About this Event
Artbook Bookstores and TBW Books are pleased to announce the publication of Sheila, a new monograph by artist John Divola.
Named for Divola's wife at the time, the book brings together rarely seen, striking portraits of her made between 1976 and 1984——intimate images of a woman he describes as having inspired the kind of love "you read about in books but assume is an exaggeration." These portraits, most of which were never exhibited and never intended to be, are among the most personal work Divola has ever made. Threaded throughout them, appearing and disappearing like thoughts during a long conversation, are images from the major series he was developing during those same years——among them his celebrated Zuma, Vandalism, and Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement Zone series——bodies of work that would come to define his place in the photographic canon.
The effect is quietly revelatory. The career-making work and the deeply personal exist on equal footing, interrupting and illuminating each other the way life and work always do, whether an artist intends it or not. Her presence, Divola notes, was woven into the fabric of his work during those years——and seeing the portraits of Sheila alongside the work for which he is best known reframes both. The personal and the conceptual revealed as two sides of the same practice, rooted, as he writes, in the artifacts of a lived life.
Event venue & nearby stays
ARTBOOK @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 917 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, United States
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