Idylls: Illusion And Delusion

The trope of the idyll is no longer limited to rural simplicity or innocence. In its recent contemporary redux, it has appeared as a private space or withdrawal to the imagination, an illusion or a flight of fantasy. This volume is divided into four sections, focusing in turn on landscape, urban, private and utopian variants, exploring the issues that have made the idyll timely again, and following the course of its present radicalization. One hint: there is often something hidden in the works collected here--for instance, Rowena Dring's clear, comic-like landscape paintings turn out to be sewn together out of small pieces of fabric, which, as soon as the viewer looks more closely, dissolve into countless flecks of color. Artists include Franz Ackermann, Alexander Braun, Olaf Breuning, Christian Jankowski, Mike Kelley/Paul McCarthy, Stefan Kurten, Jorge Pardo and Wolfgang Tillmans.