Rosa Barba - (Phaidon Contemporary Artists) by Stuart Comer & Shanay Jhaveri & Élisabeth Lebovici & Julie Ault (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The first comprehensive monograph on visual artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba, one of the most critically acclaimed artists working today

Rosa Barba is a Berlin-based artist whose work offers a crucial deconstruction of film and sculpture and how the two relate to each other. While her installations and site-specific interventions challenge and reconstitute the viewer's notions of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, documents, and information, her films settle at an ambiguous point between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, thriving in a contemporary moment while hinging on fleeting memory and encroaching uncertainty.

Predicated by extensive study in a variety of places, and occasionally enhanced by live performances conceived to activate her pieces, Barba's art provides an experience that brings back the audience to the bewildered, complex reality that surrounds us every day.

Extensively illustrated with more than 150 photographs, this first monograph on the groundbreaking artist includes essays and texts from art-world luminaries, an illuminating new interview with Barba, studio photography, and more.

Review Quotes

Praise for Rosa Barba:

'Rosa Barba's films, sculptures, and performances start with movies and the machines that make them. They end up in the realm of exuberant effects.' - New York Times

'Rosa Barba has a way of taking our world's most magical and most fundamental elements, then folding them in on one another - taking them apart, making them anew.' - Art in America

About the Author

Rosa Barba is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She is the recipient of a variety of awards, including the Zurich Art Prize (2025), the Calder Prize (2019), and the 46th Prix International d'Art Contemporain of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco (2015).

Stuart Comer is the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Shanay Jhaveri is the Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican in London.

Élisabeth Lebovici is an art historian, writer and mentor based in Paris.

Julie Ault is an artist, writer and editor who has exhibited at numerous international institutions.