Verena Landau

This lavishly illustrated book presents a comprehensive overview of the career thus far of German artist Verena Landau, documenting her projects from 1999 through 2013. Landau is particularly interested in the tense relationship between art and commerce, a theme that runs through several of her works. The sale of her painted film stills Pasolini-Stills and Passing Pasolini, for example, led her to create portraits of collectors engaged in mundane activities in the spaces in front of the paintings, while Zone of Discretion traces the story of a painting that was sold to a bank. Another project involved staging a fictional theft of her own painting through a series of photomontages. In more recent years, Landau has been interested in entrances to banks and shareholder meetings, public passages, and, most recently, spaces of public transit and the waiting and movement that occur there.

A retrospective that reveals an artist changing and evolving, Verena Landau: Passages, Passengers, Places is a fascinating, revealing document of a cutting-edge artist.