Swoon

When the 27-year-old Brooklyn street artist Swoon had her first one-person gallery exhibition at New York's Deitch Projects in 2005, the area surrounding the gallery was so overrun with fans and friends that neither cars nor pedestrians could pass through. Reviews in all of the major New York papers, and even national news sources like Newsday, raved — crediting her intricate paper cut-outs and hand-pulled block prints of realistically-rendered street people (often friends and family doing ordinary things) with depicting no less than the poetry of urban life. Her figures, according to Newsday, are rendered with breathtaking precision [and] radiate humanity and compassion. Most people know of Swoon through her wheat-pasted cut-outs, which have appeared throughout New York for the better part of the last decade. Usually seen in a state of decay, they are powerful time-based public artworks that only get more potent as they age. For the past two years, Swoon has been traveling the world, creating exhibitions and workshops. Published to accompany the artist's highly anticipated fall 2008 exhibition at Deitch's Long Island City project space, this first monograph documents exhibitions from 2005 to 2007, as well as collaborations created in Russia, Ukraine and throughout the United States.