Art

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dumas’ first solo show in South Africa after moving to The Netherlands 30 years ago provided occasion for this catalogue. Featured are more than 50 paintings, drawings and prints presented at the exhibition, as well as personal letters, documents and photographs collected by the artist. A selection of the artist’s own writings is included, ranging from her unique commentaries on art to aphoristic writings and poetry that are once insightful, witty and thought-provoking.

Invited to exhibit on the Mauvoisin Dam in Switzerland, Camille Llobet created a photographic series capturing a glacial landscape in transition. Shot on and around the moraines of the Mer de Glace, the images reveal a layered world of rock, ice, and sediment - remnants of a largely vanished glacier. Through diptychs that often exclude the sky and horizon, Llobet invites viewers to re-experience the scale and materiality of this grey-toned terrain. The book also features an in-depth interview with Jean-Paul Felley, in which Llobet discusses her working process, collaboration with geomorphologists, and the choreography of mountain landscapes in flux.

Looking at the play between memory and forgetfulness, 'Mike Kelley: Fortress of Solitude' brings together a range of key works from across the artist’s career. Whether using found stuffed animals as emotional effigies of long lost traumatic memories, or evoking the psychic existential homelessness of Superman in the form of his Kandor series, Mike Kelley explores the dark underbelly of post-war American culture. This publication accompanies the exhibition that took place at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece.

Situated in the middle of the river Maas, between the northern and southern parts of Rotterdam, Noordereiland is shaped like a typical riverboat. Bart Lodewijks trekked from its western to its eastern end, making his drawings in chalk on commercial buildings, ship cabins, quay walls, houses, and steel pipes. He then wrote a poetic account of the life he encountered on the island, published in three parts. His presence as an outsider there elicited both questions and stories from the island’s inhabitants; snapshots of trust and distrust. Although wind and rain will inevitably erase the artist’s traces on the island, through this publication it becomes permanently anchored in memory.

Trained as an architect, between 2008 and 2016 Olivier Goethals worked for the Belgian office of De Vylder Vinck Taillieu. Yet during that time he also embarked on a kind of odyssey to explore the age-old distinctions between art and architecture. The result is ‘Play Sincerely’, a personal credo and concept borrowed from the philosopher Alan Watts. The book offers an overview of Goethals’s many and varied activities – everything from writing poems and designing scenographies to programming gifs, giving lectures, sculpting objects, and filling notebooks. Goethals enjoys keeping it positive and simple, exactly in order to preserve and celebrate the complexity of things.

This publication arose from a collaboration between artists Marc Nagtzaam and Stephan Keppel. Photographs of their site specific exhibition en route! OULIPO en route! are followed by a series of collage-like scans by Nagtzaam and Keppel in which they combine each other’s drawings and photographs, collected for this project. Design: Roger Willems.

Imagine a collection of perforated leaves in which organisms like insects, fungi, or bacteria existing in the foliage have created an array of patterns. Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky’s ‘Feeding on Light’ examines photosynthesis through experimental photography. Bringing the outdoors into her analogue colour darkroom, the artist captures the traces of the often symbiotic relationships observed between trees, insects, and the sun. The book takes the form of a field guide, with an extensive index of common and scientific plant names linking the hundreds of photograms, contact prints, and negative prints. Essays contextualise her work through biology, ecology, and philosophy.

The eleventh volume of Irene Kopelman’s ‘Notes on Representation’ series presents images from a recent project which was shown in its entirety for the first time in 2022. It consists of a number of drawings of rock formations by the Amsterdam-based artist together with selected documentation of an on-site reconstruction of landscape in the exhibition space. The floor-based sculptural composition contains marble-shaped rocks known as concretions, which Kopelman studied during field trips to the Escalante National Park in Utah. As with her other work, the project reveals how artistic practice can be a way of thinking about natural or geological processes and the design of nature.

Appearing in conjunction with an exhibition at De Pont museum in Tilburg, this volume is somewhere between an artist’s book and an overview catalogue of recent work, bringing together paintings on paper, drawings, and collages from the past decade. Processes of appropriation and repetition characterise the oeuvre of Marijn van Kreij. He often combines manually copied artworks and illustrations from children’s books with cut-out snippets of text, or applies loosely painted brushstrokes to pages from art catalogues and magazines. Through this approach, the artist seeks to give iconic and lesser-known works of art from the 20th century a new place and form in the here and now.

‘Ghost Town’ is the first comprehensive overview of Ola Vasiljeva's practice between 2008 and 2023, and (re)collects the fragments, shapes, and thoughts that have been (re)configured and (re)presented throughout the artist’s multifaceted constellations. It consists of three intertwined sections: exhibitions, projects by the Oceans Academy of Arts (OAOA, an art collective Vasiljeva founded in 2008), and “storage”. The latter is a cross between an index, an archive, and a collection, and reproduces some of the separate elements which have featured in the Amsterdam-based artist’s projects over the years, from installations to sculptural works and drawings. Co-published with Vleeshal, Middelburg.

In 1961, Belgian architect René Heyvaert conceived ‘Denver Mosaic’ for a building on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado. Due to its scale, permanence, and site specificity, the mosaic has a spatial operation that is closely linked to architecture and embodies many aspects that would play an important role in Heyvaert’s later two-dimensional and sculptural works as an artist. The time he spent in the United States marks a transformative period in which he initiated his transition from architect to visual artist; the mosaic is the most significant work produced in this period. This edition is a spin-off of research conducted by the design office AVDAK for an exhibition on Heyvaert’s work.

Edited by Yvonne Rainer, this selection of texts and images by Rainer and various authors offers a retrospective portrait of her work, focusing on some of her most notable performances and projects from both the late 1960s (‘Trio A’, ‘The Mind Is a Muscle’) and since her return to dance with the White Oak Dance Project in 2000. Rainer is known for her challengingly experimental and sometimes minimalist work as a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, which spearheaded the rise of postmodern dance. An essay by Rainer frames things from the perspective of an ageing dancer who is aware of her physical limitations. With a conversation between Rainer and dancer Trisha Brown.