Catalog
This recording features a multimedia composition by Yannis Kyriadikes for voice, recorders, violin, piano, face detection software, scanner, electronics, and video, created in collaboration with visual artist Johannes Schwartz and writer Maria Barnas, and was performed by Electra. The sleeves are designed by Experimental Jetset and include a 12-page booklet featuring the photographic work of Johannes Schwartz and a text by Maria Barnas. Duration: 48 min.
Since his earliest experiments, Dove Allouche has been committed to making visible the matter that comprises planet Earth and its immediate universe. Through slow, carefully considered processes, sometimes involving scientific technologies, he seeks to reveal what lies at the limit of the perceptible. The result is a body of work that is often enigmatic, with multiple interpretations. The 96 photographs in this book correspond to the atomic spectra of the chemical elements, sorted by symbol in alphabetical order. Although the coloured lines are the result of a rigorous scientific process, they are meant to be discovered as abstract works, open to the imagination of each individual. This is the 9th artist's publication in conjunction with the yearly summer exhibition in the area of the Mauvoisin Dam in Vallais, Switzerland, curated by Jean-Paul Felley.
Lous Martens has five grandchildren – Jaap, Zeno, Anna, Julian, and Luca – and has begun making an animal scrapbook for each newcomer to the family. Although it is seventeen years since the first, Jaap, was born, none of the five books are finished yet. Consisting of loosely pasted pictures of animals that were clipped from newspapers and magazines about art, literature, and science, plus stamps and photographs from advertising brochures, the books are enjoyable for their small, ever-evolving changes as new material is added. Interestingly, the books were never intended to be published, but are now grouped into one big volume, an embodiment of familial love and dedication.
'The MoMA Plant Collection' displays the tradition of including plant life in the Museum of Modern Art NY. The book presents 340 photographs and drawings that pay tribute to the pairing of plants with art. What can the placement of greenery next to the works of Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, and many others tell us about the relationship between culture and nature? A question that Meijer started to investigate in her first artist's book, 'The Plant Collection' (ROMA, 2019), on plants in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and continues at this museum in New York.
Unbound accompanies Karel Martens’ first solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, bringing together a wide-ranging body of work Karel made and collected over the entire span of his decades long career. Containing works from the show, collaged, overprinted and juxtaposed with elements found around his studio, the book balances between being an artist book and a catalog. “This publication, thoughtfully designed by Jordi de Vetten and Susu Lee in close collaboration with Martens himself, functions as a handbook to his work. But it’s an unconventional one: unstructured, non-hierarchical, playful, personal, and associative.” With texts by Thomas Castro, curator of the exhibition and Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk Museum.
‘Amidst the fire, I am not burnt’ is a documentary approach to the iconic landscape shaped by Vesuvius. It investigates the different temporalities, scientific and popular perceptions, historic and present-day photographic representations, and stories inscribed in this cyclical landscape. The book interweaves documentary writing and photography in a varied constellation of subjects and experiences, from derelict quarries, archaeological sites, and souvenirs, to a parking lot, bonfires, and lovers parked along the road at night. As each eruption of the volcano adds a layer on top of the last, Vesuvius continues to sense, store, destroy, shape, and transmit information.
This issue is devoted to the Italian designer, artist, and inventor Bruno Munari, whose visual experiments were so iconic as to become a self-evident part of visual culture. At its core is the first English translation of ‘Obvious Code’ (1971), a collection of Munari’s own writings, sketches, and poems about his work. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, groundbreaking artworks like his series of handmade projection slides, obscure rhymes about the art market, and an original piece from his “unreadable books” series. Dozens of artists, designers, writers, and curators were invited to annotate Munari’s texts as a testament to the depth of his influence on international art.
The small French village of Aumont, where Géraldine Jeanjean’s grandmother lives, is filled with childhood memories and has been a subject for the photographer’s work for many years. Her photos are proof of what her stories contain and identify the places that have almost become imaginary. By observing them, she noticed similarities between her children and her grandmother. While the children discovered reality, her grandmother, suffering from memory problems, lost touch with it. A search for reality has developed like a game of rock-paper-scissors.
This artist’s publication contains a sequence of unique letterpress monoprints, made by Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens between 2014 and 2022. The prints, which are both highly geometric and brightly coloured, are reproduced in the book at their actual size. Textual elements accent the various abstract shapes and repetitions on almost every page. ‘Small Prints’ is available in two different cover versions, which itself is the result of a printing experiment. By printing the contents of the book in three layers on a single print sheet, which was then cut and folded, variations in the cover emerged.
Seeing into Stone describes a technique applied by experienced stone carvers, when they work on sculptural objects: before they start cutting into a stone they contemplate its surface to anticipate the structure and natural growth beneath it. This ritual of looking into opaque matter describes a spiritual practice. At the same time it functions as a metaphor for a special kind of tunnel vision, focused on what lies invisible under a surface. This book is a time travel through past and present, above and below ground.. Landscapes, impacted and even created by resource extraction are put into context with contemporary industrial mining equipment and historical cast iron utilitarian goods. Through the combination of images from very different archives, connections are made that speak about the complex relationships of humans and minerals. Images and texts contribute to a debate on mineral and human coevolution, that redefines the separation between life and non-life.
Juliaan Lampens originally sketched the design for the Chapel of Our Lady of Kerselare in chalk on a blackboard wall in his studio in Eke before it was built from 1963 to 1966. Half a century later, Bart Lodewijks is drawing on Lampens’ masterpiece, also with blackboard chalk. The chalk drawings on the chapel represent a reimagination, a return to the design that originated on the wall in Eke. The temporary drawings and surrounding environment, in all its seasonal changes, are being photographed by Jan Kempenaers.
By meticulously fixing human hair in lines onto pieces of hand soap, Oksana Pasaiko created a collection of Short Sad Texts (Based on the Borders of Countries). The project comprises both a present and an absent version. The present version is a series of small sculptures: blocks of soap on which hairs have been meticulously laid in the form of various contested borders. The artist draws particular attention to the fact that the borders presented in this book did not arise from natural features such as rivers, mountains, seas, or lakes, but rather from human conflicts.
Combining a genuine interest in contemporary and historical architecture with a desire to make sculpture functional, these five projects form a distinct body of work within Philip Metten’s practice: ‘Bar’ (2013), ‘153. Stanton’ (2015), ‘The Corner Show’ (2015), ‘Cinema’ (2017), and ‘Essen’ (2016–2021). Wouter Davidts’s analysis of ‘Untitled’ (2014) sets the tone, a work that seems to anticipate the complex interplay between drawing, sculpture, and architecture apparent in Metten’s other projects, where he gives spaces with a distinct social programme and scale a sculptural transformation. With photos by Jan Kempenaers and drawings by Kris Kimpe and Samyra Moumouh.
Irene Kopelman examines three interconnected phases in her work through the lens of two small marine animals: Botryllus schlosseri and Nematostella vectensis. One is colonial, the other is solitary, yet they both have the ability to regenerate their entire body. For the artist, drawing is a way of thinking and processing what we see through material and physical activity; dwelling on a subject and exploring it through looking and learning. It is extraordinary to think how much we could learn from these two marine models. Kopelman’s long-term project, initiated by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, is an attempt to tackle such questions through drawing and imagination.
Jochen Lempert’s photographs begin with an encounter: his meeting with plants and animals, real or artificial representations in urban or rural settings, museum displays, scientific books, and more. The resulting images display a certain ease, a proximity that speaks to his comfort around his subjects. Rather than applying his scientific knowledge to what he photographs, he visually invites meaning through the act of seeing. ‘Pairs’ appears with an exhibition of Lempert’s work in Frankfurt am Main, curated by Yasmil Raymond and Deborah Müller. The juxtapositions in this series might be two pictures of the same subject, a pair of animals, or visually evocative matches.
Aglaia Konrad’s photographic work probes the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical parameters that inform architecture and urbanism. 'Japan Works' is the result of her journey through Japan in the autumn of 2019. Using a pre-compiled list of places with exceptional architecture, Konrad took thousands of photos in Tokyo, Itoigawa, Kyoto, Nagoya and Osaka. In addition to mostly iconic, post-war Metabolist architecture, Konrad also took a large number of photos of nonspecific architectural moments and infrastructure that, with the same intensity, give their own impression of the architectural landscape in Japan. Free associations of full-page photographs alternate with contact sheets documenting her itinerary. These are informed by postscript glosses written by architect and critic Julian Worrall.
Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller (1940–2018) was one of the greatest pioneers in modern film history. A new book celebrates the Polaroids taken by this daring “master of light”, who worked as a cinematographer alongside Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Steve McQueen. This delicate, printed collection shows Müller’s sensitivity to light, acute aesthetic eye, and his attraction to natural motifs. Each snapshot of flowers, insects, and trees sparkles like a jewel, exposing such minute details as a translucent petal or a miraculous close-up of a stamp. With a contribution by French cinematographer Agnès Godard, it is designed by Linda van Deursen and edited by Andrea Müller-Schirmer.
Sculptor Mark Manders installed an exhibition in the Woning Van Wassenhove, a post-Brutalist house designed by Juliaan Lampens in 1974. Although Manders hardly touched some spaces, he treats the bed, office, and kitchen as stages for aggregation in line with the original occupant’s mindset: drawings, architectural proposals, photographs, artworks, paint pots, and seemingly wet clay are piled on top of one another. In Manders’s words: “The aim is to show the house in a perfect situation. While some spaces derail when you zoom in on them, there is a kaleidoscopic element to it, as if you are looking inside a head.”
Emerging from an eponymous exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ‘Painting as Prop’ features four new essays and a conversation with Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal. Throughout his career, the artist has consistently offered reinterpretations of existing imagery, whether an artwork, a newspaper image, or a book. Other paintings, some of which played a role as props in Sasnal’s recent film project, “The Assistant”, take cues from archival images, banal snapshots, popular culture, and art history. All of the paintings were made between 2002 and 2024. The texts introduce Sasnal’s distinct portraiture, modernist inspirations, and the evolution of his first feature film.
Learning from the inscription in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace of Urbino, typeface designer Radim Peško considers different approaches based on the original letterforms from the Renaissance. This leads to experimentation with technologies, using different methods, and constructing new typefaces to not only demonstrate the resulting fonts but also give context to their origins. The publication features texts by Peško alongside contributions by Francesco Delrosso, Stuart Bertolotti Bailey, James Langdon, Daniele Bursich, and Jonathan Pierini. Designed by Peško and Pierini.
Through the media of photography, film, and text, Dutch visual artist and photographer Petra Stavast unravels and structures complex social issues, often departing from a seemingly insignificant personal observation. ‘S75’ is a project she named after the Siemens S75, a mobile phone that was launched in 2005. It was Stavast’s first phone which featured an integrated camera, with a maximum resolution of 1280 × 960 pixels. All the portraits appearing in this series were photographed by Stavast using the S75 between 2006 and 2022 in Amsterdam, Banff, and Shanghai. The book is designed by Hans Gremmen.
Matthew Harvey’s ‘Future Estate’ is a long-term artistic research project documenting the spatial and organisational processes of commodity production, the geopolitics of development, and the zoning practices, extractions, and transnational investments that shape the material and social environments of the precarious present. Drawn to disorganised, peripheral, and contingent contexts, Harvey attempts to navigate a possible set of coordinates to follow the flow of production networks and infrastructural throughlines. As the uneven processes of global labour and distribution play out, his photographs move between subtle and transcendental moments.
This catalogue for an exhibition of work by Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens features over 40 paintings and works on paper. It offers a cross-section of the artist’s challenging representations of the human body. The works were gathered from different phases of the artist’s life, in order to make combinations that would make sense to be shown together with works from the museum’s collection, and are grouped into four categories: the family portrait, erotic figure, fragmented body, and portraits of sculptures. In this way her artworks enter into an anachronistic dialogue with the abstracted human forms of Cycladic figurines crafted by unknown artists several millennia ago.
A tear-off calendar for 2026 by Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens. For each day of the year, Martens has created a unique arrangement, originally constructed using his signature method of printing letterpress monoprints from found metal forms, and then digitized to comprise 365 compositions in total. Every day is a new day!