Press Release
"Since the 1980s, Elizabeth Newman's practice has addressed questions of representation and subjectivity, offering articulate reflections on philosophical propositions, theory, politics, art, artists, aesthetics and everyday life concerns. This publication, which brings imaginative vision to the notion of monograph-as-art-practice, functions both as an artist book and as a survey of Newman's paintings, installations, objects, collages, text works and writing over the past three decades. The book documents around 150 works in full colour, and gathers together many of Newman's own written pieces, along with new commissioned texts from Juan Davila, Damiano Bertoli, Geoff Lowe (with Jacqueline Riva), Kate Briggs, Eve Sullivan and Michael Graf. The monograph has been designed by Newman in collaboration with Warren Taylor.
'From the mid 80s onwards Elizabeth Newman's methodology has described a reflexive catalogue of meta-painting; paintings of other paintings, paintings about paintings, paintings about paint, and its absence. Paintings and not; images, objects and arrangements that inhabit the psychic space elaborated by the history of painting and its capacity to activate the human 'subject', with or without pigment, or application... In Newman's work the mechanism of painting and its attendant plasticities, expositions and morphologies, regardless of their translation into a dialect of distilled materiality, finds its foil in the 'subject'; subjectivity as subject matter, as procedure, as an expansive index of possible languages generated by the simultaneous happening of haptic and optic as a singular event.'"