—such as dots—to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes. Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural installation of pumpkins, a trio of towering, colorful flower sculptures, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers is a vivid document with varying perspectives that echo Kusama’s own. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin looks at how Kusama innovates and complicates art historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama’s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.

The Outlands, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s lens: vibrant colors and a profound sense of nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images - a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home - The Outlands is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition. Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.

I carry my landscapes around with me focuses on American abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s. Mitchell’s exploration of the possibilities afforded by combining two to five large canvases allowed her to simultaneously create continuity and rupture, while opening up a panoramic expanse referencing landscapes or the memory of landscapes. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Art critic John Yau lauded her paintings as “one of the towering achievements of the postwar period.” Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2019, this book offers a unique opportunity to explore the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative area of Mitchell’s extensive body of work. It not only features reproductions of each painting in this selection as a whole, but also numerous details that allow an intimate understanding of the surface texture and brushwork. In the complementing essays, Suzanne Hudson examines boundaries, borders, and edges in Mitchell’s multipanel paintings, beginning with her first work of this kind, The Bridge (1956), considering them as both physical and conceptual objects; Robert Slifkin discusses the dynamics of repetition and energy in the artist’s paintings, in relation to works by Monet and Willem de Kooning, among others.

How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculptureIn the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.