Rackstraw Downes Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008

Klaus Ottmann

Published by GILES in association with Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York

Release Date — June 2010 (UK and USA)

Dimensions — 112 pages, 240 x 280 mm (11 x 9 ½ in.), landscape

Illustrations — 44 colour

Hardback price — UK£24.95/US$39.95

ISBN — 1-904832-73-3

ISBN — 978-1-904832-73-7

Book Details (pdf) — Parrish-Downes-AI-LR.pdf

Trade Orders — Please visit our Trade Orders section

Press Release — Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings 1972–2008...

Sales Points

A major survey of the work of this important contemporary artist from his first works to his most recent paintings

Publication accompanies an exhibition at Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, June 20 – August 8, 2010; Portland Museum of Art, Maine, December 16, 2010 - March 20, 2011; Weatherspoon Art Museum of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, May 28, 2011 - August 21, 2011

Features an introductory essay by Klaus Ottmann, Robert Lehman Curator at Parrish Art Museum

About the Book

Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008 is an important overview of the work and methods of this British-born ‘realist’ panoramic painter (b. 1939) who was given the MacArthur Fellowship genius award in 2009. Though primarily based in New York City, Downes has travelled widely and has created a significant number of landscape paintings on site including the harbour of Portland, Maine, and the Donald Judd structures in Marfa, Texas.

Downes’s panoramic paintings, which he developed by studying seventeenth-century Dutch panoramic landscape painting possess a unique balance between realism and abstraction, timelessness and history. Painted from observation, they are not "snapshots" of a scene recreated in the studio; rather, they are chronicles of the human experience— records of social history as it evolves.

This volume is a comprehensive compendium of the artist’s career, from his current work to pieces that track the growth and development of his themes and concepts over three decades, and will contribute to the discourse concerning the changing nature of painting in the 21st century.

About the Author(s)

Klaus Ottmann is Robert Lehman Curator at Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, and an independent curator and scholar. He is the author of, most recently, Yves Klein: Works, Writings, Interviews (2010) and Thought Through My Eyes: Writings on Art, 1977–2005 (2006). Sarah Rothenberg is an internationally acclaimed solo and chamber pianist and has served as artistic director of Da Camera, Houston since 1994. She is a frequent performer on Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series in New York. Terrie Sultan is Director of Parrish Art Museum. She was director and chief curator of Blaffer Gallery from 2000–8, and curator of contemporary at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 1988-2000.