Vidya Gastaldon ISBN 3-905701-69-3 / 978-3-905701-69-2 Hardcover, 8 x 11.25 in. / 64 pgs / 40 color. / U.S. $29.00 CDN $35.00 August / Art

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by Matthieu Poirier. The exhibition will bring together works by twenty artists of eight different nationalities to explore the notion of landscape. Landscope, the exhibition and book, intend to call into question the art historical precedent of the correlation between landscape and drawing. The exhibition thus assembles, in two successive shows (Paris and Salzburg), over one hundred works, often in atypical formats, by artists for whom drawing is often just one medium among others, and landscape, a non-exclusive genre. Under the neologistic title "Landscope" - a contraction of "landscape" and "scope" [from the Greek skopein "to behold, to observe"], landscape is regarded as both a site and a view. The landscapes brought together here are often natural, yet reject conventional narrative or narcissistic themes. As in the mirror-like illustrations of Maeterlinck's dream of a theatre without actors, these scenes systematically exclude all human presence and thus contribute to the establishment of a scenography of absence, of a paradoxical phenomenology of emptiness. Even if these landscapes are completely deserted, they nevertheless remain "event-scenes [paysages d'évènements]" (Paul Virilio), genuine locations, resulting most frequently, from the collision of formal, logical and scopic motivations, rather than as a result of a narrative. Chosen here for its manifest artificiality and its necessarily dialectic relationship with the world, drawing appears as the indispensable tool for reconsidering this notion of landscape as well as the related themes of perspective, space and representation. It is not so much the spatial landscapes that are observed here, but through their archetypal characteristics, the very notion of landscape itself.--Press release.

A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of ‘inclusiveness’, both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of ‘exclusion’, which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of ‘others’ from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

159 artists from the international art scene.

The interfaces between art and the scientific disciplines of biology, environmental science, neuroscience, and physics pose interdisciplinary questions that are an inspiration to researchers. The authors compare artists’ experimentation set-ups and thereby reveal new levels of knowledge. The examples in the Artists-in-Labs program illustrate how artists approach problems and, in this way, create new tools for science. The authors of this illustrated volume of essays include Harriet Hawkins, Irene Hediger, Jill Scott, Arnd Schneider , Susanne Witzgall, Lisa Blackman, Jens Hauser and Dieter Mersch.

Essay by Wolfgang Tillmans.