ExpoOsloConteudo
In the Name of the Artists – American Contemporary Art from the Astrup Fearnley Collection
Gunnar B. Kvaran (curator)
Portuguese and English
Translated by Alexandre Barbosa de Souza, Jeff Hessney and Suzana Vidigal
272 pages
224 x 285 cm
ISBN 978-85-85298-36-4
Price: R$ 120
Sales at the exhibition and by Livraria da Travessa at
http://www.travessa.com.br
This catalogue accompanies the exhibition In the Name of the Artists – American Contemporary Art from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, held by the Bienal de São Paulo between September 30 and December 4, 2011, in the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. The presentation of the 51 artists in the book, structured in three separate parts, reflects, to a certain degree, the project of the exhibition itself, distributed on three floors of the building, as: the most consecrated contemporary.
American artists, who have been developing their work since the 1980s and 1990s; the younger generation, which emerged onto the artistic scene at the beginning of the 21st Century; and the special guest, British artist Damien Hirst, who maintained ties with the older American artists and exerted a major influence on the younger generation.
On request from the curator, many of the artists sent short texts of their own or from other authors able to say something about their oeuvre. These statements or excerpts from texts and interviews are reproduced in the catalogue as freer – and, for this very reason, more heterogeneous – presentations of the works on display. The text by the curator Gunnar B. Kvaran presents, and establishes relationships among, the various different artists, placing them within the context of the history of the art of the past several decades.
The catalogue is supplemented by a selection of critical texts about the artists with the most substantive presence in the exhibition, with particular highlights being the essays by Arthur Danto on Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst; by Julian Stallabrass on Tom Sachs; by Nancy Spector on Matthew Barney and the text by the writer Alan Pauls on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, none of which has been published in Portuguese before now.