A Brief History of Invisible Art is a fully illustrated catalog with essay by Ralph Rugoff, which brings together artworks from six decades that place a pronounced emphasis on the conceptual and communicative possibilities of the work of art, while bypassing its seeming requirements of visibility and materiality. In surveying this terrain, the exhibition includes works that represent a wide range of aesthetic practices and that engage with surprisingly diverse concerns. Whether underscoring the role of the audience, mocking the theological aura of museum rhetoric or calling attention to the importance of linguistic description in cultural production, these works prompt us to see through the more grandiose distractions of contemporary art and so to think more clearly about its underlying functions.

Featured Artists: Art & Language, Michael Asher, Robert Barry, James Lee Byars, Maurizio Cattelan, Jay Chung, Trisha Donnelly, Tom Friedman, Carsten Höller, Bethan Huws, Bruno Jakob, Yves Klein, Glenn Ligon, Jonathan Monk, Gianni Motti, Andy Warhol.