Book Description

Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection brings together more than two hundred iconic art works that each in their own way ask us to reconsider how we look at the world. How do artists challenge us to see the everyday world around us with fresh eyes? How do they make our world strange? Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection brings together nearly 250 art works spanning the course of more than 100 years of history that each in their own way ask us to reconsider how we look at the world. Brought together by Chara Schreyer over the course of three decades, the works in this volume invite us to rethink our perception of the everyday in the wake of Marcel Duchamp's radical re-imagination of the object of art and the Russian revolutionary-era literary critic Viktor Shklovsky's conception of "making strange." Whether looking at the idea of "making strange" in the work of Duchamp and Georgia O'Keefe, the legacy of minimalism and its discontents in the sculptures of Donald Judd and Felix Gonzalez Torres, the idea of disaster in America as seen through the eyes of Andy Warhol and Kara Walker, the concrete uses of language in the works of Lawrence Weiner and Glenn Ligon, or the restaging of life through the photographic medium in artists from Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman, the essays in this catalogue reevaluate the relationship between art and the world and offer a new perspective on the personal act of collecting.