Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away

Synopsis The first comprehensive book in English on the conceptual artist Danh Vo.

Danh Vo’s conceptual, installation-based practice dissects the power structures, cultural forces and private desires that shape our experience of the world. He often employs found objects, images and texts to animate personal narratives that refract global political histories. Published to accompany the most comprehensive museum presentation to date of the Danish artist’s work, this catalogue presents for the first time an illuminating overview of Vo’s work from the past fifteen years. Organized around nearly thirty major projects and installations, the volume ranges from Vo’s early conceptual works such as The Marriage Project (2003–05), in which he married and divorced acquaintances in order to add their surnames to his own, to his recent sculptural hybrids of classical and Christian statuary. A lead essay by Katherine Brinson probes the artist’s roving, research-based process in which historical study, fortuitous encounters, and personal relationships are woven into psychologically potent tableaux. Significant recurring subjects include the legacy of colonialism and the fraught status of the refugee, as well as the image of the United States in its own collective imagination and in that of the world.
Biographie de l'auteur
Katherine Brinson is Daskalopoulos Curator, Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Danh Vo (b. 1975, Bà Ria, Vietnam) is a key conceptual artist whose work dissects the power structures, cultural forces and private desires that shape our experience of the world, and addresses themes of identity, religion, colonialism, capitalism and artistic authorship. Vo is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne. He has exhibited work at the Venice Biennale, Art Institute of Chicago, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kuntshalle Basel, among other international institutions, and is the winner of the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize and the 2007 Blau Orange Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken.