Library

Library: Joe Bradley, Oscar Tuazon, Michael Williams

Greenwich April 2nd, 2018

The Brant Foundation’s Library features Joe Bradley, Oscar Tuazon, and Michael Williams.

This library selection features resources about Joe Bradley, Oscar Tuazon, and Michael Williams. Individuals are invited to visit The Brant Foundation’s spring 2018 exhibition of works by Bradley, Tuazon, and Williams, and use these resources to learn more about each artist’s practice.  Please contact info@brantfoundation.org if you would like to schedule an appointment to view the current exhibition and explore the related materials.

Current Exhibition: Joe Bradley, Oscar Tuazon, Michael Williams

About The Brant Foundation Library

The Brant Foundation’s library program was established in 2009 to facilitate the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art and to advance our mission of promoting arts education. As both a museum and art study center, the Foundation’s library serves as a crucial resource for students, scholars, and educators by providing access to a unique collection of hard-to-find materials. After noticing the difficulties of obtaining contemporary art publications, typically as a result of rarity or expense, the Foundation was inspired to make efforts to broaden their holdings and increase accessibility to the public.

By reaching out to the surrounding arts community for help, the Foundation has accumulated an actively growing, rich collection of contemporary art books. With the contributions from the many organizations and institutions that share our vision, the public gains access to a wider range of materials used for the scholarly study and examination of contemporary art. Housing over 1,000 volumes – from exhibition catalogs and artist monographs to art criticism texts and periodicals – the library reflects the Foundation’s collection and admiration of contemporary art. Because of the rarity and value of the materials, our library is non-circulating, but we welcome and encourage the public to make use of the study center during operating hours. Please contact info@brantfoundation.org to make an appointment to visit The Brant Foundation’s library.

Joe Bradley

American painter Joe Bradley has distinguished himself among the artists of his generation with his mutable approach to art-making. With minimal fuss, Bradley works in series, picking up and discarding styles and oscillating between abstraction and figuration as it suits him. “A retrospective of his work would look like a group show,” wrote dealer and collector Kenny Schachter. Bradley’s first large-scale North American exhibition supports this observation: he is shown moving from expressionistic canvases that record the detritus and spontaneity of the studio environment to subtly figurative send-ups of Minimalist painting, then to starkly primitivistic glyphs drawn in grease pencil on unprimed canvas, followed by modular aluminum sculptures paired with textual directives.

This richly illustrated catalog, published to accompany Bradley’s midcareer survey organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, presents the full range of Bradley’s unique approach to language, abstraction and the evolutions of style. Joe Bradley includes reproductions of all works in the exhibition―some 30 paintings, 8 sculptures and 30 drawings―as well as an introductory essay by exhibition organizer Cathleen Chaffee, new scholarly essays, an interview with the artist and an exhibition history.

Joe Bradley: Drawing

Joe Bradley (born 1975) is widely known for his bright, angular abstract paintings and glyph-like drawings. This first publication on Bradley gathers his drawings from the last five years, charting their evolution from starkly funny plays on Minimalism to cartoons to linear abstraction. Each drawing is presented to scale, and the book can be read as a flip book of Bradley’s process.

Joe Bradley: Krasdale

Published in 2017 on the occasion of the exhibition “Joe Bradley Krasdale” at Gagosian Madison Avenue, New York in 2016

Texts by Sir Norman Rosenthal and Anne Pontégnie

11 1/4 × 12 1/2 inches (28.6 × 31.8 cm); 100 pages; Fully illustrated

Published by Gagosian; Designed by Valentina Akerman; Printed by The Avery Group at Shapco Printing, Minneapolis

Oscar Tuazon: Live

by Anna Brohm (Author),‎ Philipp Kaiser (Author),‎ Miwon Kwon (Author),‎ Oscar Tuazon (Author),‎ Nico Machida (Author),‎ Antek Walczak (Author)

Oscar Tuazon: Live, the second major publication on the American artist (born 1975), concentrates on an exhibition of new sculptural works at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, including a full-scale reproduction of fragments of the artist’s house in Los Angeles.

Oscar Tuazon: Break the Glass

by Oscar Tuazon (Author),‎ Greece) Kastro (Antiparos Island (Author),‎ Galerie Eva Presenhuber (Author)

Published by Galerie Eva Presenbuber, 2015.

 

Michael Williams

by Eric Crosby (Author),‎ Michael Williams (Artist),‎ Suzanne Hudson (Contributor)

Over the last 10 years, Los Angeles–based Michael Williams (born 1978) has created paintings known for their layered imagery, eye-popping color and use of airbrushing and inkjet printing.

His large-scale works begin as drawings either on paper or on the computer screen before they are printed or transferred to canvas and then embellished with oil paint. Williams’ narrative content reveals a dark sense of humor about everyday life, often exploring the role of the painter as observer. Wickedly funny allegories merge with abstract painting as free-form amoebic shapes frequently fill the entirety of his canvases. The resulting paintings offer a dense and absorbing terrain of color and form. Michael Williams is published to accompany the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition, at Carnegie Museum of Art, where he presents a new body of his large-scale paintings as well as drawings that mix collage and free-associative mark-making.

Michael Williams: Paintings

This book was published on the occasion of Michael Williams’s 2013 exhibition at CANADA and features full-color plates of the paintings and their installation. Williams works for the show were drawn on a computer and printed on canvas, then stretched, and often painted some more. The images are freely associated constructions often involving landscape plus figuration plus wit or whim.

Text by Jack Hanley
Published by: Karma, New York
Edition of 500
© 2014

Michael Williams

In the last few years New York-based artist Michael Williams (born 1978) has evolved from making large gestural oil paintings to similarly scaled paintings printed with a billboard-sized inkjet printer. Despite the drastic shifting of materials there is a warmth and personal quality which persists in the paintings. Williams summons a large catalogue of imagery generated through a dedication to drawing and a mining of his inner psyche. The images that recur are often comical, and occasionally take jabs at the present state of humankind, though lacking an accusatory tone. There is a refusal in Williams’ paintings to side with representation or abstraction, instead he neglects the issue and pursues his own line of complex image-making. This volume gives an overview of these recent shifts in Williams’ paintings and includes essays by British fiction author and journalist George Pendle, and curator and writer Dan Nadel. It is published on the occasion of Michael Williams’ solo exhibition at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Michael Williams: How to Ruin an Omelet

How to Ruin an Omelet is the third in a series of artist’s books by Los Angeles–based painter Michael Williams (born 1978), following California Land for Sale!! and Yoga Online. Using a fashion sketchbook with figurative templates as its foundation, How to Ruin an Omelet is a lively amalgam of text and image.

Michael Williams: Things You Shouldn't Understand

Things You Shouldn’t Understand is the newest in a series of drawing books by Los Angeles–based painter Michael Williams (born 1978).

It employs the motif of marker bleeding through a page to propel the narrative, each image repeating in mirror form and interacting with a new one on its facing page, as a psychedelic cast of creatures twists and turns.