Böcker av Jennifer Higgie

The most comprehensive overview of the artist’s paintings to date, Nicola Tyson: Selected Paintings 1993-2022 provides a thorough investigation of the artist’s evolving lexicon.“Tyson’s paintings do not mirror the world that we see with our eyes. Rather, they invoke a kind of dreamscape; the forms are familiar, we understand them, but we cannot quite place how we know them, or where we saw them, or why we are seeing them again now.” –Kathy Noble, ArtforumKnown primarily as a painter, Nicola Tyson adds psychological weight to eroticized flesh. She enlivens her canvases with a motley of biomorphic creatures, amalgamated from partly recognizable coordinates of corporeal and animalistic appendages. Her enigmatic mutations, borne out of what she calls “psycho-figuration,” explore the possibilities unlatched by a bodily orientation to painting, informed as much by identity, gender and sexuality as by recesses of the unconscious. The paintings often become a surprise to the artist herself. By relying less on reason, Tyson carves a humorous, unsettling, as well as liberating approach to painting the female body, which roots it in experience rather than the merely observed.The most comprehensive survey on Nicola Tyson’s paintings to date, spanning three decades of her career, Selected Paintings 1993-2022 provides a panoramic view of the evolving language in her paintings. With more than 150 illustrated pages dedicated to the artist’s chromatically saturated palette, the book boasts over 50 full-color reproductions of her paintings, supplemented by close-up detail images, installation shots and photographs of the artist in her studio.The monograph includes an essay by Jennifer Higgie, which elaborates on Tyson’s feminist-informed yet intuitive methods to subjective painting. Higgie illuminates the paintings against the backdrop of the carnivalesque ethos of 1970s queer life in London, in which Tyson came of age, as well as the fertile experiments of Trial BALLOON – the feminist-collective space that the artist founded in the 1990s upon her move to New York. Selected Paintings 1993-2022 offers readers the opportunity to delectate in the sumptuous details of Nicola Tyson’s idiosyncratic and startlingly mysterious vision, all while gaining a thorough understanding of what drives her painting practice.

Thin Skin is an exhibition of contemporary and historical paintings by Australian and international artists who explore the liminal space between figuration and abstraction. Guest curated by Australian, London-based writer, curator and former editor of frieze magazine, Jennifer Higgie, it features works by thirty-six artists. As a term, ' thin skin' is joyfully ambiguous. Thin Skin refers not only to the delicate membrane that separates body, mind and environment, but to other borders: thresholds between reason and unreason, wisdom and foolishness, life and death, the conscious and unconscious, laughter and weeping. To have ' thin skin' is to be hypersensitive to the world around you. Paint is a thin skin on a surface. Some of the artists in Thin Skin employ absurdity, slapstick, parody, caricature and/or dreamlike logic to explore themselves and their place in the world. Others depict bodies in rich, often intertwined, conversations with the psyche, the land, domestic or work environments and with animals. Thin Skin also embraces the idea of ' thin places', an ancient term of mysterious provenance that refers to locations with a unique or peculiar energy. They are places that attract spirits; they appear when the distance between earth and heaven narrows. In Thin Skin, the ephemeral is made tangible. The fully-illustrated catalogue features new writing by Jennifer Higgie and a specially commissioned short story by Chloe Aridjis, award-winning Mexican-American novelist and writer.

A dazzlingly original and ambitious work of art history, intertwining biography and cultural history, and packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy