Roxy Paine: Dioramas

The first publication devoted to the important series by the American artist.

Published in collaboration with the Kavi Gupta and Paul Kasmin galleries, this volume offers the first in-depth look at American artist Roxy Paine’s Dioramas. Initially conceived in the 1990s, it was not until 2012 that Paine began to produce the first of his technically ambitious Dioramas, eventually producing seven museum-scale works that broaden and deepen his engagement with altered realities and the psychogeography of American life and modern culture. The Dioramas represent an important reinvention of the diorama, the nineteenth-century ur-form of modern spectacle, for the twenty-first century.

Edited by Saul Anton, the volume includes an extended conversation between Paine and Wexner Center of the Arts curator Michael Goodson, who organized Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, a 2016 exhibition of the Dioramas at the Beeler Gallery of the Columbus College of Art & Design. The volume also includes essays by Blaffer Museum director Steven Matijcio and critics Saul Anton and Mia Kang that explore their rich historical and social resonance, and reflect on their place in the landscape of contemporary art and art history.

Since the 1990s, Roxy Paine has positioned his work at the intersection between the monumental and the microscopic, the natural and the artificial, the material and the ideal. Featuring documentation and images from all seven dioramas produced between 2012 and 2017, this volume shows how he has continued to track these themes into new social and historical areas.