Books by Philippe Vergne

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (WALKER ART CENT)

by Kevin Young, Robert Storr, Thomas McEvilley, Philippe Vergne, Sander Gilman, Yasmil Raymond

Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

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Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 (Dia Art Foundation, New York - Exhibition Catalogues)

by Philippe Vergne, Yasmil Raymond

A major retrospective catalogue on the career of minimalist sculptor and poet Carl Andre
Carl Andre (b. 1935) redefined the parameters of abstract sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a highly influential voice in the American minimalist movement, recognized for his ordered linear and grid formats. In the early 1960s, Andre’s creative focus shifted to writing poetry when he took a job as a freight brakeman and conductor for the Pennsylvania Railroad. His poems echoed and extended the themes in his sculptural work, and his experience with the railroad significantly influenced his choice of materials in later years.

In this stunning catalogue, which accompanies the first retrospective of Andre’s work since 1970, the artist’s legacy is examined in eleven essays by international scholars. The book presents a broad range of sculpture made over the past fifty years, including Andre’s emblematic floor and corner pieces, highlighting his radical use of standardized units of industrial material such as timber planks, concrete blocks, and metal plates. A vast selection of Andre’s previously unpublished concrete poems, together with letters, postcards, ephemera, and documentation of important installations, further complements our understanding of an essential figure in the history of contemporary art.

Published in association with Dia Art Foundation

Exhibition Schedule:
Dia: Beacon (05/04/14–03/02/15)
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
(05/14/14–10/15/15)
Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
(05/08/16–09/25/16)
Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris
(10/22/16–01/29/17)

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