PETER NAGY:  Entertainment Erases History – Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present (monograph)
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition deluxe hardback:  January 2014.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
480 pages, with a 2-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece by Hari Nair, 45 color and 420 black and white reproductions.
13.5 x 9.75 x 2 in. (39.3 x 24.8 x 10.2 cm.), printed, sewn, and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN-10:  0-615-49792-6.  ISBN-13:  978-0-615-49792-1.
Brooklyn, New York:  EISBox Editions, 2014.

RETAIL PRICE: $90.00 (includes postage and handling)

Peter Nagy:  Entertainment Erases History – Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present by Richard Milazzo is the first monograph on the artist-dealer.  The monograph grew out of a related exhibition the author curated at EISBox Projects, an independent space, in Brooklyn, New York, in April 2011.  Where the exhibition focused on the first presentation of all of Nagy’s Xerox works from 1982 to 1984, accompanied by a limited selection of Cancer, Baroque and Rococo, and early Orientalist Paintings, the monograph compiles all, and analyses most, of the artist’s extant works from 1982 to 2004, including the Color Paintings he made in India, where the artist has lived and worked since 1992.

The author discusses also the history of Nagy’s fabled East Village gallery, Nature Morte, within the wider context of the art and culture of the 1980s, and the avant-garde role it continues to play in the world of contemporary art in India today.  By the time the artist closed the gallery in New York in 1988, he had created several significant bodies of work, beyond the early Xeroxes:  the Cancer Paintings of 1985 and 1986, which addressed through the use of abstraction the ‘cancer’ of global consumption; the metallic works of 1987, which commented on the negative aspects of the technological ‘revolution’; and the Baroque and Rococo Paintings of 1988 and 1989, which appropriated architectural motifs to generate a visionary form of critique in painting.  With the Orientalist Paintings of the 1990s, with such series as the Self-Portraits and A Soft History of Imhotep, and his Color Paintings, stupas, and installations, the author elucidates how the artist moved from his earliest utilization of maps, floor plans, and architectural citations and from an American and European vision to a wider global ethos that included Asian or Middle East and Far Eastern cultures.  Even as Nagy continued to work as an artist, he reopened Gallery Nature Morte in India, in 1997, to exhibit again the revolutionary art of his time and in the new millenium, this time half way around the world, and begins to work also as a curator and a writer on its behalf.

From his earliest 8½ x 11 in. Xeroxes to his Postmodern ‘altars,’ from his use of collage and montage, the techniques of miniaturization and magnification, to his use of extreme forms of abstraction, synchronicity, heterogeneity, contradiction, complexity and hybridization, critically reflecting the global culture and economy, the corporate Spectacle, all around him, the author shows how Nagy has formulated throughout his oeuvre a unique aesthetic.  Like the exhibition, Peter Nagy:  Entertainment Erases History – Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present discloses how the paintings, and the work, in general, moved from appropriation to abstraction to a combined use of both methodologies to create overall a body of work that remains unprecedented to this day.

In addition to an intensive, chapter-by-chapter analysis of each individual work and each period, this 480-page monograph contains 291 black and white illustrations, 129 black and white and 45 color reproductions of Nagy’s most seminal works, a timeline, a comprehensive history of his works and exhibitions, and a complete bibliography.