Books by Rachel Haidu

Gerhard Richter: Panorama: A Retrospective: Expanded Edition

by Mark Godfrey, Christine Mehring, Dorothée Brill, Camille Morineau, Achim Borchardt-Hume, Rachel Haidu

The expanded edition of the definitive Gerhard Richter survey
First published on the occasion of the major retrospective exhibition that opened at Tate Modern in 2011, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is the most complete overview of the artist’s entire career to date. This stunningly illustrated survey encompasses works from the late 1950s to the present―photo-paintings, abstractions, landscapes, seascapes, portraits, color charts, grey paintings, glass and mirror works, sculptures, drawings and photographs―providing the definitive account of Richter’s achievements. It also includes studio photographs, archival images and texts by an array of international critics and curators. This expanded edition of Panorama includes a new text by Mark Godfrey that covers works made since the 2011 exhibition, including the Strip, Flow and Birkenau paintings, as well as an updated chronology. With more than 300 illustrations, and an interview between Richter and Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, this book remains the most comprehensive survey of one of the world’s pre-eminent contemporary artists.

The Absence of Work Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976

by Rachel Haidu

A provocative investigation of Marcel Broodthaers's work as a reflection on the uses and abuses of language.

In 1964, at age forty, Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) proclaimed that his years of writing poetry--of being "good for nothing," in his words--were over, and a brief but dazzling artistic career began. Considered a founding father of institutional critique, Broodthaers created hundreds of objects, books, films, photographs and exhibitions, including a "fictive" museum of modern art that evolved from an installation in his own home to a massive exhibition of over three hundred works representing eagles. In The Absence of Work, Rachel Haidu argues that all of Broodthaers's art is defined by its relationship to language. His perception of his poetry's "failure to communicate" led him to explore in his art the noncommunicative, nontransparent uses of words.

Haidu's characterization of Broodthaers's contribution to institutional critique represents a major departure from the usual approach to this movement. With The Absence of Work, one of the first monographs on Broodthaers in English, Haidu demystifies a crucial and enigmatic figure in postwar and contemporary art.