Books by Massimiliano Gioni

Faith Ringgold: American People

by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari

The most comprehensive survey to date of the work of Faith Ringgold, whose groundbreaking art and political activism span more than sixty years – featuring a stellar line-up of contributors and an unprecedented collection of images
Faith Ringgold is a critically acclaimed American artist whose unique methods of visual storytelling have documented and advanced art historical, feminist, and civil-rights movements for more than half a century. Accompanying a major retrospective at the New Museum, New York, this expansive survey covers work from all periods of her career, including her early civil rights–era figurative paintings, her graphic political protest posters, and her signature experimental story quilts.

Hans Haacke All Connected

by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari

A monograph surveying the storied career of German artist Hans Haacke, on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition

Born in Germany in 1936, Hans Haacke is known for his intellectual and politically engaged art that has long shed light on systems of power. A pioneer of institutional critique, conceptual art, and environmental art, Haacke creates incisive, often site-specific works that call upon the viewer to engage or participate and thereby question invisible structural dynamics at play in society. This book offers an opportunity to revisit the artist's thought-provoking career in light of contemporary culture.

Kiki Smith: 2000 Words

by Massimiliano Gioni, Karen Marta

A monograph exploring Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerability
The art of Kiki Smith (born 1954) confronts what it means to be human. Her sculptures are often feminine figures that become personifications of sexuality, trauma and abjection. This monograph contains an essay by Margot Norton examining Smith’s fascination with the human body and its ability to project emotional vulnerability.

Tim Noble & Sue Webster: 2000 Words

by Massimiliano Gioni, Karen Marta

Male and female, sex and violence, art and trash: the power of Tim Noble (born 1966) and Sue Webster's (born 1967) art lies in its fusion of opposites. Working collaboratively since the early 1990s, these key figures of the YBA movement infuse their materials--pulsating hearts, flowers, dollar signs and their vulnerable, naked selves--with the intensity of their personal relationship.

Paul McCarthy - Revised and Expanded Edition (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)

by Massimiliano Gioni, Ralph Rugoff, Kristine Stiles

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artist
Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids.
These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist.
This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

Chris Ofili: 2000 Words

by Massimiliano Gioni, Karen Marta

Since the mid-1990s, Chris Ofili's (born 1968) painstakingly crafted paintings and sculptures have dazzled--and often distressed--viewers with a fusion of opposing forces: sacred meets profane, formal bows to demotic, and exalted bleeds into vulgar. Paintings of rare beauty are propped on elephant dung; deities squat to defecate; and lovers embrace and yet are forcibly bound.
This volume in Deste's 2000 Words series is authored by Katherine Brinson, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she curated the museum's 2013 Christopher Wool retrospective and also organizes the Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial award honoring significant achievement in contemporary art.

Judy Chicago Herstory

by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Margot Norton, Madeline Weisburg

The most comprehensive survey to date of the legendary feminist artist Judy Chicago

One of the most important contemporary American artists, Judy Chicago is known for multimedia works that embrace an explicitly feminist methodology. Accompanying a major retrospective at the New Museum, this book showcases Chicago's tremendous impact on American art and presents the full breadth of her career across installation, sculpture, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, and printmaking. Featuring an extensive selection curated by Chicago of works by women artists across history, the book also highlights her critical role as an activist and cultural historian who has reshaped the canon. This dedicated section features Chicago's 'personal museum' of women artists and historical figures whom she has placed within her own alternative canon, including Hilma af Klint, Simone de Beauvoir, Leonora Carrington, Elizabeth Catlett, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, and many others. The book presents works from across her sixty-year career, from her experiments with Minimalism to her revolutionary feminist artworks and her later works on themes of social inequity, environmentalism, and the construction of masculinity.