Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. "Absolutes and Nothings" marks the artist's first major museum show, presented as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum's Contemporary Projects series.
Strode's images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist's own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode's aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic--and captivating--fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, "Absolutes and Nothings" is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.

In 1959 Daniel Spoerri pioneered the first programmatic series of multiples three-dimensional objects issued in edition to be broadly distributed. With a radical emphasis on multiplication and movement, Edition MAT (Multiplication d'art transformable) presented an international selection of work by key figures in postwar kinetic and Op art. Multiplied is the first in-depth English-language study of this seminal project in the history of postwar art. The catalog presents the entirety of the three collections-1959, 1964, and 1965-consisting of 48 artworks by 35 European and US artists associated with kinetic and Op art, including such leading figures as Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, and Jean Tinguely, alongside lesser known artists. With four essays, artist entries, and an appendix of newly translated historical texts, this volume sheds light on under-studied artworks as well as the body of critical thought connecting art, commerce, and display in the postwar period. Artists: Yaacov Agam, Josef Albers, Arman, Jean Arp, Enrico Baj, Davide Boriani, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Christo, Gabriele De Vecchi, Marcel Duchamp, Bo Ek, Robert Filliou, Karl Gerstner, Maurice Henry, Julio Le Parc, Roy Lichtenstein, Heinz Mack, Frank J. Malina, Enzo Mari, Christian Megert, Francois Morellet, Bruno Munari, Arnulf Rainer, Man Ray, Dieter Roth, Jesus Rafael Soto, Daniel Spoerri, Paul Talman, Andre Thomkins, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, Jacques Villegle, Emmett Williams