Painter Archie Rand transforms all 613 Jewish commandments into brightly colored and shockingly beautiful images, now collected in a stunning book that is bound to be a perennial gift for any occasion or holiday.
Archie Rand, born 1949, is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand's work as a painter and muralist is displayed around the world, including in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioth que Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. There have been over 100 solo exhibitions of his work. He has published collaborative work with poets Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Clark Coolidge, David Plante John Yau, David Lehman and Jim Cummins. He was awarded, among numerous honors, the Achievement Medal For Contributions to the Visual Arts by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and he received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Formerly the Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University he is currently the Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His home and studio are located in Brooklyn.
"Archie Rand's The 613 is all the religion one can use in a
lifetime--It sends eye and mind careening as it oscillates
dizzyingly between sacred and secular, postmodern and pre-modern,
high and low, word and picture, trash and treasure, sublime and
silly, conceptual and retinal, altar and push-cart, lox and bagels.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was 'Wow!' " —Art
Spiegelman
"Part circus ringmaster and part vaudevillian, Archie Rand takes us
on a rat-a-tat arts-ride that mixes biblical, comic book and movie
history in which danger leads to violence on its way to melodrama
that plunges into tragedy; a pouring out of panels that provoke,
compel, resonate, and go on resonating." —Jules Feiffer
"If Leviticus seems an unlikely text for a comic strip, look again.
Or rather look at Archie Rand's magnificent series of commandments,
The 613. The beauty, terror, and fun are all there in one magic,
mesmerizing wall of colored shapes and visual oratory. It's a
splendid series." —John Ashbery
"Archie Rand's work reveals the truth on the most basic level,
through the struggle to create. With The 613, he is like a biblical
sage for the postmodern world, embracing the viewer and all of
history."—Ang Lee
"Panel by panel, visionary window by visionary window, invention
after invention, shock upon shock, Archie Rand's The 613 seizes
willful human life in all its transgressions and transports, its
obstinate whim and its self-regard, and fashions out of mortal
intransigence and desire a dazzling narrative tapestry. Rand's
serious wit of riotously colorful contemporary comic-book art
applied to Commandments, as it morphs into a seamless mural, rings
out with the ironic and iconic underground teasing of 'thou shalt
not' simultaneously luring us to a half-Socratic, half-Biblical
KNOW THYSELF." —Cynthia Ozick
“A monumental art project is transformed into wildly ambitious
graphic literature….a series of paintings that some might find
transgressive, transcendent, or both….a visual universe in which
time is out of joint, where edicts from the distant past receive
interpretation from a more recent past or an imagined future. As a
book, The 613 stands on its own rather than merely evoking a larger
wall display, reaching a much wider audience in the process.”
—Kirkus (Starred)
“A new book by a trailblazing artist...The 613 pairs mitzvahs with
appropriated images from Mad Magazine, pulp and 20th-century
illustration. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes
intriguingly oblique. It is outrageous and inviting, in-your-face
and mysterious, making Rand’s case 613 times over.”
—David Van Biema, Religion News Service
“[R]ichly colored, always stirring works of visual art…[The 613] is
something like seeing a cinema-sized version of ancient wisdom
transmuted through a comic (and then blown up again).”
—Flavorwire
“By turns, funny, sad, thoughtful, silly and bizarre, some
respectful, some profane…Rand’s work here is a brilliant mash-up of
comic books, True Detective magazine covers and
obsessive-compulsive disorder…like Marc Chagall on a bender.”
—Shalom Auslander, The New York Times Book Review
“The 613 presents colorful, attention-grabbing scenes…The colors
are warm and bright, with a joyous, expressive quality about
them—the book is a feast of images.”
—The Jewish Week
“Rand is a virtuoso…I am in awe of his inventiveness, essential
good will and his sense of humor. I can’t believe that every reader
of this review isn’t going to rush out and purchase The 613.”
—David Carrier, artcritical
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