The Pictures Generation (1974-1984)

Douglas Eklund [dir.], The Metropolitan Museum of Art & Yale University Press, 2009. Original Edition. Text in English. 350 pages. 28 x 21 cm.

200€

This beautiful book is the first comprehensive examination of the Pictures Generation, a loosely knit group of artists working in New York City from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The primary subject of these artists’ work was imagery itself. – how images not only depict but also shape the way we perceive the world and ourselves. The collective work of this group is an extremely important chapter in the history of contemporary art.

 

Born into a burgeoning media and consumer culture and educated in the strategies of minimal and conceptual art, Pictures Generation artists including Robert Longo, Richard Prince, David Salle and Cindy Sherman have plenty to come back to performing , addressing the rhetoric, social and psychological functions of the image in all media (photography, painting and sculpture, drawings and prints, film and video, music and performance).