MARKUS WEISBECK

Surface

Featured for the first time in the noted Sternberg Black Pocket Book series is a selection of seminal graphic-design projects developed by Markus Weisbeck’s German studio Surface over the last ten years. This paradigm-shifting firm has redefined the client-designer relationship, challenging what constitutes a graphic design practice today. Whether Surface collaborates closely with artists, like Liam Gillick or Isa Genzken, to create the posters for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale or takes the liberty to insert subtle interventions into monthly issues of a magazine, its designs skillfully inform the content at hand. Includes projects as diverse as virtual audio artwork by artist Michaela Melián, numeerous artists’ catalogues and key visuals for Manifesta 7. Also featured is a conversation between Christoph Keller and Markus Weisbeck.

Add to your order

More from the Black Pocketbook Series

MATTHIAS WEISCHER

Thicket

This book features new “pulp” paintings by Matthias Weischer, one of the most talented members of the New Leipzig School of German painters, whose work has been compared to that of David Hockney. He creates pastose oil paintings using cotton-fiber papier-mâché, the dominant material for large, semi-ornamental scenes of parks and gardens or interiors. “The manual and visual experiments with colored paper pulp came as no surprise in the work of an artist who has always been keen of exploring handcrafts and techniques, giving him a very special profile in the younger generation of German painters who started their careers after the nation’s reunion,” writes critic Walter Grasskamp in his brilliant essay “Pulp Fiction.” Weischer’s new works are a mix of the artificial landscape and staged interiors—by letting the outside in, he has opened up painting once again.

Add to your order

David Weiss

Die Wandlungen

Following Nine Books 1973–1979, Edition Patrick Frey presents an exclusive new publication of drawings by late, internationally acclaimed Swiss artist David Weiss. Die Wandlungen (The Metamorphosis) reproduces for the first time all 82 series of graphic metamorphoses the artist made in Marrakesh and Switzerland between 1975 and 1979. Without knowing in advance what he would draw, he began at the upper left-hand corner of each sheet of paper with a scribble or image and followed it as it transformed from one thing into another. For example, a cube turns into a matchbox with a picture of a lion on it and a small deer inside, which turns into a bone and so on until a new series begins. Rendered in ballpoint pen on graph paper or china ink on plain white paper and varying from 1 to 37 pages in length, each series covers over 400 sheets in this overwhelming but addictive compendium.

Add to your order

TAIPING TIANGUO

A HISTORY OF POSSIBLE ENCOUNTERS
Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York

Doryun Chong & Cosmin Costinas (Eds.)

How did Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh and Martin Wong—four artists of Chinese heritage hailing from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and San Francisco, respectively—all end up in New York in the heady 1980s? By considering them together, what might we learn about their practices and this storied time and place in art history? With these questions in mind, Taiping Tianguo: A History of Possible Encounters takes nuanced glimpses of the artists’ overlapping experiences, networks and friendships. Including a rich collection of photographs of the artists’ work, a timeline (1841–2011) charting general history, art history and biographical information from the exhibition, and essays by Hong Kong curator Doryun Chong, Para Site director Cosmin Costinas, among others, this book underlines the political and gendered nature of the music/art scene in New York art of the 1980s and the simultaneous emergence of contemporary Chinese art.

Add to your order

Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn

Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE - 2010 CE

Gregg Moore and Richard Torchia

You get the idea early on, with photos of Chinese-born, New York-based artist Ai Weiwei dropping a 2000-year-old Han Dynasty urn. Oops. No, that’s the point. This exhibition catalog/monograph from Ai’s first solo exhibition outside New York gives a comprehensive picture of this unconventional artist’s approach to the undoing of assumptions about rare and old ceramics. Whether it’s his famous Coca-Cola vase (with the Coke logo painted over the ancient surface of the pot) or other violations of the surfaces of ancient artifacts, this is a clear expression of iconoclastic modernism. Includes the first English translation of an interview with Ai Weiwei, and an essay by the Beijing-based critic, Philip Tinari. Additonal essays by Glenn Adamson, Dario Gamboni and Stacey Pierson.

Add to your order

WENDELIEN VAN OLDENBORGH

A Well Respected Man, Or Book of Echoes

Dutch film artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh believes, as Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.“ Her films, which mix scripted scenes with improvisational participation, investigate the Dutch colonial past in Indonesia. This publication features two of her recent films, No False Echoes (2008) and Instruction (2009), which present as photonovels traumatic episodes from the Dutch military intervention that still reverberate in the contemporary psyche of the Netherlands. Beginning with writings and work by von Olderborgh, the book also includes a reprint of an eloquently written 1913 essay of national freedom by Soewardi Soeryaningrat, Indonesian nationalist, subjective contemporary reactions from Lizzy van Leeuwen and Nuraini Juliastuti, and another text, from 1935, concerning national education in Indonesia. Oldenborgh’s films are rich in the layering of cultural history and issues of memory and race.

Add to your order

Wermke Leinkauf

Xander Karskens & Nettina Klein

It is considered quite normal in ­recent art history for two artists to join forces – many famous examples in the last thirty-five years are proof enough of this. But there is something special when two very differ­ent characters come together, espe­- c­ially when such a collabor­ation would seem scarcely probable due to the fact that they studied in different places and do not necessarily share the same fields of inter­est. But there is something that connects Matthias Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf, which has contra­dicted a prototypical career of this kind throughout their lives – the two have been friends from a shared adolescence in the East Berlin street art and grafitti scene. And this is where we plunge into a wild and spectacular background which characterises so inimitably the work of this artist duo. Take the following film by the two young artists: a man is hanging by his outstretched arms from some ledge or other – a bridge, a crane or what­ever. And just as you are about to place a bet as to how long he can hold on, he pulls himself up again – or maybe he simply allows himself to fall? In the installation »Deci­sions«, you witness this situa­tion repeatedly from different perspec­tives on ten monitors and then over again in other places. Thus, the viewer at least has an opportunity to get used to this ­unusual event. And because habitu­ation usually happens very quickly, it creates a completely non-specific interest in activities, for example, that are repeatedly disturbed in an unplanned way, in prohibitions that become common­place, or in observ­ing activities that seem impossible. And so suddenly new opportu­n­ities emerge which normally would only be the preserve of a »topsy-turvy world«. According to ­Matthias Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf in an outline of the project, it is all about a ­journey of discovery and the unconventional use of public space, in which the familiar becomes unfamiliar, unknown. The viewer is supposed to become aware, simply and quite spontaneously of – in a literal sense – free, open spaces that the two art­ists have conquered most artistically and subversively. This book is the first solo publi­cation on this artist-duo and ­compiles an overview of all previous actions jointly per­formed by the pair. In 2012, the duo received the Columbus art foundation prize for contemporary art.

Add to your order

ERIK WESSELO

56 Beaver St.

Erik Wesselo

Add to your order

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

Gamebook

David Maroto

Part story, part game, The Wheel of Fortune, written and illustrated with drawings by Spanish visual artist David Maroto, is a book with a difference—one in which the reader becomes the protagonist. Inspired by Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler and the gamebook “Choose Your Own Adventure” popular in the early 1990s, this gamebook is the basis for Decide Your Destiny, a collective event for 52 players. Set in a hotel casino on the coast of Normandy, the narrative changes according to the reader’s decisions and interactions with characters in the book. Different games are played in the story like French roulette—and Russian roulette. Death, chance, desire and arcane knowledge unfold as the reader/performer explores multiple narrative paths. Maroto, who also created The Book Lovers, a project on artist novels, creates art in the form of games and novels and is currently working in Scotland.

Add to your order

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Marrakech Biennale 5

Hicham Khalidi & Amanda Sarroff (Eds.)

With over 70,000 visitors to its fifth incarnation, the Marrakech Biennale is well on its way to international renown as a trilingual and proudly interdisciplinary North African biennial of contemporary art, literature, film and performance. Founded by Briton Vanessa Bronson in 2005, the biennial aims to use the “soft power” of the arts to provoke meaningful change in Morocco. The fifth edition, titled Where Are We Now? featured over 90 international artists and 30 site-specific commissions around various neighborhoods of Marrakech. This sizeable publication is a document and reflection of that celebration from artists, scholars, and critics, notably including Jamal Abdennassar, Keren Cytter, Shezad Dawood, Leif Elggren, Natasha Hoare, Amine Kabbaj, Driss Ksikes, Walid Raad, Simon Njami and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, among many others!

Add to your order