Helen Molesworth ist eine herausragende Kuratorin, deren Arbeit sich auf zeitgenössische Kunst konzentriert. Ihre kritischen Einblicke und redaktionellen Beiträge beleuchten die Praktiken bedeutender Künstler und bieten neue Perspektiven auf deren Gesamtwerke. Durch ihre kuratorischen Projekte und Veröffentlichungen prägt sie den Diskurs und vertieft das Verständnis in der Kunstwelt.
Catherine Opie's monograph offers an in-depth exploration of her impactful contributions to contemporary fine art photography over nearly four decades. Featuring over 300 stunning illustrations, the book pairs images from various bodies of work to reveal her artistic vision and psychological insight into American cultural and geographic identity. Created in close collaboration with the artist, it represents a significant milestone in understanding Opie's oeuvre and highlights the evolution of her unique narrative style.
Joan Mitchell (1926-1992) was a pre-eminent painter of the Abstract Expressionist generation, and, along with Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few female painters of her era to gain critical and public acclaim. She came to attention in the early 1950s but only recently has her work won the recognition it truly merits. Her large-scale gestural paintings register a great acuity of feeling and tremendous vitality. Leaving America documents Joan Mitchell's exhibition at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, London, which featured works made between 1960 and 1965, after she had relocated from New York to France. In the paintings of this period Mitchell moved away from the all-over style and bright palette of earlier compositions, instead deploying more sombre hues and dense central masses of color. The brushwork in these paintings is nonetheless full of zest, the paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across surfaces and smeared on by hand.
'A gem of a book' - Tracy Borman When Helen Molesworth joined the gem and jewellery industry she began her own love affair with one of humanity's oldest and richest fascinations. For as long as people have known about gemstones they have treasured them. Born of violent geological events and the chance meetings of minerals, their stories are an extraordinary journey through time, and are significant to the human narrative in as many ways as they boast sparkling facets. Selecting ten of nature's most dazzling jewels, Helen Molesworth makes journeys across the world to trace stones from their discovery to the moment a glimmering cut and polished masterpiece is traded, and then fought over, adorns emperors and kings, falls out of favour, and then raises eye-watering sums in another age. Touching on history and politics, archaeology and engineering, geography and geology, chemistry and physics, psychology and romance, fine art and high finance, her book is rich with great stories and has something for everyone.
An illustrated reader featuring a collection of essays from trailblazing curator and writer Helen Molesworth - the first book of her collected writings Over the past three decades, Helen Molesworth's singular voice and lively curatorial vision has established her as one of the most dynamic and influential voices in the art world. This generously illustrated reader - the first ever collection of her writings - presents 24 essays from the past 30 years, gathered from exhibition catalogs and art publications such as Artforum, Documents, frieze, and October. The volume opens with a new essay that lays out Molesworth's belief in art's unique capacity for merging knowledge and feeling. It also includes new critical and reflective commentary on her past writing, an innovative approach that will position Open Questions as an indispensable volume for viewing and thinking about contemporary art for generations to come.
Catherine Opie (born 1961) has forged new idioms in both portrait and landscape photography, frequently combining the two genres to explore how people occupy different landscapes--from high school football players on the field to ice fishermen on frozen lakes, to surfers waiting for the next wave. In doing so she has come to stand as one of America's foremost documentarians. Recently, Opie has returned to the genre of street photography, elaborating on the relationship between people and place, particularly the energies and desires created when masses of people convene around a shared interest or value. Freedom of assembly is one of the rights Americans take for granted; Opie is interested in the way that sites, such as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., come to be defined by the groups of people who assemble there and how their gathering shapes the identity of the place. This catalogue presents Opie's photographs of recent political demonstrations and gatherings, ranging from the inauguration of President Obama to Tea Party rallies. Drawing on a long and august tradition of American landscape painting and documentary photography, Opie gives us a view of democracy in action. Her photographs offer a dynamic, complicated and loving portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This fully illustrated catalogue features a discussion between the artist and ICA Boston Chief Curator Helen Molesworth.
Face to Face presents a selection of portraits of artists by three of the most prominent portrait artists of our time. Bringing together the diverse and distinctive work of Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie, this book forms an investigation into the charged genre of portraiture and its various approaches, navigating tensions between intimacy and publicity. While the three artists collected here share a wide set of historical touchstones, each deploys the camera Dean exploits cinema’s capacity for duration; Lacombe takes her cameras out on assignment; Opie works in the tradition of the studio photograph. Often overlapping in the subjects depicted, Face to Face offers an opportunity to look closely at bracing, intimate, and resonant portraits of the seminal thinkers and makers that these artists have encountered across the fields of music, painting, photography, film, and literature, among them Hilton Als, Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Patti Smith, Kara Walker, and many other others. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, the book includes essays by the exhibition’s curator, Helen Molesworth, and the artist and writer Jarrett Earnest.
