Summer Reading Room Book Lab
25 Jul - 17 Sep 2017
Past
Los Angeles
About
We invite you to enjoy and engage with a comprehensive selection of publications on the artists featured in our summer exhibitions – Takesada Matsutani, Paul McCarthy, and Monika Sosnowska. Throughout the summer, the Book & Printed Matter Lab will host a series of programs highlighting these books. For more details on the program schedule, please visit the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Events page.
Installation views
About the Artists
Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums—from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.
Monika Sosnowska’s sculptural language emerges from a process of experimentation with, and the appropriation of, construction materials such as steel beams, concrete, reinforcing rods and pipes. These elements—the solid and rigid foundations of buildings—are manipulated and warped, taking on an independence in which their former functionality is implied yet defunct. The formal language of her works echoes different contradictory Modernisms: that of the Polish constructivism of the 1930s; the minimal and conceptual tendencies of the international art of the 1960s and 1970s; and modernist architecture as experienced in Eastern Europe.
From the early 1960s until the 1970s Matsutani was a key member of the ‘second generation’ of the influential post war Japanese art collective, the Gutai Art Association. Over five decades Matsutani has developed a unique visual language of form and materials. As part of the Gutai group, Matsutani experimented with vinyl glue, using fans and his own breath to manipulate the substance, creating bulbous and sensuous forms reminiscent of human curves and features.
