Focal Points: Nancy Spero

How can we interpret the work of contemporary artists? First released in 2024, Focal Points is a book series of essays, articles and reviews by acclaimed curator and critic Robert Storr. Expertly edited by art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo, and richly illustrated, it lends Storr’s illuminating insights into an artist’s practice and way of thinking. Brilliantly scholarly, accessible and engaging, Focal Points offers fresh interpretations of the varied territory of modern and contemporary art.

This volume brings together, for the first time, Storr’s writings on the work of American painter, collage and installation artist Nancy Spero, coinciding with the centenary of the artist’s birth. Internationally recognised for her innovative scroll-like works on paper and multi-panel installations in which Woman is the universal protagonist, in her wide-ranging practice Spero expanded the possibilities of art by subverting received notions of time, space and representation. Discussing pivotal works such as the War Series, Codex Artaud and Notes in Time, Storr – as Pietropaolo notes in her introduction – ‘illuminates the norm-breaking and open-ended quality of Spero’s oeuvre, underlying its ability to embrace contradiction’ and collapse ‘hierarchies among media … and dichotomies between the hand-made and the photo-mechanical, power and fragility, the permanent and the ephemeral.’