Nothing and Everything.

Nothing and Everything. Numerous contributing artists. Fraenkel Gallery, 2006. 46 pp., illustrated throughout, 8x10". Images from here.

Book description:

" 'Nothing and Everything', is a hardcover catalog that accompanies an exhibition of thirty-eight drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculpture spanning eleven decades.

The book and exhibition includes works by Carl Andre, Vija Celmins, Jean Debuffet, Walker Evan, Robert Gober, Peter Hujar, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kely, Helen Levitt, Piero Manzoni, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, among others.


'Nothing and Everything' investigates one of art’s oldest mysteries: how an artwork may simultaneously contain elements of emptiness and fullness, void and profusion.

These qualities may appear contradictory but they do not have to be so.

Several works, including Peter Hujar’s 1975 photograph of the Hudson River and Ellsworth Kelly’s drawing Light Reflecting on Water (1950), explore connections between the banal and the sublime, particularly in nature. Diane Arbus’s photograph Clouds on a Screen at a Drive-in, N.J. (1960), for example, blurs the line between the mundane and the transcendent with its image of a billowing cloud on the movie screen against the evening sky.

More than a statement of modern man’s distance from nature, the photograph captures a moment of the sublime bounded by the everyday."