
‘Paint every page of each book,while still wet stack the books filling a room,wall to wall, floor to ceiling.’
—Richard Jackson, 1977
Beginning in the early 1970s, lifelong Californian Richard Jackson’s Wall Paintings, Stacks, and Room-themed installations gave rise to a series of landmark innovations in painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and the relations between them.
Jackson’s interest in the larger possibilities of art-making and how it can be done extends to books, as well. Organised by Dagny Corcoran, a longtime friend of Jackson’s and author of the expansive chronology in Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ 2020 monograph on the artist, this Book & Printed Matter Lab presentation highlights Jackson’s artist’s books and supporting archival material, displaying the artist’s preoccupation with the ambiguous requirements of codex, content, format, and purpose of a publication.
Below is a playlist created by Chris Kidd, author and dear friend of Jackson’s, as the aural backdrop for the presentation. An eclectic selection of the obscure and eternal, interspersed with nods to Richard’s longstanding love of opera, this playlist encapsulates the life and career of an artist who has never been bound by easy categorisation.
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.




Hauser & Wirth was founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, who were joined in 2000 by Partner and Vice President Marc Payot. A family business with a global outlook, Hauser & Wirth has expanded over the past 26 years to include outposts in Hong Kong, London, New York, Los Angeles, Somerset and Gstaad. The gallery represents over 70 artists and estates who have been instrumental in shaping its identity over the past quarter century, and who are the inspiration for Hauser & Wirth’s diverse range of activities that engage with art, education, conservation and sustainability.

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