Kyoko Hamaguchi, Wavecaster, 2020
In lieu of paper towels, Kyoko Hamaguchi’s Wavecaster dispenses a roll of photopaper that exposes over time. Visitors interact with it, waving a hand in front of its sensor to release more paper. As the exhibition progresses, the paper collects in a long and wavy pile on the floor. Prior to exposure, the paper is a cream yellow; within a few minutes of exiting the machine, it develops a pinkish tone. As time passes, the fleshtone pink becomes more and more vivid until it starts turning a greyish color. Information and memories pile up on the photopaper surface of Wavecaster like a palimpsest constantly overwriting itself until it eventually loses its color.

Tony Matelli, Two Faces, 2015
Part of a body of work that Tony Matelli describes as “frustrated objects,” Two Faces is composed of a mirror whose surface has been obscured with finger swipes of dust and vulgarities, rendered in enamel, playfully complicating the act of seeing oneself and the world. “In my mirrors you experience your own image made strange,” Matelli has said, adding: “I wanted to subvert the Romantic idea of the window as a sort of portal. I wanted to represent it as a kind of false promise.”

Sue Williams, Fiesta, 2009
Over more than four decades, Sue Williams has been one of America’s most fiercely pertinent painters. In early works, images of the body were stretched and contorted into gestural fragments in phlegmatic fields of color. By the late 90s and early aughts, her paintings had become almost completely abstract, expressionist riffs on the classic techniques of the Great White Male pantheon. Her more recent canvases meld modes of painting from her past work into kinetic explosions of color and form. Fiesta layers hot pink corporeal squiggles and squirts on an almost waxy beige ground, evoking comic-strip viscera and the human comedy itself.

Maximilian Schubert, Untitled, 2021
Maximilian Schubert’s work often straddles the boundary between painting and sculpture. In his Untitled works, Schubert utilizes a millennia-old process of lost-wax casting as a pathway into the body of the painting itself. The resulting surfaces are primarily incisive rather than additive; gouges, displacements and valleys of brushwork punctate the surface and overlay one another, revealing surprising paintings-as-objects that defy genre.

Erwin Wurm, Untitled (The Hitchhiker’s Project), 2021
Erwin Wurm rose to prominence in the early 1990s with his One Minute Sculptures, an ongoing series of works in which the artist provided instructions to participants to perform awkward poses with everyday objects― the focus of Wurm’s presentation for the Austrian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. His work involves a continual investigation into ephemeral and participatory sculptures, commentaries on the importance of the viewer’s engagement as a necessary agent for completion of the work. In Untitled (The Hitchhiker’s Project), a concrete cast of a disembodied hand with an orange and two lemons pushed onto its fingertips, the participatory nature of Wurm’s work becomes fixed, encapsulating the contradictions between the mobile and the immobile, an absurdist tension present in much of his sculpture.

Erwin Wurm, Untitled (The Hitchhiker’s Project), 2020
Erwin Wurm rose to prominence in the early 1990s with his One Minute Sculptures, an ongoing series of works where the artist provides instructions to participants to perform awkward poses with everyday objects―a theme that was the focus of Wurm’s presentation for the Austrian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. This translated into the essence of his practice: investigations into ephemeral and participatory sculptures that comment on the importance of a viewer’s engagement with works of art as a necessary agent for their completion. In Untitled (The Hitchhiker’s Project), a concrete cast of a disembodied hand with an orange pushed onto its thumb, the participatory nature of Wurm’s work becomes immortalized. These works encapsulate paradox and contradiction between the immobile and the mobile, a tension present in much of Wurm’s sculpture.

Gordon Matta-Clark, print of archival image used in the creation of Belly Curtain, an Homage to Christo’s Valley Curtain, 1971
In 1970, Gordon Matta-Clark helped Christo construct a scale model for Valley Curtain, the artist’s 1,300-foot curtain project in Colorado. Later, Matta-Clark, collaborating with his friend Kitty Duane, a dancer, riffed on the Christo project, creating a suite of photographs in which hand-embellished miniature curtains drape little “valleys” between parts of their naked bodies. Matta-Clark gave these pictures to Christo and they remained in his collection for the next fifty years, until his death last summer. The work was recently offered in Sotheby’s sale of highly personal pieces from the collection of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Remarkably, Belly Curtain, an Homage to Christo’s Valley Curtain has never been shown publicly in New York.

Tony Matelli, Swirl, 2012
Part of a body of work that Tony Matelli describes as “frustrated objects,” Swirl is composed of a mirror whose surface has been obscured with finger swipes of dust, rendered in enamel, playfully complicating the act of seeing oneself and the world. “In my mirrors you experience your own image made strange,” Matelli has said, adding: “I wanted to subvert the Romantic idea of the window as a sort of portal. I wanted to represent it as a kind of false promise.”

Gordon Matta-Clark, Sauna View, 1971
In a loft that he shared with Carol Goodden, Gordon Matta-Clark installed a makeshift sauna, which became an unlikely site for a film about bodies, togetherness and friendship. Shot in black and white, the film shows a group of rowdy friends who have assembled. At the beginning, the sauna is overflowing. Behind feet, we see bodies crammed on top of one another. Someone declares: “It is illegal to have more than six people in this sauna!” to the others’ uproarious laughter. Men and women pass naked in front of the camera with beers in their hands and complete immodesty. Soon, the stifling heat of the sauna calms the excitement and some start to leave. Eventually, only one friend remains, the artist Richard Nonas, the camera lingering on his penis. Upon his departure, the stage is left empty.

James Rosenquist, Spaghetti, 1970
James Rosenquist (1933–2017) frequently used advertising imagery and photography as sources in his artwork, including tinned Franco-American pasta, as featured in the lithograph Spaghetti (1970). Spaghetti swimming in red sauce, a photograph of which Rosenquist commissioned from Hollis Frampton, was often juxtaposed with other imagery in his work, as in the landmark room-scale painting F-111 (1964–65). Rosenquist described the spaghetti as Day-Glo radioactive “flak” though which the jet was flying. An accomplished print maker, Rosenquist worked with Castelli Graphics and Hollanders Workshop to make this edition.

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Dear Glenn O’Brien), 1982
In a two-part collage of embellished mail art sent to the writer, editor and gentleman-about-town Glenn O’Brien, a frequent recipient of Ray Johnson’s correspondence, Johnson riffs on the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album cover famously photographed by Andy Warhol in 1971. Johnson alludes coyly to the identity of the underwear crotch model for the album’s interior, long thought to be Joe D’Alessandro. In actuality, the model was O’Brien, then the editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine — “Was/Not Was.”

Cedar Sigo, Texting Spell, 2021
Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is the editor of Joanne Kyger’s There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera and author of Guard the Mysteries, Royals, Language Arts, Stranger in Town, Expensive Magic, and two editions of Selected Writings. Guard The Mysteries, his most recent collection was published this year by Wave Books. Sigo composed Texting Spell especially for Good Clean Fun.

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1994
Christopher Wool’s Untitled shows a fragmented and incomplete scene. An unknown man, pantsless. No story is told, and it does not seem possible to reconstruct any narrative. One can only assume that Wool himself found this moment strange and compelling and wanted to hold onto it. The edition was published on the occasion of Texte zur Kunst’s issue No. 15, SEXISMEN, September 1994.

Kyoko Hamaguchi
Kyoko Hamaguchi (b. 1989 in Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in New York City and received her MFA from Hunter College in 2020. By utilizing her daily experiences and communication systems and tools in society, Hamaguchi is constantly searching for ways to invent transient images and shapes to reflect her ever-shifting perspective as an immigrant. Her practice takes form in many different media including photography, sculpture, and installation. She Hamaguchi has shown in numerous group exhibitions in New York and Japan including at WhiteBox, New York; SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, 2019, and 2020, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan; and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo. She Hamaguchi has had solo exhibitions at ATM Gallery, New York; KOKI ARTS, Tokyo; and F2T Gallery, Milan (forthcoming).

Ray Johnson
Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a seminal Pop Art figure in the 1950s, an early conceptualist, a performance artist and a pioneer of mail art. His preferred medium was collage, a quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflected the accelerated collision of disparate visual and verbal information bombarding modern humanity. Integrating texts and images drawn from a multiplicity of sources — from mass media to telephone conversations — Johnson’s innovativeness spread beyond the confines of the purely visual. After graduating from Black Mountain College in 1948, he staged what Suzi Gablik described in Pop Art Redefined as perhaps the “first informal happening” and moved into mail art, artist books, graphic design, and sculpture, working in all modes simultaneously. Johnson not only operated in what Rauschenberg famously called “the gap between art and life,” but he also erased the distinction between them. His entire being – a reflection of his obsessively creative mind – was one continuous work of art. His works reflect his encyclopedic erudition, his promiscuous range of interests, and an uncanny proto-Google ability to discover connections between a myriad of images, facts, and people.

Tony Matelli
Tony Matelli (b. 1971 in Chicago, Illinois) lives and works in New York City. Matelli has had over 40 solo shows including the Davis Museum, The State Hermitage Museum, and a mid-career survey at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark. His work is in numerous public collections that include the Davis Museum, MA; Cranbrook Art Museum, MI; FLAG Art Foundation, NY; ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus Denmark; the National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; The Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, Moscow, Russia; Fundacion La Caixa Madrid, Spain; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden; Musee d’arte Contemporain Montreal, Canada; Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Denmark.

Gordon Matta-Clark
Born in New York City in 1943 to artists Roberto Matta and Anne Clark, Gordon Matta-Clark came of age during a time of political turmoil against a backdrop of urban infrastructure in crisis. He studied architecture and graduated from Cornell University in 1968, returning to his native New York City the following year. Struck by the inability of Modernist forms to provide solutions to the city’s increasing social problems, he began to combine his activist concerns with his artistic production. He helped establish alternative spaces such as 112 Greene Street, and the Food Restaurant in SoHo and engaged with peer artists and non-artists in collaboration that aimed to improve their surroundings. In the 1970s, Matta-Clark experimented across various media and began staging monumental interventions and smaller-scale installations in the charged city landscape, bringing attention to New York’s failing social policies, displaced people, and abandoned spaces. He also realized a number of important interventions across Europe, in Milano, Paris, Antwerp and Kassel. Gordon Matta-Clark died from cancer in 1978 at the age of 35.

James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist (November 29, 1933 – March 31, 2017) became well known in the 1960s as a leading American Pop artist alongside contemporaries Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and other figurative artists. As with his contemporaries, Rosenquist’s background in commercial art deeply influenced his nascent fine-art career and radically changed the face of the art world and the annals of art history. While each Pop artist developed a distinct style, there were commonalities in their approaches to image-making that helped define the Pop art movement in the early 1960s: the use of commercial art techniques, and the depiction of popular imagery and everyday objects. Drawing on his early experience as a billboard painter, Rosenquist culled imagery from print advertisements, photographs, and popular periodicals and recombined these to create mysterious and bold compositions. Utilizing the visual language of advertising, described by the late American curator Walter Hopps as “visual poetry,” his work has plumbed questions ranging from the economic, romantic, and ecological to the scientific, cosmic and existential. Creating seminal new work over more than five decades, Rosenquist consistently expressed facile talent in painting, collage, drawing, and printmaking. His work is included in major public and private institutions, and has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The Menil Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Denver Art Museum, Tretyakov Gallery, Museum Ludwig, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, and other national and international institutions.

Maximilian Schubert
Maximilian Schubert (b. 1983 in Rockford, Illinois) received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. He has exhibited in the US and abroad, including Off Paradise, New York; Lisson Gallery, London; the Power Station, Dallas, Texas; Bjorn/Gundorf, Aarhus, Denmark; Van Doren Waxter, New York; Kinman Gallery, London; And Now, Dallas; Eli Ping/Frances Perkins, New York; Stephane Simoens, Knokke, Belgium; Bureau, New York; The Warehouse, Dallas; Chart, New York, and CCA, Andratx, Mallorca. Schubert lives and works in New York.

Cedar Sigo
Cedar Sigo (b. 1978 in Winslow, Washington) was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Sigo is the editor of Joanne Kyger’s There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera and author of Guard the Mysteries, Royals, Language Arts, Stranger in Town, Expensive Magic, and two editions of Selected Writings. Sigo lives in Lofall, Washington.

Sue Williams
Sue Williams (b. 1954 in Chicago Heights, Illinois) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Williams’s work is represented in major museums and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; Sammlung Goetz, Munich. In the fall of 2015, Williams’s retrospective monograph was published by JRP|Ringier. Solo shows in public museums include Vienna Secession; IVAM Valencia, Spain; Geneva Center for Contemporary Art, and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany. She participated in 3 three consecutive Whitney Biennials, and has been included in the recent group shows Comic Abstraction, Museum of Modern Art New York (2007); Rebelle, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (2009); Keeping it Real, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); Figuring Color, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012); Take it or leave it, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art New York (2015); Painting 2.0, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015-16); and Everything Is Connected, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018).

Christopher Wool
Christopher Wool (b. 1955 in Chicago, Illinois) is widely regarded as one of the preeminent and most influential American painters of his generation. Wool moved to New York City in the early 1970s. Since establishing himself as an artist in the 1980s, Wool has forged an agile, highly focused practice that incorporates a variety of processes and mediums, paying special attention to the complexities of painting. Wool’s creative output also incorporates photography, sculpture, artist books, and printmaking. Wool’s work has been presented at museums around the world. Among the institutions that have held major solo exhibitions of his work are the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. Wool’s work is included in numerous noteworthy international institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome; Artist in Residence at DAAD, Berlin and Chianti Foundation, Marfa; and a recipient of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize. Wool currently lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas.

Erwin Wurm
Erwin Wurm (b. 1954 Bruck an der Mur/Styria, Austria; lives and works in Vienna and Limberg, Austria) came to prominence with his One Minute Sculptures, a project that he began in 1996/1997. In these works, Wurm gives written or drawn instructions to participants that indicate actions or poses to perform with everyday objects such as chairs, buckets, fruit, or knit sweaters. These sculptures are by nature ephemeral, and by incorporating photography and performance into the process Wurm challenges the formal qualities of the medium as well as the boundaries between performance and daily life and spectator and participant. While Wurm considers humor an important tool in his work, there is always an underlying social critique of contemporary culture, particularly in response to the capitalist influences and resulting societal pressures that the artist sees as contrary to our internal ideals. Wurm emphasizes this dichotomy by working within the liminal space between high and low and merging genres to explore what he views as a farcical and invented reality. Wurm’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including the Albertina, Vienna, Austria; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria; Museum für moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2017, Wurm represented Austria at the 57th Venice Biennale.