VITAMIN D2: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN DRAWING

First edition. Hardcover. Publisher's original boards in dustwrapper. Illustrated with over 500 images throughout. A fine copy, as new and still in the publisher's plastic wrap with paper label to one side. From the collection a Phaidon rep, later director of sales.

The second volume in Phaidon's influential 'Vitamin' series, following the 2005 contemporary drawing survey, Vitamin D. Nominated by 78 curators, critics, art historians, and museum and gallery directors, the 115 represented artists (some emerging, some established) convey the limitless possibilities of the medium, not to mention the staggering diversity of recent art. Neal Fox's massacred Disney characters appear alongside Richard Forster's photorealistic sketches of Dresden and Vidya Gastaldon's La Tentation de St. Antione, which could be an illumination from a psychedelic children's Bible. Other artists dramatically widen the category, such as performance artist Nikhil Chopra, who is pictured smeared in charcoal, splayed on the ground, and wearing a tutu and heels. The artists in the book hail from over 40 countries, making the volume broader in international scope than its predecessor. Christian Rattemeyer, associate curator of drawings at the New York Musueum of Modern Art, contributes the introduction, writing that since 2005, the "dichotomy of Western normalcy and non-Western exception... has unfolded into a more global dialogue". As a result, "drawing is regaining a political urgency".