Edgewise Press, Inc., in collaboration with Paolo Torti degli Alberti, is proud to announce the publication of a bilingual English and Italian edition of the book JONATHAN LASKER: EXPRESSIONS BECOME THINGS — FROM SKETCH TO STUDY TO PAINTING by RICHARD MILAZZO. It includes four (4) signed and numbered prints by Jonathan Lasker, in an edition of 25, with 5 artist’s proofs. The book and the prints are encased in a custom made box. A regular edition of the hardcover book is also available. 

JONATHAN LASKER: EXPRESSIONS BECOME THINGS by Richard Milazzo is the first book to analyze the role of the sketch in the artist’s work. Preliminary even to the small studies, the sketches are the stage in which Lasker works out his initial ideas for a painting. Even before making the study or studies that precede the painting, the artist sketches out the most rudimentary of forms and colors, often making the most radical of changes in the process of arriving at the image that will become the final painting.

In observing as we do in this book the evolution of the eleven sketches, we see, as it were, the artist’s mind at work. In his essay, the author also analyzes the distinct relation of the sketches to the single study and their relation to the painting, Expressions Become Things, all executed in 2000. The eleven sketches, the study, and the final painting are all reproduced in color.

Reminiscent of the seminal volume, Jonathan Lasker: A Conversation with Collins & Milazzo and 13 Studies for a Painting entitled “Cultural Promiscuity,” published in 1987, which could also be used to understand the artist’s work in general, Richard Milazzo’s JONATHAN LASKER: EXPRESSIONS BECOME THINGS is an instrument created specifically to closely scrutinize not only the working process but the act of conception or origination in a work of art.

JONATHAN LASKER is generally considered to be one of the most important artists to emerge from the 1980s. His work has been critical to the development of American abstract painting over the course of nearly two decades. Through the author’s essay and the artist’s pictures, we can trace, step by step, the aesthetic and material procedures that continue to make Lasker’s work central to the discourse on abstract painting in the new millennium.


ABOUT THE DELUXE LIMITED EDITION:

The first twenty-five copies of the deluxe print edition of this book, JONATHAN LASKER: EXPRESSIONS BECOME THINGS by Richard Milazzo, are signed and numbered by the author. It contains the essay Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things — From Sketch to Study to Painting by Richard Milazzo, with a translation into Italian by Paolo Torti degli Alberti, and reproduces in four-colors eleven sketches, one study, and the painting entitled Expressions Become Things, by the artist. It is a first edition hardcover, 88 pages, 13 x 9 1/2 inches (33 x 24 cm.), sewn, bound, and printed by Gaetano Dal Broi, Turin, Italy, with a four-color jacket and a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece by Richard Milazzo. The regular edition is limited to 1000 copies.

The book is accompanied by a portfolio of four actual-size prints entitled Expressions Become Things, 2004, by Jonathan Lasker. The prints are based on sketches Nos. 3, 4, 7, 11, illustrated actual size in the book, and carry respectively in the portfolio the Roman numerals I, II, III, IV. The image size for each of the four prints is 4 1/2 x 6 inches (11.4 x 15.2 cm.); the paper size is 8 1/2 x 10 inches (21. 6 x 25.4 cm.). The artist utilized the lithographic process for the graphite and black ink segments of the print and the copper engraving process for the color segments. They were printed on Magnani di Pescia paper, 310 gr., by Franco Masoero Edizioni d’Arte, Turin, in an edition of 25 copies, signed and numbered in Arabic numerals from 1/25 through 25/25 by the artist, with five artist’s proofs.

Both the book and the prints are encased in a two-sided gatefold box, which closed measures 13 1/2 x 10 x 1 3/4 inches (34.3 x 25.4 x 4.4 cm.), opened measures 13 1/2 x 42 x 1 inches (34.3 x 106.7 x 2.5 cm.), and reproduces in four-colors, front, back, and along the spine, sketch No. 9 by the artist.

The book and print project were conceived and designed by Richard Milazzo, and the box is designed with Paolo Torti degli Alberti.

The book and the deluxe print edition are available in the U.S. through Edgewise Press, Inc., 24 Fifth Ave., No.224, New York, N.Y. 10011. They are also available in Europe through Paolo Torti degli Alberti, via Canali Bassi, 19, 10040 Cumiana, Italy.  

JONATHAN LASKER attended the School of Visual Arts, New York, from 1975 to 1977, and the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, Ca., in 1977. He has exhibited with such galleries as Tibor de Nagy (N.Y.), Michael Werner (Cologne), Gian Enzo Sperone (Rome), Lars Bohman (Stockholm), Soledad Lorenzo (Madrid), L.A. Louver (L.A.), Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris), and Timothy Taylor (London), among others. He has had retrospectives at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Stedelijk (Amsterdam), Kunstmuseum (St. Gallen), The Power Plant (Toronto), and the Birmingham Museum of Art (Alabama). His retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid traveled to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf 2003. Among public collections, his work is in the Hirshhorn (Washington, D.C.), L.A. County Museum, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (N.Y.). He has lectured extensively in the United States and Europe, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 and 1989.  LASKER’s Complete Essays: 1984-1998 was published by EDGEWISE PRESS (New York - Paris - Turin) in 1998.

RICHARD MILAZZO was the editor and co-publisher of Out of London Press in the 1970s. Among other books, he collaborated on the English translation and facsimile edition of Pontormo’s Diary. His critical and curatorial work with Collins & Milazzo originally fashioned the theoretical context for the new Conceptual art of a whole generation of artists that rose to prominence in the 1980s, among them Ross Bleckner, James Welling, Richard Prince, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Jeff Koons, Allan McCollum, Philip Taaffe, Robert Gober, Haim Steinbach, Annette Lemieux, Saint Clair Cemin, Meg Webster, and Vik Muniz. From 1982 to 1984, he co-published and co-edited Effects: Magazine for New Art Theoryin the East Village, and from 1986 to 1988 he was the American co-editor of Kunstforum (Cologne). A series of six lectures on his exhibitions and writings, Hyperframes: A Post-Appropriation Discourse in Art, delivered at Yale University, were published by Editions Antoine Candau in Paris in 1989 and 1990, and have currently been reissued in an Italian edition by Campanotto Editore (Pasian di Prato, Udine, 2005). From 1995 to 1997, he founded and curated the exhibition space 11, rue Larrey at Sidney Janis Gallery. He has recently curated major one-person exhibitions of Malcolm Morley, Sandro Chia, Ross Bleckner, Saint Clair Cemin, Robert Longo, Alex Katz, Alessandro Twombly, and David Salle, Mark Innerst and William Anastasi. Most recently, he has written two major monographs, Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta and The Paintings of Ross Bleckner. Among his other books are Malcolm Morley: The Art of the Superreal, the Rough, the Neo-Classical, and the Incommensurable 1958-1998; Streets of Gold; Caravaggio on the Beach: Essays on Art in the 1990s; Hotel of the Heart: Poems 1997-2001; Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things; Along the Hudson (with drawings by Abraham David Christian); Il Facchino di Venezia (The Porter of Venice): Poems 2002-2003; Green Nights / Golgotha / Love’s Quarrel: Poems 2001-2003; Alogon: Early Poems (1969-1981; Mute Sirens (with photographs by Carlo Benvenuto); An Earring Depending from the Moon: Poems 2006; Stone Dragon Bridge: Poems 2006-2007; La Porta della Pescheria (The Fishmonger’s Door): Poems of Modena 2000-2008; and Circus in the Fog: Poems 2005-2006. He wrote also the catalogue essay for Jonathan Lasker’s first major drawing exhibition at the Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik in Odense, Denmark.

Previous / Next