Author(s): Laith McGregor

AUSTRALIAN ART

Taking the major 2012 work S-O-M-E-O-N-E as both its title piece and a point of embarkation, this book offers the first substantial overview of the recent practice of Australian artist Laith McGregor. Eschewing the formal and structural conventions of the traditional monograph, this book is neither exhaustive nor linear in its breadth. Rather, it assumes the similarly rigorous and rambling quality that has come to characterise McGregor’s scroll-like drawings, idiosyncratic sculptures and painted gestures, honing its focus on a selection of key works created during the last five years. Made in close collaboration with the artist, S-O-M-E-O-N-E offers an at once critical, playful and heuristic expression of a practice that is psychic, layered, cumulative, diaristic and highly personal in its scope. In the same motion, it heralds a telling new voice in the contemporary art vernacular.