McArthur Binion: DNA

„This book focuses on the works that comprise McArthur Binion’s DNA series, produced between 2013 and 2020 and united by their underlying imagery and the language of the grid. Binion has indicated that the series, more than 250 paintings and prints, is now, as of summer 2020, complete. While narratives surrounding aspects of the artist’s practice and life have become well-trod in the existing bibliography regarding his work, this volume seeks to dig more deeply, more precisely, into a single body of production as a means to both hone and open the ways we might understand and see Binion’s work. Taken as a whole, this publication reveals the visual complexity of the series and the boarder field of meaning it suggests”–Page 7.
An intimate minimalism: McArthur Binion’s permutational uses of abstraction, collage and autobiographyChicago-based painter McArthur Binion (born 1946) combines collage, drawing and painting to create autobiographical abstractions. He paints minimalist grids and patterns over copies of his personal documents and photographs, including pages from his handwritten address book and his birth certificate, as well as images of his childhood home and photographs of his hands. This book explores Binion’s DNA series and includes reproductions of more than 80 of his paintings and works on paper, as well as essays investigating this series through the lens of art history, labor, music and writing.Offering in-depth formal analysis and contextualizing his trajectory within the interdisciplinary cultural scenes of New York and Chicago, McArthur Binion: DNA provides insight into the rigorous and experimental spirit that has defined the artist’s larger practice and illuminates his place within a critical history of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries.