Michael Semff

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the most important living American painters and sculptors. His career is closely tied to the abstract style of "hard-edge" painting in the Sixties, with color field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques that emphasize the simplicity of form, frequently enhanced by bright colors. Alongside his geometrical paintings, Kelly is famous for his beautiful drawings of plants, flowers, and leaves, which were shown together with Matisse’s plant drawings at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2002. His book of drawings and watercolors is appearing to coincide with a large museum show that starts at Graphische Sammlung, Munich, in fall 2011 and which will travel on to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in spring 2012. Two texts by the curators (Michael Semff, Munich, and Marla Prather, New York) describe the plant drawings in the context of Ellsworth Kelly’s oeuvre as a whole.… (mehr)

Philip Guston: Prints is the first publication to present Guston's complete printed oeuvre. Fifty exquisite reproductions showcase a printmaker who - along with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning - was one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century
When Philip Guston turned to the medium of lithography in the early sixties, he was regarded as one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in the United States.
At that time, his art was already showing signs of the change that would lead to the later representational works that dominated the last decade of his career. The impressive series of black-and-white lithographs that Guston made shortly before his death in 1980 incorporates, as a sort of visual autobiography, the complete repertoire of objects that marked his return to powerful pictorial representation: simple everyday items, clocks, shoes, books, cigarettes, ashtrays, and occasionally his beloved sandwiches and cherries.

All of these things, taken from the world of the private and intimate, are given a unique vitality by Guston' s ironic eye and deliberate hand in the soft cadences of the lithographic crayon.… (mehr)