JOSÉ DAMASCENO

Exploring scale and perception, Brazilian artist José Damasceno’s imaginative and surreal approach to sculpture is catalogued in this comprehensive, first-time monograph. The artist is best known for large-scale sculptures and installations that deconstruct and transform common objects—from pencils and cigarettes to hammers and strings—into the unfamiliar. Damasceno’s practice is preoccupied with the idea of morphing and transition, moving from one medium to another to form a layered process that tests the relationship between networks and diagrams to surprise and disorientate the viewer. From a solo show at the MCA Chicago to representing Brazil at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, Damasceno has crossed multiple borders to become firmly established in the contemporary art world. This in-depth survey features some 200 color illustrations, with texts by Aurora García and José Thomaz Brum, plus an interview between the artist and Tate Modern curator Ann Gallagher.

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DANIEL J. MARTINEZ

The Things You See When You Don’t Have a Grenade!

Of the work and ideas of Daniel J. Martinez, Peter Sellars has said: [He is] one of the most important and articulate artists of his generation. Impossible to pin down, a genuinely free spirit, he is actually fearless. What medium does he work in? Life. Where will he strike next? Who knows? This volume documents every major project Martinez has completed to date and includes his controversial and thought-provoking public art pieces. His cross-media cultural production is conceptual in its approach to photography, video, film, sculpture, and language in installation, performance, and public art. Adding depth and commentary to this complex body of work are critics and curators David Levi Strauss, Coco Fusco, Mary Jane Jacob, Susan Otto, Victor Zamudio-Taylor, and Roberto Bedoya. Designed by Tracey Schiffman.

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LAVI DANIELS

Parables of Space, A Twenty-Four Year Survey

Lavi Daniels

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TIM DAVIES

Featuring new works created for the 2011 Venice Biennale by film and video artist Tim Davies (who will represent Wales), this color catalog documents the artist’s powerful video and sculptural installations, known for challenging notions of colonial power and globalization. For example, Davies once returned a Victorian parquet floor to the rainforest of Belize where the wood was originally sourced by slaves. The catalog also examines the context of Davies’s previous works and process, including reproductions and installation photos. Featuring texts by cultural theorist Tessa Jackson and poet Owen Sheers, and an interview between the artist and curators Tom Rowland and Ann Jones to discuss the Biennale project in detail.

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SHEZAD DAWOOD

Kalimpong

Camilla Paestra (Ed.)

Kalimpong is an artist project in book form by London-based digital-installation artist Shezad Dawood (b. 1974), whose works are often inspired by his varied cultural heritage—Pakistani, Indian and Irish. Dawood’s new work is set in Kalimpong, India, and captures various moments from 1912 to the present day, interweaving fact and fiction, past and present. Explorers and spies, poets and travelers, lovers and strangers, princesses and humanoids are all strangely connected across the globe through this curious Indian town. Dawood used an ‘exquisite corpse’ method to develop the story, inviting a number of international writers and cultural commentators to contribute texts. The writers’ responses to other writers often result in some surprising twists. Contributions by Tenzing Barshee, Shezad Dawood, Kai Friese, Alexander Keefe, Barbara Sirieix, Rosie Thomas. Kalimpong is a virtual sequel to Black Sun (2015), also published with Sternberg Press and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.

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JOS DE GRUYTER & HARALD THYS

Fine Arts

Fine Arts continues Belgian artist duo Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s playful and dystopic approach to depicting the human condition. For this project, they became watercolorists, culling a range of quotidian and historical images from the Internet. The exhibition catalog includes over 90 watercolors from their recent traveling exhibition (CCA, SF; MoMA PS1, NY; and Raven Row, London) in a glossy format reminiscent of a picture book or auction catalog. Deadpan images of the banal, the fanciful, the tragic and the grievous are presented without comment. Nostalgia and innocence are dimly stirred and questioned. Although watercolor is associated with pastoral and colonialist scenes, the contemporary mode of sourcing the images implies that these pictures might not be matters of the past. De Gruyter & Thys have been working together since the late 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects and videos are steeped in black humor and critical (self)-reflection and often overlap reality, fiction and suppressed histories.

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JOS DE GRUYTER & HARALD THYS

Das Wunder des Lebens

Like a pictorial encyclopedia, the exhibition catalog on the artist duo de Gruyter & Thys, Das Wunder des Lebens, contains over 400 drawings that show all the modern world has to offer—from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system. We see laundry bags and paint buckets as well as a nun and a man with a hat in front of a double window, a shy animal with a thick fur and breakfast on a Victorian table. Juxtapositions are normalized, and normality becomes a farce. E verything is exposed to everyone; everything becomes equal. Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos playing with notions of the banal are steeped in black humor, critical (self)-reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history. Upcoming exhibition at MCA Chicago, 2015.

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Jeroen De Rijke and Willem De Rooij

After the Hunt

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More from the Black Pocketbook Series

DEALING WITH

Some Texts, Images, and Thoughts Related to American Fine Arts, Co.

Valérie Knoll, Hannes Loichinger & Magnus Schäfer

The New York gallery American Fine Arts—whose name today is largely synony- mous with that of its gallerist, Colin de Land (1955–2003)—stands for a gallery practice in which a decided deviation from conventional models overlaps with successful activities within the institutional frame of the art market. Even today, AFA and de Land prove to be uncontested projection screens for the desire for independence or for bohemian resistance against the dictates of the market. Particularly in retrospect, a consistent image of the gallery just does not present itself. Faced with the obvious risk of romanticization, this publication seeks to understand how AFA actually functioned as a gallery within its specific context. Contributions from artists and academics including Andrea Fraser, Karl Holmqvist and Tobias Kaspar, Christian Philipp Muller, Josef Strau, Axel John Wieder, among others.

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Katalin Deér

Present Things

Sculptor Katalin Deér’s specific interest, as Max Wechsler writes in his concise essay, “is geared towards crossing over the boundaries between genres, leading to new and surprising situations for perception itself.” This extensively illustrated artist’s book, published in conjunction with an installation with new works at the Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten in Klagenfurt, provides an opportunity to appreciate this extraordinary artist, whose work, especially for its reoccupation with architecture, reminds critical observers of the masterfully pioneering works of Gordon Matta-Clark. Exploring the potential plastic dimensionality of photography and investigating the interplay between the two- and three-dimensionality of the pictorial surface, she offers perception reminiscent of cubist or constructivist experimentation. A mind-altering book.

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