Parkett #75

For over two decades Parkett has presented unparalleled collaborations with key international contemporary artists, and paired their work with discussions by esteemed writers and critics. Issue No. 75 spotlights Kai Althoff, Glenn Brown, and Dana Schutz. Althoff's portfolio includes both erotically charged paintings of men in uniform and innocent "coming-of-age" colored pencil illustrations, sensuous work--at once homoerotic, punk, and devotional--that radiates a somber luminosity. Then there are his awkward, life-size installations, which appear to be made by some sort of drunken puppeteer. The "master" Glenn Brown employs a sorcerer's bag of techniques to produce retro-Rococo paintings and sculptures, maximally intricate, hyper-composed, and rendered with the intense detail of a tripped-out sci-fi animator. His fully-realized, uninhabitable dreamscapes reflect on the bizarre world in which we all live. Dana Schutz's painterly virtuosity and devotion to the medium also look back in time, but her brilliant, confessional exposition is very much of the now. Be the subject a dissected corpse, a dazed hippie chick, or her own boyfriend on the beach, Schutz's painted world, her "monster mash," is decadently radiant and ecstatic, and also frighteningly ghoulish. Text contributors include Jordan Kantor, Viet Loers, Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, Jennifer Higgie, Trevor Smith, Jàrg Heiser, Michael Lobel, Daniel Baumann, Rachel Kent, Duncan Fallowell, Angelika Affentranger-Kichrath, Gian Maraniello and Rudolf Schmitz. Plus a photographic insert by Balthasar Burkhard, and spine by Carsten Nicolai. — F.to: 21x26; COL e BN; rileg. brossura. Editore: Parkett, Zürich, 2006.