Publications

Doubts were repeatedly expressed in the 20th century about the contemporary significance and relevance of painting, although ultimately that genre, with all its rich traditions, was never abandoned. On the contrary: groups of works by Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter from the Daros Collection show how artistic forms of expression, examined and redefined, have become open to hitherto uncharted areas of reality.

with texts by
Dietmar Elger, Peter Fischer, Martin Hentschel, Michael Lüthy.

Zurich: Daros;
Zurich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 2001.

texts in English and German

228 pages, 55 full page color reproductions,
bound in linen, dust jacket

Insomnia has been a lifetime companion of Louise Bourgeois' night hours. Between November 1994 and June 1995, she committed to paper whatever thoughts, memories, and images surfaced during her long sleepless nights. The resulting 220 drawings are the quintessence of all the impulses, sources, and motifs that inspire her work. The Insomnia Drawings show the artist's mind at work: drawings and sketches alternate with poems and aphorisms in both French and English, interspersed with notes referring to the business of everyday life. The series is a unique mirror of an extraordinary woman’s life and work: beautiful, disquieting, passionate, inquiring, and imbued with a quirky sense of humor.

L’art / ou est / la vie, / toi et vous / inspire / unafraid: Art / est le / contraire / du acting.
Les paysages de nuit ont / envahi les jours.
Water is the / opposite of continuity / water can be the best but it / can be worse / /M is for mother / in the water, it is subject / to change / or even to reversal.
Louise Bourgeois

As soon as the artist agreed to entrust The Insomnia Drawings to the Daros Collection, it was clear that this extraordinary work should be presented as a book. The result is a handsome slipcased two-volume publication, edited by Daros Services AG, Zurich. The first volume contains facsimiles of both the recto and verso of the 220 drawings. The second volume provides the reader with valuable background information on this complex and exhilaratingly beautiful work of art. Marie-Laure Bernadac, a leading Bourgeois scholar, places The Insomnia Drawings in the context of Bourgeois’ oeuvre, providing biographical references for many notes, and pointing out the leitmotifs of Bourgeois’ imaginary universe. In a lucid and beautifully written essay, Elisabeth Bronfen traces the nocturnal mysteries of insomnia and places this work of art in a larger cultural context. The second volume also contains a biography of the artist and annotated transcriptions of all texts and notes.

She presents herself as a lady-in-waiting, silent and patient, with the night promising to save her from the array of desires such as love, faith, faithlessness, tenacity, ambition, while her sleeplessness prevents any salvation from her psychic distress. If in these drawings and texts the night is metaphorically conceived of as an expanse of water that might engulf her, while sleep would restore her, insomnia is what prevents any voyage into inundation. (...) Because her insomnia brings states of ambivalence to the fore, she keeps returning to the question of being suspended between two emotions—between plenitude and lack, proximity and absence, inundation and deprivation, agreement and contradiction.
Elisabeth Bronfen

The publication In the Power of Painting is devoted to six artists: Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Ross Bleckner. Selected groups of works from the Daros Collection, mainly from the artists’ early periods, reveal their attitude towards painting and trace the emergence of an individual artistic expression and style in each case.

The paintings from the years 1949 to 1998 cover the entire second half of the twentieth century, a turbulent period in the history of art, and irrefutably contradict the assertion of the end of painting.

with contributions by
Sören Engblom, Peter Fischer, Martin Hentschel, Michael Lüthy, and Iris Müller-Westermann.

Zurich: Alesco;
Zurich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 2000.

ISBN 3-908247-27-6

Bilingual edition in German and English.

Bound in linen, dust jacket,
142 pages, 40 full page color reproductions..

American Abstract Expressionism is one of the most fascinating and influential periods in the art of the 20th century. Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture focuses not only on the heroes of this style of painting but also examines its development and later artistic responses to it. In the essays specially written for this volume, renowned authors discuss a selection of some fifty paintings from the Daros Collection.
Keyworks of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell represent the "pure" phase of Abstract Expressionism implying gesture on a large scale, in which the artist transfers the movement of his or her body to the painting. A variant to that, écriture, stands for a scriptural gesture that has evolved out of handwriting as demonstrated, for instance, in the work of Cy Twombly. Twombly's oeuvre is examined in an extraordinary group of paintings that spans the artist’s entire career. Brice Marden’s alternately fluid and tensile abstractions also involve écriture, specifically Far Eastern calligraphy. And Jean-Michel Basquiat’s pictures walk the fine line between abstraction and representation that makes them more than just graffiti. The Abstract Expressionist movement has challenged many artists of subsequent generations, inviting their commentary, paraphrase, and interpretation. Robert Ryman’s intensive occupation with the stroke of the brush is discussed as well as Andy Warhol’s answers to action painting in his Oxidation and Shadow paintings of 1978. Much of the art of the eighties questioned the meaning and legitimization of painting. Jonathan Lasker, David Reed, and Philip Taaffe are among those who explored means of shifting painting to a more conceptual level and experimenting with the conditions and possibilities of contemporary abstract painting.

Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture covers American art of the last fifty years from the original gesture of action painting to the distanced and critical approach of the younger generation.

with contributions by
Yve-Alain Bois, Enrique Juncosa, Rosalind Krauss, Richard D. Marshall, and Brenda Richardson.

Zurich: Alesco;
Zurich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 1999.

ISBN 3-908247-99-3

In English.

Bound in linen, dust jacket, 181 pages, 98 color reproductions, including 55 full page and 6 foldouts