Download as PDF
View on ARTnews

Books became portals into other worlds more than usual in 2020, with seemingly endless times of confinement and less in the way of IRL experience than most of us had ever imagined before. Whether through reading or looking at pictures that proved a lot more interesting than the composition of our walls, we at ARTnews found much to be grateful for between the covers of books this year. Here are some of our favorites.

Since his death in 2019, Matthew Wong’s richly colored, dreamy landscapes have continued to captivate the art world. Karma Gallery in New York staged an acclaimed exhibition of his work late last year, and the recent sale of his River at Dusk (2018) for $4.9 million at Phillips auction set a new record for the artist. Published on the occasion of an ARCH Athens exhibition of intimately scaled works by Wong in the last year of his life, Postcards also features an essay by art historian Winnie Wong and a poem by Henri Cole. The small scale presents an opportunity to acquaint with the painter’s explorations on paper, which, like his larger works, have the power to induce a deeply contemplative mood. As Winnie Wong writes in the introduction, “The postcard is a genre that seems to consciously elude a sense of stable locus, yet marks the times of our lives when we tried to grasp it.”

Postcards is available here.