Published on the occasion of the huge retrospective ‘General Idea’ at the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022–2023), this volume constitutes the most comprehensive source on the Canadian collective General Idea, founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson, and active until the death of Partz and Zontal in 1994.

The volume is arranged in three parts: I. Performances and Actions; II. In the Streets; III. In the Showroom. The first two parts focus on works and methods that extend beyond the traditional museum exhibition, documenting ephemeral, time-based, and even disposable works. The third part includes a plates section offering a near-complete visual survey of General Idea’s practice. Facing-page comparative images show works as they appeared in historical installations and other relevant contexts.

Actions 1963–1986

This DVD edition presents for the first time all significant actions of Joseph Beuys. Film and video documents that were difficult to access and believed to be lost have been discovered, restored, digitized, and partially reassembled; thus these DVDs contain new editions, first releases, and bonus material.

The accompanying publication is a rich source for Beuys’ actions that were not documented on film or video; these are illustrated with texts and photographs. Further, the edition includes an index listing the audio-visual documents by Joseph Beuys at ZKM | Karlsruhe.

Gates and Portals

Marina Abramovic: Gates and Portals’ charts the pioneering performance artist’s life-long exploration of spiritual practice in relation to long durational performance, and the significance of portals and gates throughout history and cultures.

Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Marina Abramovic: Gates and Portals’, 24 Sep – 5 Mar 2023, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Most books on Abramovic go out of print incredibly quickly – we recommend you get your copy while you can.

Arts of the African Diasporas on Display. Exhibition Histories 13

‘Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display’ explores key moments that have created ruptures in how Blackness has been framed through exhibitions, emphasising how Black artists have been viewed and African diasporic art histories have been shaped.

The publication expands the field of exhibition histories through a selection of pioneering exhibitions that have shaped the domain of Black art today.

This title is part of Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series; addressing what happens when art becomes public.

Moving Off the Land

The publication closely follows the process of the artist Joan Jonas in developing the multiformat project ‘Moving Off the Land’.

It is Jonas’s most recent body of work and encompasses three years of research into the significance of the ocean throughout history as a totemic, spiritual, and cultural reference.

1935-2022

Paula Rego´s oeuvre has exerted a big influence on the development of figurative art in Europe from the middle of the 1950s to the present day.

Since Rego’s celebrated solo exhibition at Tate Britain in London in 2021, and her participation in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, interest in her art has increased – this is likely due to the universal appeal of her expressive, figurative style, the force and compellingness of her visual narrations, and the social relevance of her subject matter.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (*1993, Zimbabwe) combines visual fragments in her paintings, revealing a multi-layered and personal vision of life.

She experiments with photographs and digital image collages, using them to create large-scale works on paper or canvas with intensely pigmented oil paint, often employing other media and techniques such as silkscreen, pastel or charcoal.

Hwami is represented by Victoria Miro and featured in the Hayward’s ‘Mixing It Up’ exhibition earlier this year.

A Critical Reader

In recent years, the theory of art’s autonomy appears to have been confined to the annals of Modernism.

If contemporary history, political interventions and critiques of Eurocentrism have shown us anything, it is that art and its institutions are thoroughly socially determined, that art no longer operates in a separate or protects sphere of its own.

Researched and authored by Sven Lütticken, an art historian and critic who teaches at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, this ambitious study seeks to test such assumptions, arguing that autonomy, far from a romantic naiveté, retains its conceptual and political purchase.

The renowned Colombian artist Olga de Amaral is well known for her textiles and woven walls of fabric, but is not often discussed as a contemporary artist, in the same breath as Ruth Asawa or Cecilia de Vicuña, for example.

Following her inaugural exhibitions with Lisson Gallery in New York and in London, this book marks those first shows with installation views of both displays and selections of her work from across her career, from the 1960s to the past decade.

The act of walking has grown in importance as a social phenomenon in the 21st century.

Alongside everyday physical movement or the modern moment of recreation and sensual experience, it also touches upon current questions of ecological, global, geopolitical and economic change.

In its group exhibition WALK!, SCHIRN offers an overview of the previously little examined aspect of walking as a practice in contemporary artistic production.

PEL / Becoming the figure

De Bruyckere´s sculptures are testimonies to unique emotional depth. They touch with their vulnerability and melancholy, ranging between vitality and death, harmony and deformation, figurativeness and abstraction. They bear witness to visible and perceptible processes of transformation in human and animal life. Berlinde De Bruyckere endows them with an almost sacral aura.

Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere: PEL / Becoming the figure’, 3 Jul 2022 – 8 Jan 2023, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany.

Henry Moore Institute Essays on Sculpture: Issue 80

Lungiswa Gqunta’s work looks head on at the painful legacies of colonialism and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Through it, Gqunta illuminates ways of knowing that have so often been discredited by the atrocities of these frameworks.

The spaces she conjures deny the curtailments imposed upon African systems of knowledge by colonial conquests. From them, new – and ancient – libraries of information emerge to be shared and invested in.

The eightieth edition of the Henry Moore Institute’s Essays on Sculpture series is published to accompany the exhibition ‘Lungiswa Gqunta: Sleep in Witness’.