David Batchelor

Found Monochromes Vol.1

This monograph is the first for David Batchelor’s remarkable Found Monochromes series. Since 1997, the London-based artist has been photographing single square and rectangle planes of uninterrupted white that he passes as he walks through London and places he visits. The images are informal and impromptu; shot from a uniform distance, the white planes are seen on a variety of backdrops: brick walls, car doors, metal fences and more. They are the backs of signs, number plates that have lost their number, empty billboards or faded messages. This body of work references the once radical tradition of monochrome paintings practiced by Malevich, Rodchenko, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly and others. Found Monochromes Vol. 1 brings together the largest group of photographs from Batchelor’s series, accompanied by a conversation between the philosopher Jonathan Rée and the artist.

Add to your order

DAVID BATCHELOR

the October Colouring-In Book

Since its launch in 1976, the influential journal of art history and criticism October has not had one image reproduced in color. Well-known contemporary Scottish artist and writer David Batchelor playfully rectifies this situation in the series of delightful, exuberant and colorful drawings (2012–13) that transform every page of the magazine’s first issue (Summer 1976). Disrupting October’s orderly monochromatic universe and textual clarity, Batchelor engages a carnival-like play of form and color on each page in abstract compositions of circles, triangles and rectangles of brilliant transparent color and opaque black planes. Batchelor, who works with found objects and images in drawing, photography and installation, again applies the colors and dynamism of the modern city to this artist project. Reprinted here for the first time in actual size, this book is a must-have for every art book collector.

Add to your order

ERIC BAUDELAIRE

Anabases

Anna Colin (Ed.)

In Anabases filmmaker and visual artist Eric Baudelaire revisits the political and personal saga of the Japanese Red Army as ‘anabasis’s’—an allegory of a journey into the unknown and return home. The generously sized softcover publication, conceived as a conversation between Baudelaire’s practice and philosopher Pierre Zaoui, cinema theorist Jean-Pierre Rehm and film historian Homay King includes chronologies, archival photos, maps, and pages from books and newspapers. Baudelaire’s work is collected by MACBA Barcelona, Centre Pompidou Paris and The Whitney Museum NY.

Add to your order

JOSEF BAUER

Works 1965–Today

Krist Gruijthuijsen (Ed.)

One of Austria’s noted conceptual artist from the 1960s, Josef Bauer combines sculpture, installation, painting, and performance to disturb our perception of words and colors as mere “carriers” of meaning. Detached from the flat surfaces they normally adorn, letters and colors become the sculptural objects that collapse the divide between language and bodies in the over 100 career-spanning works showcased in this extensive survey catalog. Works 1965–Today is a vital global introduction to this underrepresented master of letters and their contours. The introductory essay by Krist Gruijthuijsen illuminates Bauer’s “tactile poetry” as a radical embodiment of ’60s Concrete poetry; Austrian philosopher Thomas Zaunschirm explores Bauer’s formal bid to transcend the representational relation of language to images in an essay from 1974; Bettina Steinbrügge throws light on the reception and development of his works. Also included is a unique visual rejoinder by artist Hans-Peter Feldmann.

Add to your order

Helke Bayrle

Portikus Under Construction

The Portikus is a public exhibition space associated with the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. A production site rather than a traditional gallery, it is an institution willing to redefine its basic parameters with every new project it hosts. Since the late 1980s, some 160 exhibitions and innumerable other events have been staged at the alternative museum space. For the last decade, Frankfurtibased filmmaker Haelke Bayrle has been documenting its numerous events; now, via this three-DVD set, everyone can go backstage and experience never-before-seen footage ranging from initial installations to actual performances. An unprecedented archive of over 60 featured artists including Jason Rhoades, Wolfgang Tillmans, Louise Lawler, Yoko Ono and many more.

Add to your order

HELKE BAYRLE

Portikus Under Construction 1992-2016

Fabian Schöneich, Kobe Matthys & Sunah Choi (Eds.)

In 1992, Frankfurt–based German painter, graphic artist and filmmaker Helke Bayrle (b. 1937) began videotaping the installation of each exhibition at Portikus, the contemporary Frankfurt exhibition space established in 1987. These videos form a remarkable and intimate archive of the storied contemporary art institution and the exceptional artists and personnel that worked within it. Coinciding with the launch of a website containing all of Bayrle’s Portikus videos, this oversized softcover monograph pays tribute to the artist’s extraordinary work through a comprehensive timeline, including over 1,000 video stills plus statements by past and current directors and curators. Art critic and historian Kirsty Bell writes about the history of Portikus and the meaning of Bayrle’s work. Also included in the book is a conversation with the artist and Sunah Choi, who since 2001 has edited the videos that comprise Bayrle’s truly unique undertaking. Chronologically organized voluminous color images are interspersed with texts by noted authors and curators Daniel Birnbaum, Nikolaus Hirsch and others.

Add to your order

ON THE TABLE

The Beauty of the Fold

Charlotte Birnbaum

This second book in the ground-breaking On the Table series about the culture of gastronomy as artistic expression – edited by Charlotte Birnbaum – delves into the art of napkin folding. It features German master Joan Sallas, whose folded napkins graced the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit of 1780 Viennese royal table silver. (Watch him fold a “water lily” napkin on YouTube.) Birnbaum interviews Sallas on the history of napkin folding, stretching back to the Renaissance and Baroque, and contributes a short essay on the art’s complex history; the remainder of the book is an illustrated catalog of Sallas’s ornate folding techniques.

Add to your order

More from the On the Table Series

MARTIN BECK

Aspen Complex

New York conceptual artist Martin Beck compiles his research and reflections on two exhibition projects from the early 1970s. The International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) brought together important figures in modern design (Saul Bass, George Nelson) with environmental activists and architects (Sim Van der Ryn, Ant Farm) and French thinkers (Jean Aubert, Jean Baudrillard). The Aspen Movie Map (designed by MIT’s Architecture Machine Group/Media Lab) served as a seminal prototype for today’s GPS systems, both military and civilian. Through Beck’s analyses, the two efforts reflect the connections between the art, architecture, design, ecology and social movements at the time, and continue to shed light on those issues today. With accompanying essays by Sabeth Buchmann, Felicity D. Scott and Alice Twemlow.

Add to your order

BEFORE HISTORY

The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2015, Vol. No 1
Yto Barrada, Vol. No 2

The constructed nature of history and its sediments is the subject of this double catalog documenting the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2015 exhibition. Echoing the show’s theme, two artist books bound together function as a sculptural object through connecting fonts and contrasting paper stock. Prize-winner Moroccan artist Yto Barrada’s work is the subject of the first book. Investigating a paleontology exhibition in Morocco, she focuses on the fabrication of historic objects in the context of modern-day museology. Similarly, provocative works by the three short-listed artists comprise the second book in which proposals by Indian film artist Sarnath Banerjee, Berlin-based Iranian artist Setareh Shahbazi and Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh are presented with brief artist interviews. Together these projects explore how in our contemporary world of hyper-mediation, history as a constructed sphere is constantly in flux.

Add to your order

Rebecca Belmore

Fountain

Add to your order