Hauser & Wirth Publishers: Spring 24 New Releases

SPRING 2024

NEW RELEASES

‘The process of making a book is in many ways comparable to creating an exhibition. In both, we try to provide artists with the instruments necessary to make concrete their ideas.’

—Iwan Wirth, President, Hauser & Wirth

ABOUT HAUSER & WIRTH PUBLISHERS

In keeping with Hauser & Wirth’s artist-centric vision, Hauser & Wirth Publishers works to bring readers into the universe of artists and behind the scenes of their practices. From publishing artists’ writings and exceptional exhibition-related books to commissioning new scholarship and pursuing the highest levels of craft in design and bookmaking, Hauser & Wirth Publishers creates vital, lasting records of artists’ work and ideas, forging critical gateways to the cultural discourse they inspire.

Through its Oral History Initiative, Hauser & Wirth Publishers is building an enduring record of artists’ voices for future generations. Additionally, the imprint publishes Ursula magazine, a biannual print and digital periodical that features essays, profiles, interviews, original portfolios, films and photography by thought-provoking writers and artists from around the world.

Across its dedicated bookstores in the U.S. and Europe, Hauser & Wirth Publishers complements and amplifies the artist’s voice by hosting a robust slate of special programs, including talks, panels, readings and learning initiatives that engage a variety of audiences and communities.

Publishing has been a cornerstone of Hauser & Wirth’s activity since the gallery’s founding in 1992. Its publishing activities steadily flourished through partnerships with imprints such as Hatje Cantz, JRP|Ringier, Snoeck, Steidl, Thames & Hudson, and Yale University Press before the establishment of Hauser & Wirth Publishers, with headquarters in New York and Zurich.

For sales and distribution inquiries, please contact Sian Edwards sianedwards@hauserwirth.com hauserwirth.com/publishers

GERHARD RICHTER: ENGADIN

DECEMBER 2023 (UK & EU) / MARCH 2024 (US & ROW)

GERMAN / ENGLISH

CO-PUBLISHED WITH THE NIETZCHE-HAUS / SEGANTINI MUSEUM

SOFTCOVER WITH FLAPS

21 × 29 CM

978-3-906915-90-6

£23 / $25 / €25

Edited and with text by

Dieter Schwarz

Coinciding with the eponymous exhibition at the Nietzsche-Haus, Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz, ‘Gerhard Richter: Engadin’ delves into the artist’s deep relationship with the Engadin region in the Swiss Alps, which he first visited in the late eighties. In an insightful essay, Dieter Schwarz, curator of the exhibition, discusses the works in the exhibition and explores the impact of the Alpine landscape on the artist. With eighty color illustrations, the book features paintings, overpainted photographs, and archival images, with some materials here presented to a wider public for the first time.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Over the past sixty years, Gerhard Richter has produced a boundary-breaking oeuvre whose thematic and stylistic diversity remains unrivalled amongst the art of our time. From 1962 onwards, Richter has used photographs from public and private sources as the basis of figurative paintings. He subsequently ventured into an individual form of abstraction resulting in his iconic curtain paintings and color charts. The give-and-take between representation and abstraction is characteristic for Richter, whose works range from grey paintings, romantic landscapes, sea and cloudscapes, portraits, squeegee paintings, and strip paintings. ‘If the abstract pictures show my reality, then the landscapes and still lifes show my yearning,’ he wrote in 1981.

EVA HESSE: EXHIBITIONS, 1972–2022

APRIL 2024 (UK & EU) / MAY 2024 (US & ROW)

ENGLISH

HARDCOVER

20 × 30 CM

978-3-906915-86-9 £52 / $60 / €58

Edited and with an introduction by Barry Rosen. Text by Linda Shearer, Nicholas Serota, Ellen H. Johnson, Helen Cooper, Renate Petzinger, Elisabeth Sussman, Sabine Folie, Fred Wasserman, Catherine de Zegher, Fiona Bradley, Briony Fer, E. Luanne McKinnon, Petra Roettig, Brigitte Kölle, Andrea Gyorody and Lena Stringari

This volume provides a historical account of Eva Hesse’s landmark institutional exhibitions. Contributions from the museum curators involved in organizing these shows reflect the personal dimension of crafting an exhibition, addressing questions of intent and reception. With extensive installation views, archival material, ephemera and snapshots, ‘Eva Hesse: Exhibitions, 1972–2022’ brings these exhibitions to life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1936, Eva Hesse is one of the icons of American art of the 1960s, her work being a major influence on subsequent generations of artists. Comprehensive solo exhibitions in the past 30 years, as well as a retrospective that toured from San Francisco MOMA to the Museum Wiesbaden and finally to Tate Modern in London, have highlighted the lasting interest that her oeuvre has generated. Hesse cultivated mistakes and surprises, precariousness and enigma, in an effort to make works that could transcend literal associations. The objects she produced, at once humble and enormously charismatic, came to play a central role in the transformation of contemporary art practice.

Interview:

MBS: I would like to start by asking you about your own relationship to Mike Kelley. Is he an artist you were ever interested in? When and where did you first encounter his work and what kind of thoughts did it prompt?

MB: In the early 2010s, my roommate Putri Tan was an artist liaison at Gagosian and she brought me a copy of Exploded Fortress of Solitude, which had just been published by the gallery. I loved it. My first real interaction with Mike Kelley’s work was at his massive retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 2012. I remember thinking it was so cool to see work that transcended the anxiety of being between entertainment and critique (and that critiqued entertainment methods themselves). It was a very formative experience.

MBS: When I was asked to think about your practices in parallel, what immediately came to mind is the referential quality of both of your work, the way you create associative connections through quotation. In Kelley’s case it can be juvenile literature, pornography, science fiction, and detective stories. In yours, it’s cartoons, global pop music, viral videos, memes, and science fiction too. The use of the familiar to make it short. Except, while Kelley infuses his with horror and dark humor, yours is infused with magic and tender humor. Can you talk about your use of references and the way you quote cultural objects in your work?

MB: I think the way I use my references is with a feeling of unconditionality. I get so excited and intrigued by a cultural phenomenon or musical genre or specific YouTuber that it superfuels the need for making work. It’s like a generative fandom that stops before spiraling into horror. Maybe it’s because I’m not working squarely within the very scary realm of American pop culture, only using some of its languages, which have become familiar on a global scale. The way I use quotations is often methodological, not topical. For example, I will use reality TV for the way it instantly stirs up drama rather than as a subject in itself. The use of toys, cartoons, or anything juvenile in Mike Kelley’s works are often quoting childhood, while for me cartoon is a form of expression, not a reference to the past.

MBS: I am also interested in ways of reconstructing memory. Kelley’s seminal work Educational Complex started with reconstructions of schools he attended as a way of indexing the sites of his education. While the exterior models of the schools are fairly accurate, the interiors are radically incomplete, reflecting Kelley’s inability to remember what was there. These unremembered sections of architecture are left blank, represented as inaccessible, un-filled blocks. This somehow led me to think about your ap-

proach to oral tradition as a way to access collective memory and I thought in particular about your work Siham & Hafida (2017) (Fig. 1) which is about Aita, a traditional genre of music with a repertoire of songs and lyrics dating back to the early 20th century. The songs have no known origin and are transmitted through oral history and intergenerational bonds, and probably transformed and distorted in the process. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

MB: That’s a nice connection. We’ll never know if the incomplete sections in Educational Complex even existed in the first place. Since Aita is passed on orally, we only get what the previous generation gave us, through live transmission, and for that reason we have to assume it’s complete and original. Of course, the idea that oral history leads to inaccuracy or gaps in memory is very flawed. In Aita, the musical and emotional interpretation of the songs makes a singer a respected Chikha. In a way, keeping the emotional memory of heartbreak or resistance (two popular subjects in Aita) alive through vocal interpretation feels like a true miracle of resuscitation, maybe more accurate than a recording or a set of written lyrics. It’s like a time capsule that is sustained through live bodies. It’s not archival because it’s constantly in the making. Obviously, it shouldn’t be either or, both written or recorded, and oral methods are useful for different reasons. Mike Kelley’s subjectivity in memory is a starting point for the individual specificity of art making, while Aita is public domain. It’s cool to think that oral history is a form of collective artmaking, a type of creative meta subjectivity.

MBS: In an interview for BOMB magazine he gave in 1992, Kelley, when asked about images of dead animals in the Kuwait City Zoo taken during the Gulf War that were showcased on public television, responded: “You can’t feel for the people who are dying because that’s too close to home; but if you can go through the secondary device of the animals, then you can

63 Meriem Bennani

FIGURE 1: Meriem Bennani, still from Siham & Hafida, 2017

Ezra Nayssan

Del Vaz Projects Wirth Publishers with Foundation for

978-3-906915-84-5

NONMEMORY: MIKE KELLEY WITH KELLY AKASHI, MERIEM BENNANI, BEATRIZ CORTEZ, RAÚL DE NIEVES, OLIVIA ERLANGER, LAUREN HALSEY, MAX HOOPER SCHNEIDER

APRIL 2024

ENGLISH

CO-PUBLISHED WITH DEL VAZ PROJECTS SOFTCOVER

21.6 × 29.25 CM

978-3-906915-84-5

£38 / $45 / €42

Edited and with text by Jay Ezra Nayssan. Introduction by Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Text by Mike Kelley. Conversations between Kelly Akashi and Kathryn Andrews, Meriem Bennani and Miriam Ben Salah, Beatriz Cortez and Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Raúl de Nieves and Ceci Moss, Olivia Erlanger and Ruba Katrib, Lauren Halsey and Jova Lynne, Max Hooper Schneider and Mary Clare Stevens

‘Nonmemory’ brings together works by Mike Kelley and a group of artists—Kelly Akashi, Meriem Bennani, Beatriz Cortez, Raúl de Nieves, Olivia Erlanger, Lauren Halsey, and Max Hooper Schneider—whose work similarly engages Kelley’s titular concept: the ‘nonmemory’ of the various institutional spaces or built environments he encountered in his life. Documenting the eponymous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in 2023–24, the book also features reproductions of important works by Kelley, his foundational essay, ‘Architectural Non-memory Replaced with Psychic Reality,’ conversations with each artist and a new text by exhibition curator and editor of the publication, Jay Ezra Nayssan.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mike Kelley is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Originally from a suburb outside of Detroit, Kelley attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Southern California in 1976 to study at California Institute of the Arts from which he received an MFA in 1978. The city of Los Angeles became his adopted home and the site of his prolific art practice. In much of his work, Kelley drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, and was known to scour flea markets for America’s cast-offs and leftovers. Mining the banal objects of everyday life, Kelley elevated these materials to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture.

Rio Terà dei Pensieri was founded in 1994 with the goal of creating positive work opportunities with and for people who are incarcerated or have recently been incarcerated in two Venetian prisons. Using the workers’ collective model, whereby decisions are made democratically, the cooperative offers a creative outlet and productive employment through its organic produce garden and cosmetics lab at the women’s prison, Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, and silkscreen and bag manufacturing labs at the men’s prison, Casa Circondariale Santa Maria Maggiore.

Rio Terà consists of around thirty members, including incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people now working as employees, and volunteers. In all four facilities, incarcerated people receive specialized training to carry out their work and are paid the same wages they would earn outside the prison for similar jobs. Part of Italy’s long history of labor organization and radical collective thinking, Rio Terà is one of several nonprofit social cooperatives currently operating across the country, each producing goods specific to its region so as to reduce competition.

Process Collettivo, Mark Bradford’s collaboration with Rio Terà, began in 2016. The project’s primary initiative is a storefront in central Venice that sells the products produced by Rio Terà, offers resources for the formerly incarcerated, and shares information about the cooperative with the public.

In September 2023 Bradford met with Rio Terà’s former president Liri Longo to discuss the origins and goals of their work together and the role of relationships in collectives, nonprofit work, and socially engaged projects more generally. An edited transcript of their conversation follows here, accompanied by documentation of Rio Terà’s programs and the Process Collettivo collaboration, as well as descriptions of the various aspects of each of the cooperative’s activities. The photographs were taken by Carlos Avendano, Agata Gravante, and Damian Turner during one of Bradford’s visits to the prisons in 2017. This documentation is accompanied by firsthand accounts from current and former Rio Terà members, who speak to their experiences

working with the organization and Process Collettivo. These interviews were conducted for this publication in late 2023 and have been edited for clarity. Several of those interviewed have requested that their names not be used; to respect their privacy and for the sake of consistency, individuals are identified by first initials throughout.

Reflecting the international scope of this collaboration, the text in this chapter appears in both English and Italian. In the conversation between Bradford and Longo and the firsthand accounts from current and former Rio Terà members, emphasis has been given to the language in which these conversations took place—English for the former, and Italian for the latter.

La cooperativa sociale Rio Terà dei Pensieri è stata fondata nel 1994 con l’obiettivo di creare opportunità lavorative in un ambiente positivo, assieme e per le persone detenute di due carceri veneziane. La cooperativa offre uno sbocco creativo e un impiego utile grazie alla presenza dell’orto biologico e del laboratorio di cosmesi presso il carcere femminile, Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, e dei laboratori di serigrafia e di pelletteria presso il carcere maschile, Casa Circondariale Santa Maria Maggiore.

Rio Terà comprende circa trenta membri, di cui fanno parte volontari e persone attualmente detenute ed ex detenute, ora assunte. Per tutte e quattro le attività della cooperativa, le persone detenute ricevono una formazione

specifica che consente loro di portare avanti le proprie mansioni con competenza e sono pagate tanto quanto guadagnerebbero per professioni simili fuori dal carcere. Rio Terà appartiene alla lunga storia italiana di organizzazioni lavorative e di pensiero collettivo radicale; inoltre, è una delle cooperative sociali non a scopo di lucro attive in tutto il paese, che realizzano prodotti tipici della propria regione per ridurre una possibile concorrenza tra le diverse iniziative.

Process Collettivo, la collaborazione di Mark Bradford con Rio Terà, è iniziata nel 2016. Punto cardine del progetto è lo spazio nel centro di Venezia che vende i prodotti di Rio Terà, offre opportunità per le persone ex detenute, e informa il pubblico sulle attività della cooperativa. A settembre del 2023, Bradford e Liri Longo, ex presidentessa di Rio Terà, si sono incontrati per parlare delle origini e degli obiettivi del loro lavoro congiunto e del ruolo delle relazioni nei collettivi, nel lavoro no profit e, più in generale, nei progetti di impegno sociale. Nelle pagine seguenti si svolge la loro conversazione, accompagnata dalla documentazione del programma di Rio Terà e della collaborazione Process Collettivo, oltre a spiegazioni più dettagliate delle singole attività della cooperativa. Le fotografie sono state scattate da Carlos Avendano, Agata Gravante e Damian Turner durante la visita di Bradford alle carceri, nel 2017. Inoltre, la documentazione è accompagnata da testimonianze dirette di attuali ed ex membri di Rio Terà, che parlano delle loro esperienze lavorative all’interno della cooperativa e di Process Collettivo. Le interviste sono state organizzate alla fine del 2023 appositamente per questa pubblicazione, e qui appaiono revisionate per garantirne la chiarezza. Molti partecipanti hanno chiesto di rimanere anonimi; nel rispetto della loro privacy e per coerenza, per tutte le persone intervistate sono state utilizzate solamente le iniziali dei loro nomi.

Nella conversazione tra Bradford e Longo e nelle testimonianze degli attuali ed ex membri di Rio Terà è stata data enfasi alla lingua originale in cui si sono svolte: inglese per la prima, italiano per le seconde.

Produce Garden / Orto

Established in 1994, the produce garden— nicknamed l’Orto delle Meraviglie, or the Garden of Wonders—was Rio Terà’s first initiative inside Venice’s prisons. Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, Venice’s women’s prison, was a former convent, and the produce is cultivated in what was its garden. The women incarcerated there plant, tend, and harvest around forty varieties of fruit, vegetables, flowers, and wild herbs across 64,500 square feet of terrain, using organic agricultural methods. These women also sell the produce to the public at a weekly stand at the entrance to the prison, and to local restaurants, where chefs have developed special, seasonal menus based on the food the garden has available. The women also prepare bags of mixed vegetables for a Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, or solidarity purchasing group—a unique Italian system of buying goods collectively, first established by several families in the city of Fidenza in 1994, that seeks to empower consumers, support the local economy, and foster relationships between consumers and producers, very much in a collective spirit like Rio Terà’s.

La prima iniziativa di Rio Terà all’interno delle carceri veneziane è stata l’istituzione dell’Orto delle Meraviglie nel 1994, che nasce nel giardino dell’ex convento dove la Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca ha tuttora sede. Qui le persone incarcerate piantano, coltivano e raccolgono circa quaranta varietà di frutta, verdura, fiori, erbe selvatiche e aromatiche, per un totale di 6.000 metri quadrati di terreno, utilizzando metodi di agricoltura biologica. Ogni settimana, le persone detenute vendono i prodotti al pubblico, allestendo un banco all’ingresso del carcere, e a ristoranti locali, che sviluppano menù stagionali speciali basati sulla disponibilità dei frutti dell’orto. Inoltre, le persone detenute preparano ordini di verdure miste per Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, un sistema prettamente italiano per l’acquisto collettivo di prodotti nato a Fidenza nel 1994 grazie all’iniziativa di diverse famiglie, e che cerca di responsabilizzare i consumatori, supportare l’economia locale e favorire le relazioni tra consumatori e produttori, in uno spirito collettivo simile a quello di Rio Terà.

Rio Terà and Process Collettivo

Mark Bradford Collettivo

Process

MARK BRADFORD: PROCESS COLLETTIVO

APRIL 2024 (UK & EU) / MAY 2024 (US & ROW) ENGLISH WITH ITALIAN INTERVIEWS

SOFTCOVER WITH FLAPS

16.5 × 22.9 CM

978-3-906915-85-2

£38 / $45 / €42

Edited by Nicole R. Fleetwood

Edited and with an introduction by Nicole R. Fleetwood. Conversation between Mark Bradford and Liri Longo. Essays by Asale Angel-Ajani, Elisabetta Grande, Mitchell S. Jackson and Jessica Lynne

In 2016, the artist Mark Bradford began a partnership with the cooperative Rio Terà dei Pensieri, an organization that creates work opportunities with and for people incarcerated and recently incarcerated in two prisons in Venice, Italy. The ongoing project, Process Collettivo, builds on Rio Terà’s existing structure, raising awareness about its work through a storefront that sells goods made by the collective—providing funding for the nonprofit—and offers both resources and employment for the previously incarcerated.

This book examines and offers extensive documentation of both Rio Terà’s multifaceted activities and the collaboration with Bradford. The publication features a conversation between the artist and former President of Rio Terà Liri Longo that delves into the history of their work together and the importance of relationships in collectives, nonprofit work, and socially engaged artmaking. Functioning in the spirit of Process Collettivo, the book also serves as a platform for vital information related to the project’s concerns: new essays by Asale Angel-Ajani, Elisabetta Grande, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Jessica Lynne critically assess the state of Italian prisons, provide a comparison of Italian and American carceral systems, reflect on the power of creativity inside prisons, and consider this partnership as part of a larger discourse of social practice.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he still lives and works. He is best known for his large-scale abstract paintings created out of paper. Characterized by its layered formal, material and conceptual complexity, Bradford’s work explores social and political structures that objectify marginalized communities and the bodies of vulnerable populations. Just as essential to Bradford’s work is a social engagement practice through which he reframes objectifying societal structures by bringing contemporary art and ideas into communities with limited access to museums and cultural institutions.

NEW RELEASES SPRING 2024

NICOLE EISENMAN: MAKER ’ S MUCK

JUNE 2024

ENGLISH

TRADE EDITION SOFTCOVER

29.25 × 23.5 CM

978-3-906915-78-4

£38 / $45 / €42

SPECIAL EDITION WITH MUCK SPINE SOFTCOVER WITH JACKET

29.25 × 23.5 CM

978-3-906915-91-3

£100 / $125 / €110

Edited by Sarah Nicole Prickett. Text by hannah baer, Hannah Black, Durga Chew-Bose, Cyrus Dunham, Sheila Heti, Alhena Katsof, Shiv Kotecha, Matt Longabucco, Sam McKinniss, Ryan McNamara, Tess Pollok, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Sam Roeck, Jasmine Sanders, Lynne Tillman and Janique Vigier

At the center of Nicole Eisenman’s installation ‘Maker’s Muck,’ a plaster figure is seated at a potter’s wheel, surrounded by sculptures in various stages of formation. Eisenman has invited several authors to follow the trajectories of ‘Maker’s Muck’ and its many objects in essays, metafictional reflections and other experiments in interpretation.

SPECIAL EDITION WITH MUCK SPINE

The special edition conceived in close collaboration with the artist features a silkscreened linen jacket with a tipped-in image inside flap. With a limited number of 500 copies produced, a line of acrylic ‘muck’ has also been hand-piped onto the spine of each book.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Nicole Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Her work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, 2019 Whitney Biennial and 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster in Münster, Germany. Most recently, the solo exhibition ‘Nicole Eisenman: What Happened’ was on view at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, and Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2023, traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in April 2024.

Look the part, be the part, motherfucker.

—Proposition Joe, The Wire, season 1, episode 9

My grandfather wore a tie every day. Well into his eighties, confined by age and temperament to an upstairs bedroom in the house he had purchased with savings from a job as a railroad porter, he would bathe, shave, and dress in a white shirt, tie, suspenders, and a pair of sharply pressed trousers, only to spend the day in an armchair with a quilt over his knees, listening to radio evangelists or reading the daily papers. He had left a sharecropper’s plot in Bishopville, South Carolina, in the mid-’40s for Washington, DC, his clothes and whatnot stuffed into a few cardboard suitcases. Staying with relatives until he got established, he would soon send for the wife and eight children he left behind. I have a photograph of my grandfather from that time posing in a white suit, wide-brimmed hat, and patterned tie against a painted backdrop of a suburban house. The photograph was taken long before he actually had a house to stand in front of, but for him it was an image of the future he had arrived in and something to send back to the folks at home to say “I made it, I’m here, I’m doing OK.” For my grandfather and an estimated six million other Black people, it became clear that there were no prospects in the segregated South, and between World War I and the beginning of the 1970s they fled for, as the author Richard Wright would put it, “the warmth of other suns.” The life to come was in Washington, DC, or New York, or Detroit, or Oakland, or Chicago. It didn’t matter much that, in the end, those utopias never lived up to their promise. What mattered was that Black life and Black possibility were not as brutally suppressed in those spaces as they were in the South. My grandfather’s portrait, with its optimistically painted scene of middle-class American life, was an image of a future he had willed into reality.

Sun Ra was also part of the great migration, leaving Birmingham, Alabama, in 1945 for a future he was going to create. Although my grandfather wouldn’t have recognized that future, a place where time travel,

in, where your feet never really have to touch the ground because they’ve thought of everything, they’ve thought of experiences you would like, food you want to eat, temples you want to visit, artists you might want to know.. But also what was amazing was to understand was that, as Americans, we don’t understand that people are very happy in their lives. Somehow we think that American culture is culture and that there’s no other way of being. But no, people are very happy in their lives.

If you grew up in a culture, things that happen there are quite naturalized. You don’t see them anymore. Once my friend Caroline, Luca’s mom, was handing me something and I said, “Caroline, do you realize that everything you hand me is on a tray, even if the tray is not physically there?” She’s like, “What are you talking about?” It’s like you just don’t see it anymore. But there’s this notion of hospitality and how to present something to somebody.

I’m a crude American. Hand somebody something—just hand it

Interview by Ben Luke

to them. In Japanese culture, it’s either literally on a tray or symbolically on a tray. There’s this elegance about how a guest should be treated.

BL: This next question brings up a subject which I think we’re going to be dwelling on for some time. Which writers or poets do you return to?

GL: Well, Baldwin, obviously, over and over again. But it’s a hard question, actually, because there are a lot of people.

BL: I suppose just because you make work from texts doesn’t mean that you return to those texts a lot. So, for instance, how important to you is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man now?

GL: That’s true. Although I made work using text from Invisible Man very early on in my career, I haven’t returned to it. And there are some writers newer to me, like Édouard Glissant, whose name has been floating around for a long time. I’d really never read the work so much, so I’ve been diving into that work now and thinking it through.

Stuart Hall, I think, was enormously important. I met him probably the first time I came to London through great friends, the artist Isaac Julien and the curator Mark Nash. I didn’t know that one could meet someone like Stuart Hall, that he would just be around at a dinner. That was astonishing to me. So that was super important.

His work has been something that I’ve returned to over and over again. There’s a brilliant meditation on him by the filmmaker John Akomfrah, titled The Unfinished Conversation (2012), that I keep looking at as well.

And I’ve just discovered that Toni Morrison narrated a lot of her books. She passed away many years ago, but it’s amazing to hear her voice and hear how she inhabits her characters.

BL: One thing I wanted to ask you about was Gertrude Stein. I wondered how much appreciation you have for her writing, because obviously it plays a problematic role in your work.

Glenn Ligon, Warm Broad Glow II, 2011. Installation view, Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD, 2021

Ligon’s grandfather Sylvester Hooks in the mid-1940s, Washington, DC

GLENN LIGON

GLENN LIGON: DISTINGUISHING PISS FROM RAIN; WRITINGS AND INTERVIEWS

JUNE 2024

ENGLISH

SOFTCOVER WITH FLAPS

16.5 × 24.1 CM

978-3-906915-88-3

£32 / $38 / €35

Edited by James Hoff. Introduction by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax. Text by Glenn Ligon

This long-awaited and essential publication collects three decades of writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose work has been delivering an incisive examination of race, history, sexuality, and culture in America since his emergence as an artist in the late 1980s. No stranger to text, Ligon has routinely used writings from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Richard Pryor, and others to construct work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the artworld and culture writ large. He began writing in the early 2000s, engaging deeply with the work of peers such as Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson, as well as artists that came before him, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons, and Andy Warhol. Throughout the publication, Ligon combines razor-sharp insight with anecdotal and biographical details, providing the fullest picture yet of the artist and his ongoing evaluation of the art and politics of our time. Complementing essays and less easily categorizable writings are illuminating interviews with Helga Davis, Thelma Golden, Byron Kim, Hamza Walker, and others, as well as a foreword by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax and a preface by the artist.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Glenn Ligon is an artist living and working in New York. Ligon pursues an incisive exploration of American history, literature and society, across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. Important solo exhibitions include ‘Post-Noir,’ Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); ‘Call and Response,’ Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); his mid-career retrospective, ‘America,’ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011); and ‘Some Changes,’ The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2005). In 2021, he was inducted as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

prompted this sudden urgency, given that we had not talked about the divorce, nor done anything about it, for four whole years. So I asked, “Why’s diter suddenly in such a hurry?” Ragnar explained that diter’s fiancée, Dorothy, was putting pressure on him to get the divorce done so that they could get married.

I immediately resolved that I would not stand in their way, and that I would do whatever was needed to complete the divorce. I said as much to Ragnar, but added that diter and I would have to talk about the issue and handle the process ourselves. We would, for instance, need to arrange an appointment with a vicar in order to obtain a certificate that all attempts at reconciliation had failed; “diter needs to state his side of the case there—and he also needs to talk to me!” Ragnar replied that diter was not in the country, but was probably somewhere in Germany. He also told me that diter absolutely refused to enter into any discussion with me directly, which was why he had asked Ragnar to act as his agent throughout this process. “Dear Sigga, just go and get the certificate from the vicar. Then we can meet at the civil court office to sign the divorce settlement.”

I felt that diter and I needed at least to talk to each other about how to divide possessions between us. So, over the next few days I did my best to contact him, but he was nowhere to be found. I thought about hiring a lawyer, but gave up on that idea—I felt that he or she would have no more success than me in trying to speak to diter. I decided that I simply had to trust him to treat me honestly in the proceedings.

Around noon some days later, Ragnar rang unexpectedly to ask me to meet him that day at the civil court office to sign the documents. I was very busy preparing for an exhibition of art made by hospitalized children, but nevertheless hurried over. I hastily signed the certificate for our legal divorce without reading what it said, and rushed back to work.

1960–61

That winter, I started mooting the idea with diter that we should visit his parents in Switzerland. He was immediately on board. We decided to try and go the coming summer, and began planning the trip. Kalli would come with us, of course, whereas Adda would spend time out in the country as usual; she spent every summer with my relations at Flaga in Skaftártunga in the south of Iceland, where she was so happy and content.

diter had been in contact with Arthur Köpcke, a German artist who lived in Copenhagen. He ran Galleri Köpcke in an old desanctified church in the center of Copenhagen. Around the time we were making our plans for the Swiss trip, diter received an invitation from Köpcke to exhibit book aa, his portfolio of hand-cut black-and-white pages. diter asked me if I would like to exhibit my book poems – drawings (1959) as well, and I agreed to do so.

One day, diter told me that a young Swiss woman, a commercial designer from Bern, had contacted him to see if he could procure some work for her in Reykjavík. She had worked in Bern for Hartman, the same commercial designer as diter, which was how she had made the connection. diter said he had got her a job at Ásgeir Júlíusson’s advertising agency, and that she would be arriving on Gullfoss the following day, and would I mind letting her stay in the side room of our apartment to start with. I didn’t mind at all, and set about making the room ready and cozy for the young woman. When the steamer arrived, diter went down to the harbor to fetch her.

I kept on peering out of the living room window onto Ljósvallagata to see if they were coming. And then the taxi drew up. I was standing by the window as they stepped out of the car. Beatrix Sitter-Liver was a dashing young woman, tall and slim, with a mass of lovely long, curly hair. diter gave me a smile as he looked up to the window when Beatrix emerged; he looked in good spirits and happy to be in the company of his fellow countrywoman.

She lived with us in the side room for a few months, and we left it up to her whether or not she had meals with us; she of course shared the

Top diter and Kalli on a visit to Ingibjörg and Bjarni in Egilsstaðir.

Bottom diter showing Kalli how to fish on the trip to Egilsstaðir.

DIETER ROTH IN MY LIFE: MEMORIES

APRIL 2024 (UK & EU) / MAY 2024 (US & ROW)

ENGLISH

SOFTCOVER WITH FLAPS

16 × 22 CM

978-3-906915-89-0

£28 / $29.95 / €25

Written by Sigríður Björnsdóttir

Sigríður Björnsdóttir met 26-year-old Dieter Roth in Copenhagen in 1956. A year later, Roth joined her in Reykjavík, and in 1957 they married. Over sixty years later, Björnsdóttir recounts their meeting, their life together with her daughter, Adda, and their children Karl, Björn and Vera, the ups and downs of their marriage, and their eventual separation and divorce

Beyond her own professional and artistic activities, and her roles as mother and wife, the author describes her collaborative and experimental work with Roth, their encounters with friends and artistic peers within the tightly woven Icelandic creative community, and the beginnings of Roth’s multifaceted practice. During this period Roth designed furniture and jewelry, pursued typographical work, experimented with new printing techniques, and worked on several artist’s books. In 1957, together with the Icelandic poet Einar Bragi, he founded the publishing house forlag ed. After their divorce in 1964, Roth kept studios in Mosfellsbær and Seyðisfjörður, and collaborated with his children and grandchildren until his death in 1998.

‘Dieter Roth in My Life: Memories’ is a rare testimony—an honest and highly personal account of a period in Björnsdóttir’s life, shared with a man she describes as the love of her life, who went on to become a successful and highly influential artist.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Dieter Roth was born in Hanover, Germany in 1930, relocated to Switzerland during the war, and married and moved to Iceland in 1957. He died in Basel in 1998. Roth was an artist of an immense diversity and breadth, producing books, graphics, drawings, paintings, sculptures, assemblages, installations, audio and media works involving slides, sound recordings, film and video. He also worked as a composer, poet, writer and musician. Throughout his career, the artist continually circled back to earlier ideas and processes, reinterpreting and transforming works so that linearity and closure are consistently defied. Transience and order, destruction and creativity, playful humor and critical inquiry, the abject and the beautiful, all maintain a consistent balance throughout his work.

Cover and back cover

Mike Kelley, Concretized Negative Space (detail), 2002

© Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved / VAGA at ARS, NY. Photo: Genevieve Hanson

Page 3

Hauser & Wirth Publishers Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland, 2019 © Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke

Hauser & Wirth Publishers Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland, 2022 © Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Photo: Noë Flum

Hauser & Wirth Publishers Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland, 2019 © Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke

Page 4

Gerhard Richter, 25.3.15 (detail), 2015 © Gerhard Richter 2023 (03112023). Photo: Georgios Michaloudis, farbanalyse, Köln

Page 6

Eva Hesse with ‘Expanded Expansion,’ in the exhibition ‘Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1969 (detail). Courtesy the Estate of Eva Hesse

Page 8

Spreads from ‘Nonmemory: Mike Kelley with Kelly Akashi, Meriem Bennani, Beatriz Cortez, Raúl de Nieves, Olivia Erlanger, Lauren Halsey, Max Hooper Schneider,’ 2024

Page 10

Spreads from ‘Mark Bradford: Process Collettivo,’ 2024

Page 12

Nicole Eisenman, Maker’s Muck (detail), 2022

© Nicole Eisenman. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Page 14

Spreads from ‘Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews,’ 2024

Page 16

Spreads from ‘Dieter Roth in My Life: Memories,’ 2024

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Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street, NY, 2023

© Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Photo: Matthew Praley

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