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In 1960, Alex Katz (born 1927) began to collaborate with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, commencing a relationship with dance that has spanned his entire career. Undertaken for the company’s performance of The Red Room (later known as Post Meridian ) at the legendary Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Katz’s contribution consisted of three enormous red panels that defined the stage, and round wooden discs capable of holding two dancers, which floated down from the top of the theater rafters. During the collaboration, Katz also made numerous portraits of both dancers and dances. Katz and Taylor collaborated again in the 1980s, but the painter has only recently returned to the depiction of dance, with a new series of portraits of leading figures in the New York dance scene. Alex Face the Music surveys Katz’s career-long involvement with dance, reproducing canvases, cartoons, drawings and studies in oil.

Embracing an overtly psychedelic aesthetic, German artist Daniel Richter (born 1962) creates bright, almost fluorescent, paintings that swell with activity and nervous intensity. Spagotzen includes the type of anarchic canvases that have made Richter famous. Rife with violence, these images feature boldly colored figures writhing amidst fiery urban scenes. In other works, couples and trios appear in desolate or otherwise deserted landscapes, blurring the line between an apocalyptic end and an Edenic beginning.

Japanese bound and beautifully printed in deep, dark, black ink on several kinds of paper, this volume documents New York artist Banks Violette's recent solo exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, where he showed recent sculptures and site-specific installations made of metal, neon, varnish and glass. Calling upon Banks' goth sensibility, one of the kinetic sculptural works actually destroyed itself over the course of the exhibition; another was fabricated of deep-frozen elements. According to the esteemed independent curator and former Director of Exhibitions at London's Royal Academy of Arts Norman Rosenthal, "Violette's gothic installations are operatic analyses of the dark side of American culture. Violette's heavy-metal stylings become a mirror of the anxiety in youth culture, an adopted language compensating and empowering those who suffer sensations of immense sorrow and despair... Fuelled by its associations with violence, satanism, racism and nationalism, Violette uses the Goth genre as both symptom and cause of individual amorality and social breakdown."

This publication offers an overview of the painting œuvre by Swiss artist Lori Hersberger (*1964), concentrating on the last five years. Color treatment and staging of the picture are the two essential parameters of his attitude. His technique of mixing serigraphy, fluorescent color, reproduction, and direct intervention on the images have all added to the conception of the artist's book and are genuine to his installations. Accumulation and fragmentation, mannerism, violence, and refinement co-exist both in Hersbergers' installations and paintings. * * The book includes texts by Mirjam Varadinis, Angelika Stepken, Karl Schawelka, and Annemarie Reichen. * * Published in collaboration with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg.