Art historian and curator Dawn Ades is a leading voice on Dada, Surrealist, Abstract and Latin American art. This volume collects her essays for the first time, highlighting her passionate voice across time periods and art movements.
Arranged thematically, this collection presents the breadth of Dawn Ades’s critical and curatorial interests, ranging from avant-garde poster design to the representation of the female in Mexico, but with an overarching foundation in abstraction, identity and the influence of new media.
As well as working as a professor and curator Ades has written on a wide range of artists since 1980. Spanning the likes of Francis Bacon, Richard Deacon, Salvador Dalí and Hannah Höch, this body of essays is ingrained with Ades’s consistently clear and intellectually stimulating observations.
To introduce the book, Ades is interviewed by Doro Globus who explores the writer’s relationship to curating, teaching and art history.
It was a great pleasure, and a journey of discovery, how accessibly Ades writes when proofing this hefty tome. In a time when (often bad) academic writing seems to become ever-more prevalent, it was refreshing to be able to engage directly with someone’s thinking and wide-ranging interests, often led simply by her looking, rather than that always needing to be connected to overtly theoretical frames of reference.
The book is published by Ridinghouse, and is due in March 2015.
Gerrie van Noord 