Books published by Karma

Alex Katz illustrates Hawthorne's classic gothic tale of Puritan New EnglandWhile enrolled in an illustration course at Cooper Union in 1948, Alex Katz (born 1927) created nine ink drawings to accompany Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic romance, The House of the Seven Gables. Published a century earlier, in 1851, Hawthorne's classic novel is a solemn study of greed, guilt and atonement under the Puritan moral code of 19th-century New England, inspired by the curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a condemned woman during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was one of the most influential American writers of the 19th century, known for his darkly romantic stories and novels such as The Scarlet Letter. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and belonged to a prominent circle of New England-based writers and philosophers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott.Alex Katz (born 1927) is a New York-based artist known for his large-scale Pop-inspired canvases of two-dimensional figures set against monochrome backgrounds. For over seven decades, his work has been the subject of hundreds of solo and group exhibitions worldwide.

The debut monograph on the haunting, tenebrous figuration of the acclaimed Maine painterMaine-based painter Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) explores storytelling and visual metaphor, often drawing inspiration from his childhood in Compton, California. Starting from a black ground, Hodges develops the scene around his figures, who materialize in the recessive space with foggy, ethereal brushwork.Hodges' figures are "forms that are made sharper, and more haunting, not because we see those things in their eyes, but because we see it in their bodies, their postures, the endless desire for humans not to be alone, and to connect," Hilton Als writes. "To that Hodges adds all that wonderful blackness."This fully illustrated catalog features a selection of works made between 2019 and 2020; a newly commissioned essay by Hilton Als; and an interview between the artist and Suzette McAvoy, Executive Director at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

This massive volume comprises over 80 interviews published across a 13-year span of Lauren O?Neill-Butler's career as a writer, educator, editor and cofounder of November magazine. The majority of the interviews first appeared on Artforum.com's interviews column, which O?Neill-Butler edited for 11 years. The book is divided into two sections, ?Q&A? and ?As Told To the first comprising interviews in a traditional format and the second recast by O?Neill-Butler in the interviewee's voice.00Interviewees include: Judy Chicago, Shannon Ebner, Carolee Schneemann, Lucy R. Lippard, Joan Semmel, Liz Deschenes, Eleanor Antin, Andrea Fraser, Anohni, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, Adrian Piper, fierce pussy, Nan Goldin, Nell Painter, Frances Stark, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Alex Bag, Agnáes Varda, Lisi Raskin, Mary Mattingly, Carol Bove, Jennifer West, Aki Sasamoto, Mary Ellen Carroll, Rebecca Solnit, Rita McBride and Kim Schoenstadt, Karla Black, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lynda Benglis, Sturtevant, Rachel Foullon, Ellie Ga, Lisa Tan, Mira Schor, Jo Baer, Ruby Sky Stiler, Suzanne Lacy, Rebecca Warren, Katy Siegel, Marlene McCarty, Rachel Mason, Mary Kelly, Dianna Molzan, Lynne Tillman, Polly Apfelbaum, Jesse Jones, Dorothea Roc.

An acidic portrait of the grifters and pretenders of the art world, from the celebrated author of The Mars RoomIn Rachel Kushner's latest work of fiction, The Mayor of Leipzig, an unnamed artist recounts her travels from New York City to Cologne--where she contemplates German guilt and art-world grifters, and Leipzig--where she encounters live "adult entertainment" in a business hotel. The narrator gossips about everyone, including the author. "Taking a time out from what happened to me in Cologne and in Leipzig," Kushner writes, "I want to let you in on a secret: I personally know the author of this story you're reading. Because she fancies herself an art world type, a hanger-on. Who would do that voluntarily? I mean, it's not like someone held a gun to my head and said, Be an artist. I chose it, but I still can't imagine having anything to do with the art world if you don't have to. Also, people who don't make stuff, who instead try to catalogue, periodize, and understand art, they never understand the first thing. Art is about taste, a sense of humor, and most writers lack both." Rachel Kushner (born 1968) is the author of The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018). Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and the Paris Review.

Between art, engineering and architecture: recent works by Robert GrosvenorThis monograph on Robert Grosvenor (born 1937)--known for his large-scale architectural sculptures--accompanies his third solo exhibition at Karma and concurrent exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, presenting recent works of sculpture alongside an essay by renowned curator and critic Bob Nickas.

The latest in Karma's acclaimed series of overviews, this 424-page clothbound volume is the first comprehensive survey of New York-based minimalist painter Paul Mogensen (born 1941). Born in Los Angeles, Mogensen arrived in New York in 1966 already associated with such peers as David Novros and (through Novros) Brice Marden. His first solo exhibition at the Bykert Gallery came the following year. Since that time, Mogensen has created often colorful works that follow rule-based progressions (such as the "n + 1" method) to generate sharply executed geometric abstractions. In a text for this volume, the artist Lynda Benglis usefully summarizes the special character of Mogensen's art: "Paul is a colorist who is measured in his method. It may be said that he is a decorative painter as well a painter of a philosophical disposition. He is stringent in his approach, as stringent as a mechanic might be with a Ferrari. There are no accidents."

This book collects images that New York-based artist Anne Collier (born 1970) originally presented as a slideshow of 80 35mm slides depicting found images of female subjects in the act of taking self-portraits. Dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these relics of the analog age were collected by Collier, each image discarded by its original owner but finding its way back to relevance in Collier's work. The slideshow consists of amateur snapshots of women photographing themselves with film cameras prior to the advent of the digital "selfie." Instead of circulating on social media, these abandoned images once existed for a private audience. The resulting work is steeped in a deep sense of loneliness, illustrating photography's contentious relationship to memory, loss and self-representation. The book represents a kind of sequel to Collier's 2017 book Women with Cameras (Anonymous).

The latest volume of writing by influential New York-based critic and curator Bob Nickas collects his 2012-14 column for Vice magazine's Komp-laint Dept. This column unleashed the full omnivorous range of the author's interests. There are essays on musicians such as Neil Young, Sun Ra, Royal Trux and Lydia Lunch, which look at their biographies and the history of Nickas' personal relationship with their music; there are lengthy and often very funny "complaints" about, among other things, two different presidents, Jeff Koons, New York architecture, the meeting of fashion and punk, religion in general, nostalgia and the problem with contemporary graffiti. Additionally, there are meditations on filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and Nicolas Refin. The book is rounded out by perhaps the definitive (two-part) examination of how and why Richard Prince uses appropriation.Bob Nickas has worked as a critic and curator in New York since 1984. He is the author of Theft Is Vision (2007) and The Dept. of Corrections (2016).

16 Pictures is the latest in a series of photobooks by American artist Robert Grosvenor (born 1937). Included here are color photographs of vehicles, scale models and ordinary objects. Sometimes blurry, sometimes overexposed, and very often brightly colorful, the photographs depict scenes that may be staged or chanced upon.

Boats Crosses Trees Figures 1977-78 is a survey of Peter Halley's (born 1953) early works on paper made during his years as a graduate student at the University of New Orleans.Already pointing clearly to the pictorial concerns that he would focus on throughout his career these works initiate Halley's interest in the interaction of opposites, primarily abstraction and figuration but also interior and exterior, foreground and background, light and dark, appearance and disappearance.Inspired by the color and sound of New Orleans, Halley translates the physical world into bright, geometric compositions constructed of gridded squares of color, where, through the combination of formal severity and openness as equal partners, seemingly simple compositions turn into complex amalgams of various possible views of an image and its space.

First published in 1993, Sister is a story of love and violence bearing justice. In author and critic Jim Lewis' first novel, an orphaned, 17-year-old Wilson leaves his Nebraska home and heads south to Mississippi. There, he finds work as a gardener on the estate of the Miller clan--a nuclear family with two lovely daughters, Marian and Olivia, living in compliant happiness. Wilson's surreptitious presence soon casts a quiet path of destruction through the Miller home with very tangible results for the sisters. Twenty years after its original publication, Lewis' lyrical, atmospheric novel remains exacting in its appraisal of young love linked to loss and unnerving in its examination of the isolated American family.

Using El Lissitzky's artwork as a starting point, New York-based painter Sebastian Black (born 1985) abstracts space and graphic shapes in this slim artist's book.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at OV Project in Brussels, this catalog brings together paintings by two influential modern American painters--Paul Mogensen and Steven Parrino--revealing how, for both artists, structure, material, production, and function of the artwork relate to space and spectator.spectator.

This is the seventh volume in Karma's 11-volume facsimile printing of Lee Lozano's Private Book (1930-99) project. "Don't be RIVAL RABBITS," she writes here. "Give your ideas away. Help the world survive. SHARE AN IDEA JOINT."

Before her self-imposed exile from the art world, Lozano was a highly regarded painter who defined a generation of American artists infusing conceptualism with a new intensity. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, she kept a series of personal journals. This series of 11 pocket-sized books is printed as facsimiles.

Kokuyo Business Paper is the latest of Michael Williams' (born 1978) artist's books published by Karma. This newest book focuses on drawings on top of photocopies and employs the gatefold as a primary characteristic of the book. Each fold has the potential to hide and reveal another image, forcing the viewer to look and open each fold.