“Psycho cops, gay riots, stock market implosions, heroic acts, serial killers, Rudy, Ronald, Osama and The Donald all feature heavily in this pitch-perfect, oversized collection of the large-scale, black-and-white Sharpie drawings created by the noted international conceptualist Aleksandra Mir (and a rotating cast of assistants) live, daily, at New York's Mary Boone Gallery in the fall of 2007. For the critically acclaimed show, Mir and her crew reproduced, by hand, more than 200 of the most outrageous front covers to have graced New York's top tabloids, The New York Post and the Daily News, from 1986 to 2000. The New York Times' Roberta Smith praised the work's "goofy, graffiti energy," noting, "The works at Boone redo the news, reminding us how soon we forget and exaggerating the ephemeral beauty--or at least boldness--of a genre of graphic design and language that we consume and discard on a daily basis."
Published by Retrospective Press, 2008.
***Aleksandra Mir was born in Lubin, Poland in 1967. Her Polish citizenship was revoked during the 1968 Polish political crisis; she holds dual Swedish-American citizenship instead. Her work deals with time, place, language, gender, identity, performativity, representation, transition, translation and transgression. She is known for her large-scale collaborative projects and for her anthropological methods, involving rigorous archival research, oral history and fieldwork. She has participated in more than 360 exhibitions worldwide, including at Tate Modern, London (2014), Tate Liverpool (2017), Whitney Museum of American Art (2014), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2007), MoMA, New York City (2012), YUZ Museum, Shanghai (2018), and Biennale di Venezia (2009).
