Auguste Orts

Correspondence

Dieter Roelstraete

An exhibition catalog from M HKA, Antwerp, documenting the group called Auguste Orts, a production platform set up by Brussels-based artists Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer, and Anouk De Clercq. Indentifying themselves as visual artists, they work primarily with film and video, imagining experimental modes of life, contesting oppressive systems. In an accompanying essay, T.J. Demos writes: “While comprised of the singular and at times divergent approaches of its members, the group’s work shares a simultaneous commitment to the political potential of filmmaking and the subtle craftwork of aesthetics.” The catalog also includes an essay by M HKA director Bart De Baere; a roundtable discussion between the curator Dieter Roelstraete and the artists; in-depth texts on and illustrations of each artist’s work.

Add to your order

CARL OSTENDARP

Book

Jochen Kienbaum (Ed.)

American painter Carl Ostendarp believes in a world in which a serious painter can make work that does not demand connoisseurship from his audience. His installations employing walls of continuously painted two-tone wave shapes as a backdrop for deceptively simple cartoonlike paintings and sculptures are intended to re-contextualize the gallery space and refresh our way of seeing. In his newest project, Book, Ostendarp re-creates the continuous-wave motif using the pages of the book as gallery walls, inviting viewers to project their own imagery while merging the foundations of Modernism, Pop, Color Field and Minimalism into his simple biomorphic forms. Available in two versions—blue tones or red tones—Book makes space for Ostendarp’s viewers to play and create their own installation, in reality or imagination.

Add to your order

CARL OSTENDARP

Matthia Löbke

Internationally known for mixing styles and traditions in his paintings, New York–based artist Carl Ostendarp (b. 1961) has made his mark by irreverently combining comic book–style graphics with his exquisitely executed color-field and hard-edge paintings. Monochromatic color backgrounds interrupted by graphic drawings taken from MAD magazine or single-syllable words with phonetic expressions like “ARGH” or “EKKK” applied to the surfaces mark his signature style. This fresh new monograph, produced to complement Ostendarp’s first German solo museum exhibition at the Kunstverein Heilbronn, is a detailed document of the exhibition’s extensive installations. Over 100 color images include detail shots, single works and full installation views photographed to capture the wavelike sensation of his murals. Exhibition director Matthia Löbke and noted American art critic Jerry Saltz contribute informative and historical essays. Long collected by major institutions around the world, Ostendarp’s work can be found at the Chicago Art Institute; Walker Art Ctr.; SF MOMA; Yale Art Museum; wand many others.

Add to your order

GINA OSTERLOH

Group Dynamic

Los Angeles photographer Gina Osterloh is best known for exploring the wavering line between figure and ground, photographing actual people (often herself), fanciful, fabricated mannequins, or rough cardboard silhouettes against paper backdrops of her own devising. This catalogue documents her 2012 residency at LACE, where she developed a major new body of work by relocating her studio into the main gallery and engaging with the public across a diverse range of artistic platforms. Generously illustrated with color and black and white images and designed by Willem Henri Lucas, Group  Dynamic includes essays by Matthew Thompson and Kris Cohen and an interview with the artist by Michelle Dizon.

Add to your order

SILKE OTTO-KNAPP

Questions of Travel

Rosemary Heather & Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.)

Published on occasion of parallel exhibitions that Los Angeles–based painter Silke Otto-Knapp presented in two markedly different locations: Fogo Island, Newfoundland and the Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna. The rural and urban, new and old world, is evident in the selection of works presented and compiled in this joint catalog. Stark and poetic black-and-white monochromes are made by applying watercolor to primed canvas, and a distinctive technique of layering and erasing coats of paint. The exhibition catalog includes essays by Susan Morgan and Vanessa Joan Müller and a conversation between Otto- Knapp and Nicolaus Schafhausen. Art historian Morgan approaches the work via three significant influences: cultural geographer J. B. Jackson; avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; and the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Otto-Knapp, a UCLA professor, took the title for this project from Bishop’s poem of the same name, reprinted here.

Add to your order

Our World

André Platteel

In 2007, when Rotterdam proclaimed itself European Youth Capital 2009, Dutch marketing strategist-writer-coach-idea generator Andre Platteel was hired to find out what, exactly, “youth” (meaning the multi-ethnic, economically diverse 12-to-27-year olds in Rotterdam) wanted, hoped for, dreamed about. This book is a multi-media chronicle of his search and the fascinating, wildly successful results – more than 100,000 young people in Rotterdam participated in one or more of the 500 projects and events. Photographs, interviews, writings, reports, installations all illuminate the theme of connection, and show how the first generation to grow up totally in an information culture uses that knowledge. As Platteel writes, optimistically, “They consider the world to be too precious to let egotism destroy it. The world they imagine has connectedness at its heart.”

Add to your order

OUT OF SHANGHAI

Focusing on three Shanghai-based Chinese contemporary artists – Shen Fan, Ding Yi and their teacher Yu Youhan – this bright yellow exhibition catalog documents a landmark show in Germany. Asking what exactly is Chinese about Chinese contemporary art, the exhibition answers the question with reference to millienia-old Chinese traditions and their interplay with Western modernism. All three artists make non-figurative work, but Yu Youhan, shaped by the repressive Cultural Revolution, had to pursue his art in secret, at great risk, with the goal of freeing Chinese art from the propagandistic style of social realism. Yu pushed the door open for his students, whose work reflects the dramatic changes in China since Tiananmen Square. With reproductions and many photos of the exhibition itself.

Add to your order

oVer

Add to your order

SUSANNE PAESLER

Works 1991–2006

Christian Schreier & Stephan Berg (Eds.)

German painter Susanne Paesler (1963–2006) was among a generation of artists in the 1990s who distanced themselves from the modernist concept of the image as a place of ever new and competing aesthetics. Distrustful of the notion of authenticity and uniqueness, Paesler examined the meaning of artwork itself within her conceptual paintings produced during her short but powerful career. Forty formal geometric paintings, made over a 15-year period, are gathered for the first time in this well-designed publication accompanying her solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bonn. Paesler’s paintings are sometimes reminiscent of cheap woolen blankets, Burlington socks or Burberry coats —everyday objects that served her as motive and model for her work. But instead of following the principle of the readymade and mounting fabric directly onto stretchers, the artist manually copied the patterns so that painting, handcraft and design became a fluent conceptual exchange. Bringing insight into Paesler’s unique career is a provocative conversation between curator Christian Schreier and gender studies professor Hanne Loreck.

Add to your order

PAGES Issue #5

On the Verge of Vertigo

Add to your order

More from the Pages Series