ANDREAS SLOMINSKI

Das Ü des Türhüters (The O of the Doorkeeper)

Dirk Lunckow (Ed.)

German absurdist sculptor Andreas Slominski (b. 1959) explores the realm of the readymade, appropriating bicycles, windmills, animal traps and now ports-potties as freestanding sculptures or wall reliefs. This extensively illustrated monograph documents Slominski’s large-scale installations of 100 red, green and blue plastic toilets with urinals, toilet seats, toilet roll holders or vent pipes arranged like colorful paintings on the walls of the Deichttorhallen, Hamburg. Though the artist is perhaps best known for his work as an absurdist sculptor, he is also a veteran of absurdist performance—once famously having charged two mimes with carrying an invisible painting from the Royal College of Art to the Serpentine in London. Andreas Slominski’s solo exhibitions include Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Serpentine Gallery, London; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Museum Boijmans van Beuningin, Rotterdam; Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin; and Kunsthalle Zürich, and is represented by Metro Pictures, US. Essays by museum curator Dirk Luckow plus Saša Stanišić and Dörte Zbikowski explicate the work.

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JOHN SMITH

Tanya Leighton & Kathrin Meyer (Eds.)

This comprehensive new monograph on the influential British artist-filmmaker John Smith—renowned for his playful and formally ingenious subversion of the everyday world—contains essays by Ian Christie, Martin Herbert, Kathrin Meyer and Ethan de Seife. Herbert’s text provides an incisive overview of Smith’s work over the past four decades, while Christie examines the artist’s oeuvre within the context of English eccentricity. Meyer’s essay discusses his film The Black Tower in relation to absence and abstraction and de Seife looks at cinematic scale through the prism of Smith’s Gargantuan. The publication includes a complete, fully illustrated filmography, with images and synopses from nearly 50 film and video works created between 1972 and 2012, also making it an important document of British conceptual filmmaking.

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DAVID SMITH

Form in Color

For David Smith (1906–1965), widely considered one of the foremost American abstract expressionist sculptors of the 20th century, there was no conceptual boundary between mediums. Focusing on works from the late 1950s until the artist’s untimely death in 1965, this oversized but trim exhibition catalog charts the development of 21 stunning works couched among historic images culled from the artist’s archive. The physical qualities of Smith’s welded-steel sculptures transmit a strong industrial presence but part of their impact and power derives from their gestural and tactile surfaces that give painting and drawing and sculpture the same visual impact and spatial weight. Smith paved the way for such artists as John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero and Richard Serra by moving the site of sculpture’s construction from the 19th-century confines of the artist’s atelier and fine-art foundry into the expansive, industrial context of the 20th century. Essay by Menil Collection curator Michelle White.

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ROBERT SMITHSON

Invention of the Landscape, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill & Film

Eva Schmidt (Ed.)

The seminal work of the American Earthworks movement, environmental sculptor Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, attracts many to the shores of the Great Salt Lake. This publication documents the long-awaited, recent completion (with the support of SKOR, Amsterdam) of Smithson’s last, unfinished project, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in Holland, by his widow (the artist Nancy Holt) and curator Theo Tegelaers, who combined Smithson’s original footage with new material. Features include Smithson’s drawings, vintage and recent photography, film stills and a previously unpublished interview with Smithson. Texts by Roel Arkesteijn and Marc Glöde, among others.

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SOFIE BIRD MØLLER

Leaving Things Out

Mentored by Germany’s renowned post-WWII painter Günter Förg, young Danish artist Sofie Bird Møller brings the materials and techniques of the 20th century into the present. Møller creates “paint-overs” with fashion photography that combine figuration and abstraction in a disorienting combination of superficiality. With her body and fingers, she layers on thick, lush acrylics over the images, often advertisements featuring subjects like erotic Mexican wrestling. The elegant photos turn abstract, with the added paint layers suggesting naked flesh, muscle and meat. Consciously using contradictions—the sense of an excruciatingly boring situation exploding in intoxication—to create “interferences,” she releases the historical aspects of the material into the moment. Texts by critic Laura Henseler, curator Anders Kold and collector Wilhelm Schürmann.

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Sowing and Weeding

Folk Culture in Contemporary Art

Over 20 young artists approach this tricky topic – sowing and weeding, and the transformation of specific folk cultures within contemporary art – from a host of different angles, coming up with a wealth of thought-provoking and entertaining works of art. Based on a German-U.S. exhibition, this lavishly illustrated catalog is focused on the construct of an “old” folk culture, in the final throes of dissolution, and how it can still become part of the creative process, in positive or negative ways. Just as Kandinsky, Jorn and Beuys idealised folk culture in the romantic tradition as the vehicle of a primordial energy, so this group of artists insists that “the more the ruination of the world proceeds, the better the everyday world of the peasant lends itself to a regressive idealization.”

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JO SPENCE

The Final Project

How do you make leukaemia visible? Well, how do you? It’s an impossibility. – Jo Spence

British artist Jo Spence’s last body of work, ‘The Final Project’, explores the acute sense of unreality the artist felt following her cancer diagnosis. Unable to use treatments from her previous battle with breast cancer, Spence confronted the distinct contrast between her physical appearance and mental state by looking for more indirect and allegorical methods of exploring her condition.

Returning to previously explored territories of magical realism and motifs from other cultures, she created a hybrid body of work she entitled PhotoFantasy. These images used a mixture of allegorical props alongside a photomontage effect, resulting in a visual language quite different from her previous works. This publication presents a compilation of this work alongside unpublished writings and notes by the artist, as well as texts by Terry Dennett, Philomena Epps, Clarissa Jacob and Amy Tobin.

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TOBIAS SPICHTIG

Blue, Red, and Green

Fabian Schöneich, Tobias Spichtig & Ursula Blickle (Eds.)

Swiss conceptual artist Tobias Spichtig’s work is based on the overwhelming presence of the media, the continuous availability of information and how they interact to contribute to the dissolution of time. Divided into a text booklet and an image book, the exhibition catalog features essays and an artist conversation. The image book highlights the phenomena of perception, focusing on the tools built to capture moments and memories—in this case hundreds of images of cameras taken from assorted auction sites and photographed in a way so as not to re-present the aim of these objects, originally built to reveal more than what we are able to see

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SPUTTERANCE

René Daniëls

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Sriwhana Spong

Nijinsky

This book accompanies a multi-dimensional film project by Auckland artist Sriwhana Spong for Art Basel 2010, which began as a re-imagining of one of the lost masterpieces of ballet, George Balanchine’s The Song of the Nightingale. Based on music by Stravinsky, “Nightingale” was originally choreographed in 1925 for the itinerant Ballets Russes. All that remains today are fragments of a film of the ballet, Stravinsky’s score, and photographs of the costumes by Henri Matisse. In the book, Spong uses stills from the films along with collage works that overlay geometric forms onto found ballet photography. Includes texts by Sarah Hopkinson and Gwynneth Porter. Both Spong and Balanchine share the philosophy expressed in Balanchine’s famous maxim,”Before is over. Performance is now.”

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