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the long version

Los Angeles–based artist Walead Beshty (born 1976) has long maintained an active writing career alongside his work in the visual arts. Writing on a variety of media, including essays on cinema, painting, sculpture and photography, and texts on artists such as Jay DeFeo, Sharon Lockhart, Kelley Walker, Luisa Lambri, Annette Kelm and Michael Asher, among others, Beshty has been widely published in both books and magazines. This book, the latest in JRP|Ringier’s Positions series copublished with Les presses du réel, gathers together a selection of these essays, often hard to find, in partially reedited forms. Together these texts appear as a parallel production to Beshty’s artistic work: they reflect on the conditions of the realization and circulation of images, undermining distinctions between media, abstraction and figuration, and proposing new aesthetic criteria for the works examined.