John Stezaker

Tabula Rasa

A small but engaging exhibition catalog on one of Britian’s great contemporary collage artists. Tabula Rasa features work made across a 32-year span elegantly uniting the central themes in the art of John Stezaker. Silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s along with film-still collages from the 1990s and 2009 are brought together for the first time. An important overview of this master collage artist whose work centers around the notion of screens, voids and cut-outs. An essay by Michael Bracewell, ‘The Space Between’, looks at the connections between the 13 selected works. Includes detailed installation views from Stezaker’s recent exhibition at The Approach, London.

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JOHN STEZAKER

Celebrated for his brilliant use of old film stills, portraits, postcards and other found imagery, John Stezaker engages with this exquisitely selected found material through inversion, excision, incision, fusion and accidental damage. In this extensive monograph/exhibition catalog, Stezaker focuses on the dialectics innate in the work; life and death, seeing and blindness, male and female, love and betrayal, portrait and landscape, and more. Included are works ranging from 1977 up to the most recent series from 2010, introducing lesser-known groups such as ‘Sublimes’ and ‘Lost Tracks’ alongside his famous ongoing series including ‘Masks’ and ‘Marriages’. The largest monographic catalogue on Stezaker to date, the publication features texts by Dawn Ades and Michael Bracewell and a conversation between the artist and Daniel Herrmann and Christophe Gallois, with over 80 images of the artists’ work.

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JOHN STEZAKER

Silkscreens

For the first time, this large-format volume brings together John Stezaker’s unique silkscreen woks executed between 1977 and 1994. Stezaker is best known for his intimate collages of film stills, postcards and other found imagery; these mid- to large-scale silkscreens add a new, fascinating perspective to the perception of this inventive British artist. While this body of work seems to contrast with the collages, in fact it uses many of the same techniques, like cutting out, cropping, slicing, over-laying and repetition, and create the dark, cinematic feeling, alternately menacing and satirical, that pervades Stezaker’s work. Over 65 images accompany a comprehensive essay by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith.

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JOHN STEZAKER

Crossing Over

Celebrated artist John Stezaker is widely known for his innovative approach to found photographic imagery. Building upon the corresponding 3rd Person Archive series, the image fragments in this volume span the history of postcard production. Moving from the Victorian era to the postwar period and black and white to colour imagery, Stezaker focuses on the female figure, notions of return and crossing back.

Exploring time and memory, Crossing Over frames seemingly minor details, such as the figures passing on a street corner or conversing on a park bench, as well as the marks left by the physical movement of the images themselves.

Reprinted to full-scale, 65 image fragments in this artist project are collected for the first time here.

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Stockwell Depot

1967–79

Founded in 1967, Stockwell Depot heralded the emergence of the London artists’ studio movement and gained international recognition as a center for British abstraction. For over 25 years, this disused former brewery in South London functioned as both cooperative studio and exhibition space. Artists associated with the Depot—Roland Brener, Jennifer Durrant, David Evison, Katherine Gili, Peter Hide and Roelof Louw, among many others—held differing and often competing attitudes toward art. The ambitious work made and shown at the Depot tells the story of late modernism in Britain, tracing a period full of formal experimentation and critical debate. Incorporating interviews with 10 artists alongside a major essay by curator Sam Cornish, this is the first catalog to examine the artists’ activities within a historical context and track their development through the Depot’s pivotal annual exhibitions. With interviews by curators David Waterworth and Sam Cornish and preface by curator Jon Wood.

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STRAY WARMINGS

Nina Canell

Copper pipes cut to various lengths gather in the center of the gallery space to offer a provisional physicality. Richly saturated reds, blues, greens and metallic gold, bent and twisted metal, and deformed glass tubes suggest endless permutations of material form. Sculptor Nina Canell, through the annealing process of heating and cooling, works with the residue of her materials’ transformation. The effects of time and temperature visibly imprint themselves onto her basic materials. Born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden, educated in Dublin, the artist now lives and works in Berlin. This exhibition catalog follows her major US solo exhibition at Midway Contemporary Art, and also includes reproductions from beyond this particular context. The slim hardcover with its distinctive marbled cover documents the trajectory of Canell’s practice exploring the transformation and permutation of materials and in the context of their dissolution. Includes a conversation between curators Dieter Roelstraete and Monika Szewczyk as well as an essay from Steven Connor.

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STREAMLINES

Oceans, Global Trade and Migration

Dirk Luckow & Koyo Kouoh (Eds.)

Migration, mobility, the hope for a better life, globalized trade, isolation at sea, working conditions, geographic boundaries and psychological alienation—the geopolitics of the oceans—are all captured in Streamlines, the amply illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Europe’s largest exhibition hall in one of the largest port cities in Europe. Noted African curator and founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, Koyo Kouoh assembles 15 artistic and literary positions on seaways, world trade, flight and migration on the “sixth continent.” The compact volume brings together humanist and aesthetic reactions through essays, drawings, collages, textiles, sculptures, photographs, installations and films by 16 contemporary artists from regions with historical connection to the port. Divided into themes—action, consumerism, confrontation, transformation, participation and narration—this timely work illuminates the close link of historical, political and ecological issues to capitalism and global economic dependencies. Artists featured are Kader Attia, Alfredo Jarr, Mark Boulos, Khalil Joreige and more.

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STRUCTURIST

The Art of David Barr

Structurist artist David Barr (1939–2015) explored the intersection between art, mathematics and life in a distinct vocabulary of colors, shapes and volumes. As a true scientific-minded craftsman, his explorations of the mathematical aspects of art employed Fibonacci number sequencing and the Golden Ratio, demonstrating an innovative artistic approach to complex meanings. Throughout his career, Barr pursued connections between numbers and color in relief paintings, sculptures and writings—enthusiastically searching for a grand synthesis in his studio practice and public art commissions. With Structurist, Wright’s exhibition catalog introduces this trailblazer’s legacy of public art to a wider audience in a thoughtful, yet playful survey of his life and work. Numerous artworks from his vast oeuvre have been reproduced here for the first time in 76 lavish color plates. An artist biography and timeline plus an essay by renowned Chicago architect, professor and colleague Laurence Booth round out this handsome publication.

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Katja Strunz

Einbruchstellen (Points of Entry)

This catalog of sculptor Katja Strunz’s Berlin show underscores the unity of her work. “A wall is there to be torn down and to look behind,” she said of her folded works, included here, which fold in the wall surrounding the art space and allow it to collapse into splinters. As a confessed materialist, Strunz, born in 1970, works quite consciously in the tradition of Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist, with the effects of tearing, bursting, sudden interruption, fragmentation and bringing to a standstill. An interview with the artist and a fine essay by Barbara Kuon put this innovative artist’s work into aesthetic context.

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FLORIAN SLOTAWA

Körnerstraße / Wilhelmshofallee / Hans-Arp-Allee

Oliver Kornhoff (Ed.)

Berlin-based installation artist/photographer Florian Slotawa takes Mondrian’s pristine geometry, Duchamps’s readymades and Robert Smithson’s “non-site” sculptures—among other influences—and comes up with sculptural installations that are completely his own. This lavish book, produced to the artist’s specifica- tions, presents Zlotawa’s “hotel” works from 1999. The artist takes the furniture in various hotel rooms, stacks it into a geometric arrangement and photographs the results in elegant black and white portraits. The resulting documentations of these sculptural installations look like strange caves or closets, leading the viewer into an unexpected dialogue with the architectural structure. This is the first time that this complete series has been published in one volume.

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