Product Description

Andy Warhol's silkscreens, Gerhard Richter's blurred images, Vija Celmins' hyperrealism: some of the most influential developments in the history of contemporary art hinge on the use of photographs as source material. Beginning in the early 60s, with seminal works by the aforementioned artists, The Painting of Modern Life charts the 45-year evolution of the translation of photographic images to paint--revealing an extraordinary breadth of stylistic and thematic diversity. This volume features 22 painters whose sources range from snapshots to commercial media, among them Richard Artschwager, Robert Bechtle, Celmins, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Thomas Eggerer, Judith Eisler, Franz Gertsch, Richard Hamilton, Eberhard Havekost, David Hockney, Johannes Kahrs, Johanna Kandl, Martin Kippenberger, Liu Xiaodong, Malcolm Morley, Elizabeth Peyton, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Richter, Wilhelm Sasnal, Luc Tuymans and Warhol. Essays by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, writer and critic Martin Herbert, Hayward Director Ralph Rugoff and poet and critic, Barry Schwabsky lend insight to issues of translation, context and content.

About the Author

Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, and immigrated to North America with her family when she was 10 years old. Since the 60s she has received international attention for her renditions of natural scenesooften copied from photographs that lack a point of reference, horizon, or discernible depth of field. A master of several mediums, including oil painting, charcoal, and multiple printmaking processes, Celmins matches a tangible sense of space with sensuous detail in each work. She received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, and retrospectives of her work have traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. In 2002, a retrospective of her prints was held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Celmins currently resides in New York and California.

Richard Artschwager was born in 1924 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in New Mexico. He began his studies at Cornell University in 1941 but was called into service for World War II. In 1950 he moved to New York, where he began to design and build furniture, a commercial venture which held great influence over his early sculpture. Artschwager's work is found in the collections of such institutions as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Franz Gertsch was born in Morigen, Switzerland in 1930, and studied in Bern. He made his first large-scale photorealist works in the late 1960s, and showed them to rapt attention in the early 1970s. His large-scale woodcut work, which he began in the 1980s, is unique--he works in formats that push the limits of paper production, and has opened new dimensions for a traditional medium. Gertschis work is represented in museums around the world.

Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Since the early 1960s he has emerged as one of the essential painters of the postwar period, pioneering photorealism with paintings made from found photographs (amateur snapshots, advertisements and book and magazine illustrations) and then from his own photographs. His work has also profoundly engaged with and influenced such genres as Pop and abstract art. A retrospective of Richter's work was shown in 2001 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition was one of the largest ever organized there for a living artist, and traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. In 1949, after attending the School of Fine Arts at what is now Carnegie Mellon University, he moved to New York City where he embarked on a successful career as a commercial illustrator. It was in the 1960s that he began his iconic Campbell's Soup paintings, and honed his trademark deadpan persona. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Warhol created silkscreen paintings, sculptures and films, promoted the fledgling rock band, The Velvet Underground, and produced Interview magazine. After surviving a gunshot wound inflicted by the infamous Valerie Solanis in 1968, Warhol died during a routine gallbladder operation in 1987.

Barry Schwabsky is an American art critic and poet living in London. He is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art and Opera: Poems 1981-2002, as well as contributions to Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting and to monographs and exhibition catalogues on such artists as Alighiero e Boetti, Jessica Stockholder, and Gillian Wearing. Schwabsky also co-edits the international reviews section of Artforum and has taught at New York University, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College.