from Californian counterculture to intimate artist portraits by the likes of Tacita Dean

Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie, edited by Helen Molesworth, Mack and ICP, 164pp, £35 (pb)

The publication celebrating three main ladies photographers accompanies an exhibition on the Worldwide Middle of Images (ICP) in New York (27 January-1 Might). “This e-book types an investigation into the charged style of portraiture and its numerous approaches, navigating tensions between intimacy and publicity,” says a press release from the publishers. Among the many highlights are stills from Tacita Dean’s 16-minute movie portrait of David Hockney and One Hundred and Fifty Years of Portray (2021), which captures on movie a dialog between the painter Luchita Hurtado, who died in 2020 aged 99, and the artist Julie Mehretu (their mixed ages encourage the movie’s title).

Etel Adnan, edited by Sébastien Delot, Susanne Gaensheimer and Matthias Mühling, Hirmer Publishers, 208pp, £40 (pb)

This monograph on the late Lebanese poet and artist Etel Adnan accompanies a survey at present operating on the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich (till 26 February). The publication presents Adnan’s texts, work, tapestries and leporellos—accordion-like items combining poetry and artwork—spanning greater than eight many years. “Politically, poetically and metaphysically, Adnan’s texts and photos replicate the energetic change between the Arab and the Western world,” says a press release from the publishers. The quantity additionally seems to be at Adnan’s use of Arab calligraphy in her leporellos. In an interview with The Artwork Newspaper in 2018, she stated: “Calligraphy is much less inviting as a result of it’s actually very codified… We expect that writing is mental, however it’s also a bodily exercise. Your hand will get right into a trance.”

Portia Zvavahera by Meredith A. Brown and Allie Biswas, David Zwirner Books, 112pp, £50 (hb)

This monograph devoted to the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavaheraincludes 24 work together with an in depth evaluation by the curator Meredith Brown, who attracts analogies between Zvavahera’s work and the work of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. “[The latter’s] experimental aesthetic is obvious in Zvavahera’s ‘expressive manipulation’ of paint whereas her compositions and topics correspond to Klimt’s later works,” writes Brown. In an interview with the author Allie Biswas, Zvavahera discusses the significance of desires to her follow, saying: “My reminiscence is extra visible—the visions and the feelings are what come most strongly, and that is what permits me to color. Even the dialogue in a dream returns to me.”

The Artist within the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Different Tales from the Edge by Thomas Crow, Princeton College Press, 288pp, $55, (hb)

This account of the so-called counterculture tells the story of artwork in California from the Sixties to the Eighties by means of protagonists such because the late US artist Bruce Conner and the Catholic activist and artist Corita Kent, who was additionally a nun. Crow outlines the geographical span of his evaluation with “its first half leaning onerous if not solely towards San Francisco and the north, the second towards Los Angeles and the south”, shining a light-weight on a “generational cohort galvanised by resistance to conflict, racial oppression, and environmental degradation”. The artist Mike Kelley’s “abbreviated profession closes the e-book”, Crow says, highlighting key works by the late Los Angeles artist comparable to Portray with Hawaiian Masks, Ballerina and De Stijl Portray (1976).