Books by Briony Fer

Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (Modern Art Practices and Debates)

by David Batchelor, Paul Wood, Briony Fer

This book begins by considering responses by French artists to the First World War, showing how Purism, Dada, and early Surrealism are related to the ethos of post-war reconstruction. The authors then discuss the language of construction in places as dissimilar as France, Germany, and the Soviet Union; the contrasting demands of the utility and decoration of objects and paintings; and the relationship of surrealism to questions of sexuality and gender and to Freudian theory. The book concludes by addressing the widespread debate over realism in art: whether it represents an alternative to the elitism of the avant-garde or whether avant-garde art should play a role in the development of a modern realism.

Anni Albers

by Briony Fer, Ann Coxon, Maria Müller-Schareck

A long-overdue reassessment of one of the most important and influential woman artists working at midcentury

Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a German textile designer, weaver, and printmaker, and among the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism. Although she has heavily influenced generations of artists and designers, her contribution to modernist art history has been comparatively overlooked, especially in relation to that of her husband, Josef. In this groundbreaking and beautifully illustrated volume, Albers’s most important works are examined to fully explore and redefine her contribution to 20th-century art and design and highlight her significance as an artist in her own right.

Featured works—from her early activity at the Bauhaus as well as from her time at Black Mountain College, and spanning her entire fruitful career—include wall hangings, designs for commercial use, drawings and studies, jewelry, and prints. Essays by international experts focus on key works and themes, relate aspects of Albers’s practice to her seminal texts On Designing and On Weaving, and identify broader contextual material, including examples of the Andean textiles that Albers collected and in which she found inspiration for her understanding of woven thread as a form of language. Illuminating Albers’s skill as a weaver, her material awareness, and her deep understanding of art and design, this publication celebrates an artist of enormous importance and showcases the timeless nature of her creativity.

Published in association with Tate

Exhibition Schedule:
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany
(06/09/18–09/09/18)
Tate Modern, London
(10/11/18–01/27/19)

Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Modern Art Practices and Debates)

by Tamar Garb, Briony Fer, Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, Nigel Blake

This first volume in the series focuses on aspects of Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism in Paris between 1848 and 1900. Discussing works by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Morisot, and other great painters of the period, the authors demonstrate how some historians view this art as representative of the social, historical, and economic circumstances in which it was produced, how the painterly effects of the art are evaluated, and how a feminist perspective can help to explain art works and change our perception of them.

Francis Picabia Our Heads are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction

by George Baker, Briony Fer, Catherine Hug, Gordon Hughes, Anne Umland, George Thomas Baker, Carole Boulbes, Masha Chlenova

By rejecting consistency, Picabia powerfully asserted the artist's freedom to change

Irreverent and audacious, restless and brilliant, Francis Picabia achieved fame as a leader of the Dada group only to break publicly with the movement in 1921. Moving between Paris, the French Riviera, Switzerland, and New York, he led a dashing life, painting, writing, yachting, gambling, racing fast cars, and organizing lavish parties. Like no other artist before him, Picabia created a body of work that defies consistency and categorization, from Impressionist landscapes to abstraction, from Dada to stylized nudes, and from performance and film to poetry and publishing. A primary constant in his career was his vigorous unpredictability.

Illustrated with nearly 500 reproductions, this sweeping survey of Picabia's eclectic career embraces the challenge of his work, asking how we can make sense of its wildly shifting mediums and styles. In her opening essay, curator Anne Umland writes that with Picabia, familiar oppositions between high art and kitsch, progression and regression, modernism and its opposite, and success and failure are undone.

In 15 superb essays, additional authors--including distinguished professors George Baker, Briony Fer, and David Joselit and renowned Picabia scholars Carole Boulbès and Arnauld Pierre--delve into the radically various mediums, styles, and contexts of Picabia's work, discussing his Dada period, his abstractions, his mechanical paintings, his appropriations of source imagery, his multifaceted relationship with print (both in his paintings and as a publisher and contributor to vanguard journals), his forays into screenwriting and theater, and his complex politics. Marcel Duchamp, of course, but also Nietzsche and Gertrude Stein make repeat appearances along the way.

Turning to Picabia's contemporary legacy, Cathérine Hug maps the history of his critical reception and interviews contemporary curators and artists, including Peter Fischli, Albert Oehlen, and David Salle. A lively 30-page chronology illustrated with archival photographs and ephemera gives readers a year-by-year account of the artist's colorful life and of his interactions with fellow artists and critics, friends, and lovers.

Together these essays suggest that the unruly genius of Picabia offers us a powerfully relevant and provocative alternative to the familiar narrative of modernism.

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction accompanies the major 2016 exhibition on the artist, jointly organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Francis Picabia was born in 1879 in Paris, the only child of a Cuban-born Spanish father and a French mother. His first success came as a painter in an Impressionist manner. He went on to become one of the principle figures of the Dada movement in New York and Paris. In 1925 Picabia moved to the south of France, where he lived and worked through World War II. Following the war, Picabia returned to Paris, where he died in 1953.

Gabriel Orozco Politécnico Nacional

by Briony Fer, Gabriel Orozco, Benjamin Buchloh

A comprehensive volume devoted to the major Gabriel Orozco exhibition held in Mexico City.

The first overview of Orozco’s practice in Mexico in more than fifteen years, this major exhibition occupies the entirety of the Museo Jumex. Curated by Briony Fer, the exhibition takes a thematic approach to the artist’s practice over the past thirty years. Each floor focuses on different aspects of Orozco’s constantly evolving body of work, including relations of work and world, space and time, provisionality and process.

This long-overdue publication will feature an essay by Fer and an in-depth conversation between the artist and Benjamin Buchloh, accompanied by illustrations of Orozco’s masterpieces. The exhibition and publication aim to provide a comprehensive exploration of Orozco’s artistic journey, highlighting key pieces from his diverse body of work, including sculptures, installations, and paintings. This initiative reflects Museo Jumex’s commitment to showcasing contemporary art and fostering deeper engagement with influential artists like Orozco.

Orozco’s works have been included in the permanent collection of several museum institutions such as the Pérez Art Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Aspen Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Noguchi Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Tate, London; and Museo Reina Sofia, Spain.

Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible

by John Yau, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, Ruth Asawa, Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson

Revealing rarely seen work alongside her iconic looped-wire sculptures, this catalogue celebrates Ruth Asawa’s unique vision and intimate subject matter.

Known for her intricate and distinct artistic language, Asawa produced numerous sculptures, drawings, and prints that are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Her works on paper and “continuous” looped-wire sculptures suggest a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms, a means of reshaping how we perceive the world. Personal motifs reappear throughout in the most comprehensive look at the artist’s oeuvre to date––ceramic casts of faces of her family, friends, and neighbors; the carved front door Asawa and her family made for their home; and drawings of her children, grandchildren, and husband sleeping––all providing an expansive look into the artist’s life.

A document of the breathtaking and surprising exhibition Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible, organized by Helen Molesworth, this book records and expands upon the show, offering new insight from writers and curators with a selection of sixty-four works from Asawa’s spectacular oeuvre. With an introduction by Molesworth, this book features focused texts from Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau.