Böcker av Robert Hobbs

Unter Verweisen auf Soziologie und Science-Fiction brachte Peter Halley in den 1980er-Jahren frischen Wind in die Malerei. Mit Neonfarben und Roll-A-Tex-Sandtextur dekonstruierte er transzendente geometrische Abstraktionen von Beginn und Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts zu abstrakten Zellen und Gefängnissen und verband sie augenzwinkernd durch Kanäle mit der Außenwelt.Durch die Verortung seiner Malerei in der Schnittmenge zwischen analoger und digitaler Welt greift Peter Halley viele Herausforderungen des Informationszeitalters und des französischen Poststrukturalismus auf. Hobbs' Monografie analysiert Halleys fast hermetisch verschlüsselte geometrische Kunst mit Blick auf die Möglichkeiten des Internets, die ästhetischen Optionen von Photoshop, die Aktualität der soziologischen Theorien von Michel Foucault und Jean Baudrillard sowie die ungelösten Rätsel gleichermaßen von Science Fiction und Physik.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell's abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead's highly original process metaphysics.

In 2002, Kara Walker was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious Säao Paulo Art Biennial. Curator Robert Hobbs wrote extended essays on her work for this exhibition, and also for her show later that year at the Kunstverein Hannover. Because these essays have not been distributed in the US and remain among the most in-depth and essential investigations of her work, Karma is now republishing them in this new clothbound volume. Among the most celebrated artists of the past three decades, with over 93 solo exhibitions to her credit, including a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker is known for her tough, critical, provocative and highly imaginative representations of African Americans and whites reaching back to antebellum times. In his analysis, Hobbs looks at the five main sources of her art: blackface Americana, Harlequin romances, Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, Stone Mountain's racist tourist attraction and the minstrel tradition.

A long-overdue monograph on a sculptor who draws not only on minimalism and conceptualism but on a rich web of intellectual and visual sources to create postmodern work that is a "complex" of juxtapositions.Alice Aycock's large, semi-architectural works deal with the interaction of structure, site, materials, and the psychophysical responses of the viewer. Offered meaningful but contradictory clues by both her images and her texts, viewers attempt to discover not only what the work of art conveys but how it communicates its contents, in investigations that parallel the artist's own. In Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects, Robert Hobbs examines the development of Aycock's work over twenty years and her negotiation—along with other artists who came of age in the early 1970s—of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. "The problem," wrote Aycock in 1977, "seems to be how to connect without connecting." Hobbs describes Aycock's strategies for doing just this: for creating a work with disparate image and texts that offer a new perspective on reality. Influenced by the "specific objects" of minimalism's hybrid forms and by conceptualism's emphasis on language, Aycock relies on paradigms, cybernetics, phenomenology, physics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, information overload, outdated scientific thinking, and computer programming to create a "complex" that is architectural and sculptural as well as mental and emotional. Schizophrenia and other mental conditions, sometimes considered metaphors for the disconnections of postmodern existence, are specific sources of inspiration in Aycock's work. By exploring the physical and existential positions of isolation, estrangement, disorientation, entrapment and fear, her three-dimensional constructions not only posit alternative states of mind, they suppose possible narratives and suggest multiple truths and lies. Aycock's work invites the viewer to experience sculpture with the entire body and a fully mind. Her sculpture has had a transformative effect on the contemporary art experience.

Beverly Pepper has spent her lifetime at the forefront of monumental sculpture worldwide. From her first twenty-foot sculpture in Spoleto in 1962 to her four forty-foot columns in the Federal Plaza, New York, her work ranges in varying scales across three continents. This title presents an illustrated biography of her life's work.