Helen Pashgian: Spheres and Lenses

Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988–2009 is the first book to explore the late period of Frankenthaler’s art and life.

Profusely illustrated with more than 95 plates and 40 archival images, the book features essays by Douglas Dreishpoon and Suzanne Boorsch; a roundtable discussion with Katharina Grosse, Pepe Karmel, and Mary Weatherford; an illustrated chronology and selected bibliography. Initiated by Dreishpoon, Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné and Chief Curator Emeritus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the book complements an exhibition of Frankenthaler’s late paintings on paper and canvas organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and curated by Dreishpoon that premiered in 2021 at the New Britain Museum of American Art before traveling to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, and Artis—Naples/The Baker Museum.

Frankenthaler’s invention of the soak-stain technique expanded the possibilities of abstract painting with references to figuration and landscape. In later years, her practice continued to evolve through the use of diverse media and processes, as she shifted from painting canvas on the floor to using larger sheets of paper that were laid out on the floor or on table tops for easier accessibility. The continuity between the late work and what came before is striking, as the painter, graced with a vast art-historical image bank, and technical prowess, moved in whatever direction suited her mood and imagination. 

Printed on paper made from Japanese shrubs, this work of book art documents artist Ann Hamilton’s fascination with tactility, an exploration into the possibility of cultivating attention in a hyper-distracted world of information.

Throughout her practice, Ann Hamilton has used videos and still images as part of her larger installation works, though they have rarely been the singular focus of a project. This publication brings together vocabulary from four bodies of image-based work produced over the last five years and includes photographic portraits as well as lens-less contact scans of ornithological taxidermy, fabrics and garments, and objects from various personal and institutional collections. Hamilton believes that her projects can be considered not as artifacts or something to be documented, but as their own material object—in this case, a book. While Sense contains images that Hamilton has accumulated over many years, of people and of objects that conflate touch, light, and surface, the book also becomes an object in hand, a thing felt, an artwork in itself. 

Reprocessed through multiple printings on tissue Gampi and newsprint, the images emphasize the tactile nature of their substrate and Hamilton’s material hand. The work’s physical presence is reinforced by the textured surface of the book’s pages and scale shifts. This volume thus becomes an art object of its own; repetition, the atmospheric nature of the images’ shallow depths of field, and the intuitive connections made between different bodies of work create an almost film-like cadence that renders the felt qualities of touch.

His extensive and diverse work, not only in sculpture but in photography, printmaking, and new media, points to his ongoing exploration of the possibilities—technical and metaphoric—that can be wrought from this medium.

— Lauren Tresp, THE Magazine

For nearly 50 years, Tom Joyce has employed hands on knowledge of diverse materials to produce cast, forged, and constructed sculpture, charred drawings, photographs, and mixed-media artworks that often incorporate industrial remnants from large scale manufacturing or iron fragments collected for their significance to a specific region or event. 

With recent commissions for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (seven interactive sculptures forged from 19,500 pounds of salvaged stainless steel) and for the National September 11 Memorial Museum, (a 75-foot-long quote by Virgil forged from 8,000 pounds of iron retrieved from the collapsed World Trade Center towers), Joyce continues to examine, through the inheritance of prior use, the environmental, political, and historical implications of using iron in his work. This volume includes in-depth essays from MaLin Wilson-Powell and Ezra Shales.

The definitive survey of Charles Ross’s career.

– Khristaan D. Vilela, New Mexico Magazine

Charles Ross’s fascination with light, time, and the space of the stars has given life to a rich artistic career that includes a major earthwork, large-scale prism installations, sculpture, and painting with dynamite. From Star Axis, a vast architectonic earth/star work in the New Mexican desert, to his Solar Burns series made by burning wood panel monochromes with focused rays of the sun, Ross allows the natural patterns and forces of the cosmos to inform his work. 

This significant monograph includes major essays by Thomas McEvilley and Klaus Ottmann, an extensive interview with Loïc Malle, which profiles Ross’s life and art up to the present, as well as historical texts by Virginia Dwan, Anna Halprin, Michael Heizer, Steve Katz, Donald Kuspit, Ed Ranney, and Jean-Hubert Martin.