In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker about the exhibition No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984-1989 at David Zwirner in New York, "the show's cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era." With an eye to canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of international art scenes that were based in Cologne-arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time-and New York. While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner, and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler, and Monika Spruth showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. The works of these German artists were exhibited along with the latest contemporary art from the US by artists like Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the works of German artists were presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring, Augustine & Hodes, and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work being produced and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this ongoing dialogue, among them Europa / Amerika (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1986) and A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland (New Museum, New York, 1986). Big, bold, and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color over one hundred immensely varied artworks by the twenty-two international artists included in this massive exhibition-one of the largest in David Zwirner's history. Beyond its stunning visual components, the book features crucial new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, and an illustrated chronology of the decade by Kara Carmack. The book also includes an arsenal of compelling archival material, from documentary photographs from the period to reproductions of Cologne's culture magazine Spex. Taken as a whole, this ambitious exhibition catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart, and "dissonance of styles"-in the words of Schjeldahl-embodied by this fascinating and fecund moment in global art history. Artists featured in the book include Werner Buttner, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Gunther Foerg, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Albert Oehlen, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, and Christopher Wool.

* American artist Chris Johanson has built a loyal following with his vibrant and sometimes hilarious take on the universe and our place in it. This monograph offers a panoramic view of Johanson's practice from his roots as a street artist in San Francisco to his celebrated exhibitions.

In the Belgian artist Harold Ancart's rich new body of work, he turns an immersive landscape of trees, mountains, and seas into a meditation on painting itself. Harold Ancart often paints subjects that naturally invite contemplation, such as the horizon, clouds, flowers, flames, and icebergs. His newest body of work captures the experience of landscape seen in motion or from a distance: trees blurred while driving past, an inky-black sea seen from a distance, an evocative Martian mountain range. Recalling Rene Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart blurs form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction. Reproduced here in magnificent foldouts, two multipanel canvases situate the viewer between a mountainscape and a seascape, both monumental in scale. Ancart segments the seascape with a stark horizon line, dividing sky and ocean. Like other comparable motifs within the artist's oeuvre, the vividly colored cloudy sky functions in an anthropomorphic way, alluding to the endless possibilities and personalities of organic forms. Including an interview with Bob Nickas, this catalogue offers insight into Ancart's frank reflections on painting, writing, nature, and more. The publication also features a new essay by Laura McLean-Ferris. Taken together, the works in Harold Ancart: Traveling Light meditate on the expansive possibilities of painting.

The most comprehensive overview of artist Josh Smith's radicaltechnicolor paintings. Josh Smith: Emo Jungle looks at the artist's vigorous repetition of particular motifs, illuminating his approach to painting as an exploratory medium for image production. Published on the occasion of Smith's critically acclaimed first exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue features a new body of work that marks an important evolution for the artist. In these paintings, Smith sets the stage for a new mode of self-reflective commentary on image making, acknowledging that "the meaning perhaps arises in the making." A new essay by Bob Nickas treats the Reaper, Turtle, and Devil figures from Emo Jungle as ciphers through which to understand Smith's work. Nickas demonstrates how these new paintings restage and personalize the artist's more abstract earlier works and illuminates the ways in which repetition functions within Smith's practice. With more than one hundred illustrations, this book serves as the ideal introduction to Smith's disruptive oeuvre.

For one year, respected critic and curator Bob Nickas put his money where his eyes are: He decided to become a collector, someone who takes art off gallery walls instead of hanging it there. His ground rules dictated that he would buy one work per month from an artist he had never written about or exhibited before. In this fascinating diary of his year on the market, he tracks the changes in his relation to art, when the commitment becomes one of the wallet and not just the mind and words. "It has affected the way I look at art," he writes. "On the one hand, if I am unwilling to part with my hard-earned money, how worthy can the art really be? On the other, there are certainly works far above my humble means . . . . For this project, I have had to pay to have my say."

New York-based artist Kelley Walker hacks advertising and displays its inner workings as art. His large-scale prints appropriate iconic cultural images, digitally altering them to expose their underlying agendas. In "Black Star Press: Black Star, Star Press Star" (2004), Walker combined nondigital collage processes to reference abstract painting: He smeared newspaper photos of the Birmingham race riots with melted chocolate and toothpaste, scanned them into a computer and made photographic prints from the results. Such hybridized work is neither quite post-Pop nor just appropriation. In the past few years, Walker has emerged as one of the most innovative and rigorous young artists in New York and has become much in demand not only for his solo work but for his collaborations with fellow New Yorker Wade Guyton. This monograph is a valuable introduction to Walker's technical processes, and essays by maverick critic and curator Bob Nickas and writer Scott Rothkopf lend much insight into his practice.

Working in series that evolved slowly over decades, British-born, New York-based painter Alan Uglow (1941-2011) always remained faithful to his central vision; his practice was unaffected by the increasingly commercial demands of the art scene in the 1980s and 1990s, earning him the "artist's artist" tag. His paintings revolve around a subtle dialogue between notions of center and edge, and are executed gradually, with several layers of paint. They appear at once calm and dynamic, and simultaneously suggest emptiness and ground. Published to coincide with a 2013 exhibition organized by Bob Nickas at David Zwirner, New York, this indispensable catalogue includes all-new photography of paintings created from the early 1990s through 2011, archival interviews and images, and an exhibition chronology illustrated with images of museum and gallery invitation cards.