HEISE, Henriette (ed.)
Twilights: Essays on Artists’ Late Work

Late works are messages from the edge: the edge of relevance, the edge of health, the edge of death. They face mortality or insignificance while also telling stories about persistence—about what it means to make art despite a lack of a future horizon. In an art context that is increasingly defined by precarity and crises, late works can teach us a lesson about how to keep going.

Twilights: Essays on Artists’ Late Work, edited by Henriette Heise emerged from a seminar at the National Gallery of Denmark in 2024 and features 14 contributors from both artists and art historians: Julie Foged Kristensen, Henriette Heise, K Vang, Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Dorthe Aagesen, Karen Westphal Eriksen, Mathias Danbolt, Christian Vind, Birgitte Anderberg, Sebastian Hedevang, Pia Rönicke, Maria Zahle, Steven Zultanski, and Guston Sondin-Kung. 

Tackling the question of late work from a variety of perspectives—from art historical investigations to personal memories—many of the essays share an interest in questions of ephemerality, incompleteness, and finitude. The authors relate these formal qualities to specific experiences of loneliness, grief, joy, retrospection, exclusion, and the feeling of time passing. By focusing on artists who persisted in the midst of transformation and limitation, these essays help us find a way of thinking about our futures.

Alternately elegiac, anecdotal, and theoretical, the essays consider late works by Anna Ancher, Astrid Noack, Derek Jarman, Dieter Roth, Dora Maar, Elisa Maria Boglino, Ernest Mancoba, Félix González-Torres, Franciska Clausen, Käthe Kollwitz, Louise Bourgeois, Lutz Bacher, Michael Asher, Phyllida Barlow, Stuart Brisley, Tony Conrad, and Yong Soon Min.

[publishers’ note]

Published by At Last Books, 2026
Design by K Vang
Anthologies / Art Criticism / Artists' Writings