Rosalind E. Krauss - Curator

Curator

Krauss has been curator of many art exhibitions at leading museums, among them exhibitions on Joan Miró at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1970–73), on surrealism and photography at the Corcoran Museum of Art (1982–85), on Richard Serra at the Museum of Modern Art (1985–86), and on Robert Morris at the Guggenheim (1992–94). She prepared an exhibition for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris called "Formlessness: Modernism Against the Grain" in 1996. She is currently preparing a second volume of collected essays as a sequel to The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986).

Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum, Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976. Professor Krauss's attempts to understand the phenomenon of modernist art, in its historical, theoretical, and formal dimensions, have led her in various directions. She has, for example, been interested in the development of photography, whose history-running parallel to that of modernist painting and sculpture-makes visible certain previously overlooked phenomena in the "high arts", such as the role of the indexical mark, or the function of the archive. She has also investigated certain concepts, such as "formlessness", "the optical unconscious", or "pastiche", which organize modernist practice in relation to different explanatory grids from those of progressive modernism, or the avant-garde.