Gerard Byrne: images or shadows

Publisher's description: Irish artist Gerard Byrne (born 1969) works primarily in film and photography, which he presents as ambitious large-scale installations. His film and video projects reconstruct historically significant conversations derived from popular magazines from the 1960s-1980s; the effect of these works is to test the “cultural present” of the gallery space against the “defunct present” of a magazine article. Byrne's work draws on a range of sources, from popular print media of the recent past to iconic modernist playwrights and thinkers such as Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre. This volume offers the first complete overview of his work to date.