Alison Gingeras Libri

Combining the dark wit of Francisco Goya with the lush painterly style of Elizabeth Peyton, Dublin-based artist Genieve Figgis is the painter of the moment.

The first overview on Erna Rosenstein, surrealist, poet and creator of mesmerizing dreamscapes in painting and assemblage A New York Times critics' pick Best Art Books 2021 This is the first ever English-language monograph on the vast and complex oeuvre of Erna Rosenstein (1913-2003), a prolific artist whose varied output was informed by her experience as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. Released on the occasion of the eponymous, upcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and edited and with a text by exhibition curator Alison Gingeras, this book serves as an introduction to Rosenstein and her story. Alongside an extensive plates section, poems by Rosenstein are included in the book, as well as a special insert reproducing a fairy tale authored and illustrated by the artist. Art historian Dorota Jarecka has also contributed an essay, and the book additionally includes Rosenstein's own narrative testimony of the war in Poland.

A look at the dark, symbolic work of Polish painter Aleksandra Waliszewska alongside historical artworks that influence her. Painter Aleksandra Waliszewska creates densely narrative, art historically saturated oil and gouache paintings. Waliszewska's pictorial universe is populated by supernatural characters and dark themes: devils, vampires, satanic creatures, possessed girls, apocalyptic scenes, bloodthirsty zombies, and other incarnations of the living dead. These characters are situated in dystopian urban landscapes, lost highways, deserted suburbs, gloomy housing estates, swamps, and other sites associated with the Eastern European landscape. Drawing from the specifically Slavic histories of the Upiór (the living dead), Waliszewska claims her artistic and conceptual descendance from premodern art and Symbolist works of the late 19th and early 20th century from Nordic, Baltic, and Eastern European regions. The Dark Arts presents a dense visual narrative, reproducing over a hundred images of Waliszewska's in juxtaposition with dozens of historical paintings and sculptures. Shifting away from the dominant figures of French and Austrian artists, this revisionist look at Symbolism through an Eastern and Baltic lens will introduce a wider audience to a rich and relatively understudied field of visual culture.