Art & Art History

Scale is being taken to new extremes in art: from Luke Jerram’s microbiological clear-glass sculptures and Klari Reis’s petri dish paintings, to Lilian Bourgeat’s oversized furniture and stemware and Janet Echelman’s 230-foot-long aerial sculpture that was installed over the Amstel River in Amsterdam. Art lovers are forced to examine these massive or tiny works through a new perspective. Featured here are forty-five cutting-edge artists from around the world who are revolutionizing our approach to scale in art, using crafted or found objects, unusual materials, texture, color, and patina to create a sense of wonder in which we think afresh about function, appearance, beauty, and aesthetics. The book is divided into two sections: Big Art and Small Art. The artists showcased are innovative in their choice of materials, which include plastic bags (Pascale Marthine Tayou) crayons and pencils (Diem Chau), leaves (Lorenzo Manuel Durán), inflatables (Choi Jeong Hwa),and digital media (Yang Yongliang). Stylishly designed and highly accessible, this is the first book to bring together in one volume the very best examples of big and small art of the twenty-first century.

Over the last thirty years, Martin Puryear has created a body of work that defies categorization, creating sculpture that examines identity, culture and history. Departing from the impersonal and mechanical aesthetic of Minimalism, Puryears work combines modernist abstraction and the traditions of crafts and woodworking, in shapes informed by the natural and by ordinary objects, made with materials such as tar, wood, stone and wire. This book accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that follows Puryears development from his first solo show, in 1977, to new works that will be presented for the first time at the exhibition. With essays by John Elderfield, Michael Auping and Elizabeth Reede, and a conversation with the artist by Richard Powell, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the artist.

Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting presents an array of works that reflect the energy, vitality and innovation demonstrated by a diverse group of contemporary artists who apply traditional knitting and lacemaking techniques to unusual materials, or new techniques and technologies to traditional materials. The works brought together here are by artists from many different countries. Individually these works speak to the pervasive and persuasive cultural, social, and political issues with which art intersects today. The role of hand work as a symbol of community and communication is highlighted in many of these pieces, and the artist's personal commitment to collaborative experiments is the focus of others. The works are also barometers of change in the visual arts of our time, signaling the dissolving of the categories of art, craft and design that have fragmented the world of aesthetic and functional objects for more than a century.

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), renowned for his role in establishing Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant art movements in the postwar era, is perhaps best known for his masterful and brilliantly colored wall drawings. Throughout his career, however, LeWitt also created many remarkable three-dimensional works suitable for display in outdoor settings. In this handsome publication, which accompanies the first major career survey of LeWitt's "structures," the artist's modular works are traced from their simplest manifestation in a single large-scale cube through multiple variations, with examples from the 1960s through the 1990s. Works from the 1980s onward explore the three-dimensional possibilities of diverse geometric forms, such as stars, and the introduction of new materials, including concrete block and fiberglass, stimulating experimentation with non-geometric, irregular forms on an increasing scale. The book includes essays by Nicholas Baume and Joe Madura that provide curatorial and critical context for the structures. Additional essays by Rachel Haidu, Anna Lovatt, and Kirsten Swenson offer fresh art-historical commentary, ranging from the problematic of site for LeWitt's initial structures to the relationship between abstract conceptual systems, architecture, and urban space. Also included is a never before published conversation among the artist, Baume, and Jonathan Flatley. Stunning color plates record the works on display in Lower Manhattan's City Hall Park, supplemented by archival and historical documentation.

A documentary about film maker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye. This film explores Lye's career, and includes newly discovered historical footage of the artist. It also chronicles recent attempts to realize Lye's plans for giant versions of his sculptures.