LOS ANGELES, CA.- Hauser & Wirth’s Book & Printed Matter Lab is spotlighting multidisciplinary Californian artist Richard Jackson and his career-long fascination with the larger possibilities of artmaking and its extension to books with an intimate presentation – ‘Richard Jackson: Works with Books’ – organized by Dagny Janss Corcoran, renowned Los Angeles art bookseller and a longtime friend of Jackson’s.

Celebrating the artist’s career-spanning monograph published in 2020 by Hauser & Wirth Publishers – a critical biography of Jackson, authored by art historian John C. Welchman and featuring an in-depth illustrated chronology by Corcoran – the presentation features Jackson’s artist’s books, a new artwork, a film, and supporting archival material, displaying his preoccupation with the ambiguous requirements of codex, content, format, and purpose of a publication.

At the heart of the presentation is a new work that Jackson created within the Lab in February 2021. In ‘Painted Monograph’ (2021) Jackson painted all 480 pages of his new monograph, relating back to an idea he initially conceived in 1977— ‘Paint every page of each book, / while still wet stack the books filling a room, / wall to wall, floor to ceiling.’ During the creation of the work, Jackson was filmed with Corcoran discussing philosophies on art, life, and book-making as they relate to the books and printed matter on display.

Alongside the new film produced by Corcoran, the digital presentation of the exhibition on the gallery's website features a curated playlist by Chris Kidd, author and close friend of Jackson's. This eclectic selection of obscure and eternal sounds interspersed with nods to Jackson’s longstanding love of opera seeks to encapsulate the life and career of an artist who has never been bound by easy categorization.

‘Richard Jackson: Works with Books’ is on view by request from 20 March through 6 June 2021 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

A pre-eminent figure in American contemporary art since the 1970s, Richard Jackson is influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and action painting, exploring a performative painting process which seeks to extend the potential of painting by upending its technical conventions. Born in Sacramento, California in 1939, Jackson first came to international attention with a major presentation of his installation works at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 1988, followed by the 1992 exhibition, ‘Helter Skelter,’ at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.