This month we have a bumper list of superb new releases to tell you about – too many, in fact – it’s a big list! Instead we have selected five highlights which are comparatively rather different yet certainly worth your attention.
In order to tempt you even more, we have delved deep into the art world reviews and endorsements for the books (most of which accompany exhibitions). From super heroes to psychedelic acid-trip cartoons and beyond, we have some treats for you! So, let’s leave the reviews to do the talking…
MARVEL: Universe of Super Heroes (Verlag für moderne Kunst)
“…Universe of Super Heroes broadly appeals to parents and kids, fans and newbies. It’s got enough frenetic energy to impress the most sugar-addled young minds, and enough glamour to appeal to folks who can’t tell the Falcon apart from Hawkeye. And in the middle of all the unabashed fun, the exhibition delivers a jolt of serious cultural value in the perfectly preserved comics pages that started it all.” — Paul Constant, Seattle Times
Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective (Kerber Verlag)
“Liking Robert Indiana’s art has always seemed like a guilty pleasure. That’s partly because LOVE, his iconic work, is hugely popular, and also because he expressed sentiments – LOVE, HUG, EAT – that verge on the sentimental. But, Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective […] makes a compelling case for the stature of this late Pop artist. Walking through the Buffalo museum’s show, it’s clear that Indiana wasn’t a one-shot wonder […] Had he never designed LOVE, Indiana would be remembered for artworks that display his remarkable graphic sensibility, eye-popping sense of color, and gift for integrating text with abstract forms […] This outing could not have been more tantalizing.” — Phyllis Tuchman, ArtNews
Chicago Imagists (Hayward Publishing)
While the world was patting New York, LA and London on the back for inventing pop art and conceptualism back in the late ’60s, a group of artists in Chicago were too busy having the time of their lives to care. The Chicago Imagists are criminally under-known – a bunch of friends turning acid trips and comic strips into vivid, hilarious, ridiculous painting – but this exhibition should go some way towards changing that […] It’s all so fun, so funny, so free, so different to everything we think mid-century art is meant to be. I’d take countless hours of this over yet another painfully serious show of dour art by artists we all already know. Chuck your soup cans and Marilyn Monroes in the bin: the Imagists are where it’s at.” — Eddy Frankel, Time Out London
Lydia Cabrera: Between the Sum and the Parts (Koenig Books)
“Cabrera published over one hundred books during her lifetime, few of which are available in English […] Cabrera was a brilliant, complex figure whose work should be better known to an international audience […] In this modestly sized exhibition, the curators introduce us to the multi-layered, complex cultures, traditions, and legacies that are part of the history of the Caribbean, amalgams that underscore the significance of interracial and cultural marriages and the possibilities they beget.” — John Yau, Hyperallergic
13 March 1911: Adam Smyth (Information As Material)
“Adam Smyth’s exemplar of E. M. Forster’s ‘only connect’ makes its own atmosphere from shreds and patches of a single day in history so that unconnectedness itself is the common factor that brings minutiae of humour, big names and small, world events and parochial incidents together in a rich and colourful tapestry that causes us to muse on every day there has ever been and the kaleidoscope that would reward his kind of affectionate research.” — Tom Phillips, CBE, RA and author of A Humument (Thames & Hudson)
Image credit: Gladys Nilsson, A Cold Mouth (detail), 1968, taken from the exhibition and book, Chicago Imagists (2019)