PETRA VALDIMARSDÓTTIR

Come and Go

This heartbreaking book is part of an award-winning project that depicts the reality of the death penalty. The Berlin-based artist/graphic designer, Petra Valdimarsdóttir, created a graphic wall of several hundred envelopes, each one marked with the last word uttered by a prisoner before execution at one Texas prison. Inside the envelope is personal information on the prisoner, including name, age, weight, mug shot, place and details of the murder for which they are being executed. This graphically compelling book uses one page for each prisoner, “imprisoning” his or her last sentence within blocks of black ink. Winner of the Hendrik Valk Price in 2010, this powerful project honors the murder victims at the same time as it makes the humanity of the murderers evident.

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JEFFREY VALLANCE

Blinky

A book dedicated to the billions of hens sacrificed each year for our consumption, Blinky is the quintessential conceptual artwork of the 1970s. Blinky is the seriocomic brainchild of artist Jeffrey Vallance, who has taken the concept and processes of documentation to their most absurd conclusion. 2008 marks the thirty-year anniversary of Jeffrey Vallances Blinky project. In celebration of this historic event, Vallance has released The Special 30th Anniversary Edition of the publication, Blinky the Friendly Hen (Smart Art Press; Santa Monica, 2008) in conjunction with a life-size Blinky Chapel complete with roof and steeple at Track 16 Gallery. The original Blinky (1978) was a piece of meat (chicken) Vallance purchased at a local supermarket. What followed was a trip to the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery to see if they would bury a piece of meatthey did, and held a subsequent burial ritual for a dead pet, all documented by Vallance. Vallances straightforward narrative and simple black-and-white photos offer a striking commentary on our society, our treatment of animals, and death. The Special 30th Anniversary Edition of Blinky the Friendly Hen (3rd Ed.) includes a DVD documenting the project, plus extras not seen in previous editions.

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JOAN VAN BARNEVELD

Into Longing, Vast Rock
A Staying at Age: Taking the Off-Stage to the Fore.

Visual artist Joan van Barneveld processes the deep romantic longings within popular culture, particularly popular music. His earlier work explored the poetics of grunge, culminating in the re-creation of Kurt Cobain’s Seattle greenhouse inside a Dutch gallery in 2009. In his recent work, reproduced here from exhibitions at Onomatopee (Eindhoven) and Paul Loya Gallery (LA), he photographs and over-paints performance venues void of people. Organized into diptychs and triptychs, the pieces form a narrative, not of an incurable grunge fan or lo-fi addict but of an artist trying to coax the emotional intensity of youth, late-night house shows, and homemade mix-tapes into messy adult life. Critic Jan Tumlir, philosopher Rene Gabriels and curator Freek Lomme address aspects of landscape, rock’s intensity, and romanticism in pop, creating a sourcebook for the poetics of longing.

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CHRISTIE VAN DER HAAK

Sproken | Fairy Tales

Jane Huldman & Philip Peters (Eds.)

Accompanying Dutch artist Christie van der Haak’s (b. 1950) stunning site-specific installation at the Gemeentemuseum’s Projects Gallery in 2015 comes this long-over- due survey documenting 35 years of this exceptional artist’s watercolors, paintings, objects and installations. Van der Haak moved from painting to designing fabrics as autonomous artworks and upholstery, wall coverings, tablecloths and the like. Op- erating in a field between art and design, her approach represents the active return by contemporary artists to Bauhaus principles of working across disciplines. Recently van der Haak has been transforming spaces such as museum rooms into places with a different meaning, employing her characteristic vocabulary of exuberant, dazzling colors and complex ever-changing patterns in a multitude of both two- and three- dimensional objects. Drawing on art history, mythology, contemporary social issues and generally everything she encounters in life, her work is like a fairy tale—charming, seductive and beautiful but never without profound hidden layers of meaning.

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SARA VAN DER HEIDE

The German Library Pyongyang

In early 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, was transformed into The German Library Pyongyang, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut. The temporary intervention by Amsterdam-based South Korean artist Sara van der Heide (b. 1977) is a re-imagining of the German Library into the Goethe-Institut’s library initiative. Devised as a way to discuss national cultural policy in a post–Cold War and postcolonial era, van der Heide’s project looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas, transcending thinking prescribed by nation-state, language and geography. Artistic, linguistic and graphic interventions in the library merge with the activities of the German learning center, including the replacement of all Chinese institutional printed matter with Korean texts. The softcover folio holds four slender exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English and Chinese, plus a reader with critical reflections by a variety of artists and musicians, exhibition and seminar documentation. Informative essays by Anselm Franke, Changho Choi and others.

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JAN VAN DER PLOEG

Selected Works 2009–2016

During the 1990s, Amsterdam-based artist Jan van der Ploeg (b. 1959) gained international acclaim with his bold, colorful geometric wall paintings. His abstract modular motifs sometimes recall Calder’s mobiles, Artschwager’s conceptual blps, or LeWitt’s minimalist wall paintings. Though van der Ploeg’s installation for Kunsthaus Baselland consists of two massive wall pieces, the accompanying catalog is a survey of almost a decade of work by the artist. With 350 color plates featuring a number of museum installations, it is his most extensive document to date. Jan van der Ploeg first began painting geometric designs on the walls of buildings in his native Amsterdam. Since then, he has painted in hundreds of galleries and institutions, from the Hammer Museum lobby (L.A.) to the walls of the Rijks Museum, considering the specific architecture of each space and adding to it new depth and dimension. Unique combinations of common shapes, bold colors and shifts in scale invite the viewer to experience familiar spaces in new and dynamic ways.

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FLY ME TO THE MOON

Bik Van der Pol

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HANS VAN HOUWELINGEN VS. PUBLIC ART

Stiff

Bram Kempers, Sjoukje van der Meulen and Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen

Artist Hans van Houwelingen is known for his versatile and critical look at art in public space, public life and cultural politics. In this monograph – an unusually beautiful and comprehensive look at the art of making public works – van Houwelingen’s writings are interwoven into the discussions of three important Dutch critic curators, each of whom focuses on a selection of particular works in relationship to their topic. Bram Kempers addresses the social and cultural backgrounds of Dutch public art; Stefan Schmidt-Wulffen offers a comparison of international positions on art in public space over the last few decades; and Sjoukje van der Meulen contributes an in-depth analysis of the art-theoretical implications of van Houwelingen’s work. The artist himself responds to the theoreticians in his typically clear-headed and imaginative way.

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SARAH VAN LAMSWEERDE

Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall

The compact monograph on Amsterdam-based performance/installation artist Sarah van Lamsweerde’s (b. 1971) most recent performance, Paper is a leaf that will destroy us in its fall, includes photographs of objects from Lega (a people from the northeastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo), ancient “proverb strings” or mutanga along with those created by the artist plus her performers Esther Mugambi and Alex Zakkas. The objects in a proverb string traditionally function as carriers of wisdom that are activated in social situations. In Paper is a leaf, van Lamsweerde explores what it means to develop an ideographic tool in our age of virtual images and communications, engaging a variety of related aesthetic and ethical questions in the process. Dutch writer and evolutionary biologist Tijs Goldsmidt, independent curator and editor Alessandra Saviotti and choreographer Norberto Llopis Segarra contribute thoughtful and informative essays to this cultural-based work.

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REZI VAN LANKVELD

At the First Clear Sight

Rezi van Lankveld’s paintings strikingly balance the shift between pictorial scene and creative process. The artist’s working procedure has remained the same throughout her career: oil paint is poured onto wooded boards until an image emerges, creating a spontaneous ambiguity to the pictorial form captured by the artist and spectator alike. This exhibition catalog, in collaboration with The Approach, London, presents a selection of the Dutch artist’s work from 2003–10 for the first time. Her most recent work has moved towards pieces in which the pictorial elements reach out to the edges of the wooded board, creating forms which rise and fall rhythmically across the work. Excellent texts by Leen Bedaux, Jeremiah Day, Melissa Gronlund and Zlatko Wurzberg.

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