Hans Haacke Books

Some of the most representative tendencies of the second half of the 20th century are represented in the private collection of German Reinhard Onnasch, which features work by Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz, Dan Flavin, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Jason Rhoades, and others.Essays by Boris Groys, Petra Kipphoff. Artworks by Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Hans Hofmann, Mike Kelley, Edward Kienholz, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Smithson, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner. 8.75 x 10.5 in.110 color illustrationsEnglish/Portuguese

The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by the vast uncultivated spaces of the desert and mountain as well as post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt or Robert Smithson moved earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo's Running Fence or Walter de Maria's Lightning Field. Journeys became works of art for Richard Long whilst Dennis Oppenheim and Ana Mendieta immersed their bodies in the contours of the land.

Throughout his career, Hans Haacke has explored the social, political and economic conditions of making, funding, exhibiting and collecting art. When Haacke curated his own legendary Viewing Matters exhibit at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, he brought into focus the often concealed relationship between commerce and high art in a complex installation that included hundreds of pieces of art, merchandising from the museum store and portraits of the previous directors of the museum. In this publication, the artist explores both the dialects of the art exhibition and the socio-economic role of the museum in contemporary society. -- From publisher's description.

Castles in the Sky (2012), [is] a project devised in Spain specifically for the exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía. Instead of bringing together a selection of works from the past and adding a new project, Haacke extends his concerns into the present. The social impact of his early works reverberates in the new project, reflecting the extent to which the present is indebted to past actions and decisions. In this show, Haacke continues to pursue his goal of violating the romantic conception of the artwork and testing the limits of the institutions that welcome it.