State of the Question

by Hains, Raymond

• ISBN13: 9788489698963
• ISBN10: 8489698961
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Actar-D

Summary

Born in France in 1926, Raymond Hains continues to live and work in Paris and Nice. His work has recently been the subject of renewed interest in the contemporary art world and is now being exhibited alongside the current generation of sculptors and installation artists including Cattelan, Gordon, Zittel, Hirschhorn, and Whiteread; he participated in Skulptur Projekte Munster, 1997, and is the 1997 recipient of the prestigious Kurt Schwitter's Prize. This catalogue documents a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. Hains defines himself not as an artist, but as an inventor. Among the works from 1949 to the present collected in this book are his torn posters and billboard pieces. Dynamically stripping away layer upon layer of advertisements, he reduces color and image to sheer, fantastic speed, and breaks down and reverses the commercial onslaught into streaks and spots of paper detritus. Regarding himself as an "reaction painter" with no studio but the street, Hains transgresses established theories of the artwork and draws on opera