Celebrated French artist Annette Messager transforms everyday objects into sculptural installations that bustle with creativity, memory, melancholy, mystery, and obsession.
Messager enshrines the images of deceased friends and family, and knits little sweaters for dead birds. Her frequently interactive works are elaborately hand-crafted, with the sacrosanct OCD quality of private archives. Describing herself as “collector, every-task-doer, artist, woman in love, tale-teller,” she fashions her shadowy monuments from an endless accumulation of textiles, stuffed animals, photographs, newspapers, and other detritus that speaks to her from beyond.
The extremely unconventional 36th issue of McSweeney’s quarterly magazine is a box-shaped head filled with short stories, art postcards, a “lost” work by Michael Chabon, and a tiny scroll.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers founded McSweeney’s independent publishing house as a forum for indie literary-fiction authors to articulate progressive ideas. Issue 36 is a “275-cubic-inch full-color head-crate” filled with booklets and other objects, ripe for the sifting.
Filmmaker, photographer, and de facto performer Laurel Nakadate takes on the thorniness of female adolescence and self-image in her funny, wistful, dark, and uncomfortable images.
Already enjoying festival-circuit acclaim for feature films The Wolf Knife and Stay the Same Never Change, Nakadate holds her first museum show in New York next month. The survey spans a decade of deadpan subversion that includes her runaway-chic panty-flags, provocative self-portraits in anonymous men’s homes, precocious teens aping American Apparel softcore, and her newest work, in which she documents her own daily crying jags.
Taking the form of an antique type-specimen book, Retrofonts is a chronicle of the best type designs from last 150 years, with an accompanying CD containing 222 copyright-free fonts.
Munich-based graphic designer Gregor Stawinski compiled and categorized more than 360 fonts into nine chronological sections for the book, ranging from “Art Nouveau and Japonism” to “Postmodern and Punk.” The resulting 560-page volume is a compendium of the best examples of modern typeface, presented within a historical context that uses each font to visually represent a different zeitgeist.
In Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist, the daughter of Robert Crumb showcases her talent for irreverence and skewed idealism — both inherited and individualized — from age two to 28.
The book is as delightfully weird as one would expect from the progeny of the underground comix icon — who helped edit the collection — but the youngest Crumb is not ultimately stuck in her father’s shadow. A trained circus performer and former tattoo artist, she proves her artistic pedigree with offbeat sketches, cartoons, studies, and doodles, all of which closely chart the growth of the artist’s creative explorations over many years.
A master at constructing provocative forms with fabric and sticks, Lara Schnitger shows that art can be a straightforward game, best played by the passionate.
The Dutch-born, Los Angeles-based artist studied in a variety of cultural capitals before making her mark with inventive fabric collages and cloth-covered stick sculptures that explore the erotic, combative nature of women at play. Whether expressing her quirky constructions in two or three dimensions, Schnitger’s metaphorical pieces take Amazonian ideals to new levels.
Work of Art finalist Peregrine Honig takes our intertwined obsessions with youth, fashion, and celebrity, and turns them into quirky, unsettling art.
Perhaps Kansas City’s best-known art-world export (thanks to her star turn on the Bravo reality show), Honig makes paintings, sculptural installations, and performative, fashion-based projects that combine folk-art inflections and a childlike love of color, cuteness, and baby animals with a worldly, satirical voice that’s not afraid to get profound, funny, and even scatological.
More than a century after this collection of short news items appeared in a French newspaper, Joanna Neborsky’s contemporary illustrations accompany the text in a different kind of graphic novel.
Journalist Félix Fénéon anonymously wrote more than a thousand brief reports for Parisian paper Le Matin, a selection of which have been translated by Luc Sante and republished in Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon. Bringing new life to the Frenchman’s historic accounts, Neborsky’s artwork elegantly draws on the past for inspiration.
Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons has always been an innovator and iconoclast; with the book and CD set Swanlights, he fuses music and art to create a hybrid as achingly romantic as the artist himself.
Although Antony’s music can always stand on its own, the two elements of Swanlights are best taken together. Page through the book as you listen to the album and you’ll find drawings, paintings, cut-outs, scrawled song lyrics, and photos of Hegarty that suggest a complex, conflicted relationship to the natural world. Just as in his music, the images build to intense, even violent, crescendos, then recede into the quiet of white space and delicate scribbles.
Drew Friedman’s Too Soon?: Famous/Infamous Faces 1995-2010 features the artist’s scathing, closely studied caricatures of celebrities and politicians from a nightmarish pop-culture alterna-verse.
Originally published in the pages of publications like New York magazine, Time, and The New Republic, Friedman’s images portray modern icons in all of their grotesque, media-puffed glory. His pantheon of parodied subjects includes everyone from Michael Jackson to Cindy McCain — all of whom are depicted in a creepily cartoonish style.
