Materiality and The Afterlife of Artworks

This collection explores, theoretically through a series of case studies, how matter and materials have a role in the afterlife of artworks.

Focussing on modern and contemporary art, the book asks several related questions: How does matter affect the afterlife of works of art and images? How are contemporary artists taking afterlife/materials as part of their practice? And what role does the pair play in transforming center-periphery relations? Through a range of contributions, the book describes how the History of Art has enlarged its scope through the incidence of both the “iconic turn” and the “material turn”, giving an overview of how the notion of afterlife has been increasingly changing art historical studies, and of how this fact is articulated with the growing attention paid to matter —and, when matter is considered in relation to a technique, to materials. It offers both an account of the state of things in the theoretical/historiographical discussion and a set of case studies ranging from Picasso’s Guernica or Torres García’s murals to the works of Ad Reinhardt or Ana Lupas, as well as more recent practices by artists such as Gala Porras-Kim or Pierre Huyghe.

This book is suitable for students and researchers in History of Art, Visual Studies, Memory Studies and Philosophy.