Art

From 1998 to 2003, Kasper Andreasen collected diverse printed matter on the streets of London, Copenhagen, Prague, and Amsterdam. When he moved to Berlin in 2016, he rediscovered this material and considered either doing something with it or simply discarding it. He decided to make collages. ‘High Capacity’ presents this personalised collection of printed matter. The project examines the traces of text and images, the collage-making process, and the temporal nature of certain printed matter. It also addresses the ubiquity and abundance of print versus the transience of the medium. The book is printed in a way that reflects the imperfect and grubby origins of this found matter.

This publication by Yael Davids unfolded as a workbook along two different exhibitions: A Daily Practice at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2020) and One Is Always a Plural at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2021). In Eindhoven the exhibition emerged from a three year research cycle facilitated by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Within the Van Abbemuseum she set up an educational structure, initially afterschool care for children, which evolved into weekly Feldenkrais classes. In Zurich, taking up these ideas in connection with a collection show, which had not been done for some time, was a fruitful challenge.

Berlin-based artist Alexandra Leykauf appropriates the gender-oriented or feminine cultural gaze via the medium of photography, playing with varying degrees of appropriation in order to reveal the superficiality of images. She often deconstructs different aspects of photography and cinema, in turn exposing the complexity inherent to the construction of images. This book presents an overview of Leykauf’s practice through three exhibitions – Both Sides Now (2020), Animus (2021), What We Do in the Shadows (2022) – her series ‘Stick People’ and ‘Faces’, and a number of video works. Texts by the artist and Garance Chabert illuminate the connections between these works.

‘Motivi’ is a collection of graphic compositions by artist Simon Boudvin, who created this during his residency at Villa Medici in Rome between 2020–2021. Drawing inspiration from famed Italian architectural and design magazines, Boudvin collected noteworthy pages from issues published in the 1980s. He then enlarged them by 400% to create 192 close-ups of seemingly random shapes and patterns. These reproduced fragments present a chapter in the history of Italian design, creating a background of the time.

This cahier is a visual sketchbook for an exhibition by Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, in dialogue with the museum's collection. Although the exhibition has been postponed towards 2025, this anticipatory publication already arose from Dumas' enthusiasm and affection for this combination. The enigmatic Cycladic antiquities, dating from 3000-2000 BC, speak to us in the same timeless language as Dumas' contemporary works.

‘Then, Now, and Then’ consists of 16 films that Marijke van Warmerdam made during her stay in Rome in 2017 and subsequent visits to the city. All the films are loops, and most last no longer than a few minutes. They portray life on the street as the artist takes us on a walk through the city. Distance and proximity, visibility and invisibility, movement and rotation alternate as the films show how the dynamism of the Baroque lives on in today’s Rome. With her keen eye for abstract image qualities, Van Warmerdam celebrates the hidden order of chance that makes street life so colourful throughout the centuries. This collection of stills and summaries brings the films to life.

Updated reprint in black of a book featuring a collection of Na Kim’s work from 2006 to 2015 published on the occasion of her fourth solo exhibition, SET (named after this publication) at DOOSAN Gallery New York, from October 8 to November 5, 2015. For this book, fragments of her works are set in more or less personal categories, taking on a form reminiscent of a sample book. In contrast with the first edition, published before the show’s opening, this book also contains images of the actual exhibition and a text by Jae Seok Kim.

Based in New York, the Lebanese-born artist Walid Raad (1967) often deals with the significance of locale in his work, and particularly with how different forms of violence or disruptive events can affect the lives of objects, ideas, or artworks. The artist’s appearances during and literally in the midst of his exhibitions are also an integral part of his practice. This extensive catalogue is published on the occasion of ‘Let’s be honest, the weather helped’, shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and offers a comprehensive overview of three long-term projects by Raad, along with a live performance piece entitled ‘Kicking the Dead and/or Les Louvres’.

For this publication Nagtzaam made compositions with frames, lines, dots, bars, scribbles, numbers, and pictures, all scanned from magazines and books in the library of the Laimun artist-in-residence program in Sardinia (Italy). With an accompanying text by Anya Jasbar. Design: Marc Nagtzaam & Roger Willems.

Swiss-born, Amsterdam-based artist Batia Suter presents a recent project in which she deals in a humorous and indirect way with the fundamentals of sculpture. The book is comprised of reproductions of protective packaging material for fruits, vegetables, and headphones, interspersed with collected images of armour. The sense of a fossilised present offers a new perspective on the artist’s phylogenetic approach to imagery and her appreciation of unintentional beauty.

Over the course of 202-2021, during the pandemic, Kara Walker has produced series of drawings in the style of a medieval 'Book of Hours'. Enigmatic images appear to traverse a range of time periods, from scenes of biblical and mythological origins, to images of historical violence, to others that suggest more recent political strife. The highly personal nature of these images capture Walker's own response to the intersection of past and present as a way to understand our contemporary political moment. The book comes with a poster.

This book, 'A Model', parallels an exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. The museum’s director Bettina Steinbrügge conceived this exhibition as a conversation with the ever evolving contemporary art museum. This publication, with an essay about the roles museums can take, in theory, in practice, and in use, enacts how Steinbrügge engages the artists in the exhibition to sit with this shifting idea. Commissioning major works by Nina Beier & Bob Kil, Rayyane Tabet, Oscar Murillo, or Claire Fontaine and historical works by Alvar Aalto and Tomaso Binga the exhibition uses the format of prologue, body, and epilogue to overlap gestures in the museum space. Likewise, this book engages the designer Julie Peeters, photographer Adrianna Glaviano, and artist Jason Dodge as editor to stage a publication that makes a new exhibition, 'A Model', between these pages.

Henri Jacobs has been conducting an investigation into two-dimensionality that involves the inherently flat nature and recto-verso proposition of a surface. Materialising in various forms, such as plaited paintings, murals, brickwork, wall hangings, ceramic objects, and drawings, the collection of works featured in this book were produced using a variety of techniques. In particular, the Brussels-based artist regularly experiments with plaiting paper, in which old and new works – or figurative and geometric images – are woven together into a two-sided, two-dimensional surface that is image, pattern, texture, and structure all in one.

This artist’s book accompanies Ari Marcopoulos’s exhibition at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. To create the book, Marcopoulos re-photographed prints of his photographs that he had produced at home using a pigment printer. This process was in many ways a continuation of the period of pandemic isolation in which most of the images were photographed. Closely aligned with his own copious output, the selection is both haphazard and intuitive, leaving room for spontaneity and even mistakes. A portion of the book also focuses on the 2021 video installation ‘Alone Together’, featuring a saxophone performance by jazz legend Joe McPhee, which forms a central part of the exhibition.

This book of photographs is the sequel to ‘A NOT B’ (2010), wherein quotidian items are again staged and captured through the camera’s unblinking eye. Yet the images are no longer set in the innocent atmosphere of the preschool years, when the world is read through analogies, but catapulted into a darker space of representation at the cusp of adolescence, against the backdrop of a hyper-commercialised world. The compositions create a distinctive play with logic, language, and meaning. Objects transform from their humble selves into abstract shapes discharged of meaning, or alternately into advertisements for themselves, charged with desire or bad omens of an ominous future.

This is a book about a single word: skiapod. What began as a task to select a single word from among all existing words, and to expand upon and alter the meaning and mythology of that word, soon became a fascinating journey through our human history and the strange workings of our minds. Discover how a concept can appear through different periods, crystallise in different makers’ minds, and become recorded in various media: from cave drawings to a fax, and from Malevich to Guston. Arranged as a step-by-step process, the book raises questions as well. Why do we need to create images and meaning? What do we try to grasp by creating an image of a mythical figure?

The thirteenth volume of Irene Kopelman’s Notes on Representation series is connected to the exhibition ‘Una cuestión de encuadre’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama. It presents three series of works developed in collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama in 2024. Featuring contributions by the artist and scientists, it offers a model for interdisciplinary practice rooted in long-term exchange. It also marks the occasion of Kopelman’s appointment as the first non-scientist to be named Research Associate at STRI – a formal recognition of her enduring engagement with the institute’s work and the Panamanian landscape.

Two years ago, Dutch visual artist Bart Lodewijks received a curious phone call from someone wanting to know if he would be interested in making his signature chalk drawings in Belgium’s newest prison. He arrived to find it is nothing but a construction site, so the first drawings appeared along the street where the prison would be located. He got acquainted with the locals – a landlord, the parcel delivery guy, an orange tomcat – and spoke with residents about the imminent changes in their neighbourhood. More than a year later, the first inmates arrived and Lodewijks ventured inside the prison with them. This book documents the project in its strange and wonderful entirety.

This eye-catching booklet is published with an exhibition of hybrid wooden objects by Walid Raad. The Lebanese-American artist’s practice spans almost every discipline, from photographs, videos, and lectures, to performances, sculptures, collages, and drawings. Raad’s approach is based on the assumption that artworks are not constants, but rather mutable quantities that change meaning and thus also their form during cultural or physical transfer. For instance, in dealing with the Lebanese wars, he uses the format of a seemingly authentic archive to confront the Western viewer with a society that has lost a unifying narrative.

A red rectangular frame, part of an installation by Hans Demeulenaere at the 2021 exhibition ‘One way or another, 10 years of Posture Editions’ at S.M.A.K. – the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent – remains behind in the museum due to the artist’s forgetfulness. This forms the starting point for ‘Unfolding Structures of Exchange’. What happens when three artists (Hans Demeulenaere, Nikolaas Demoen, and Marc Nagtzaam) exchange this red nomadic frame among themselves and shape it to their sculptural, drawing, and choreographic hand? The limited edition book’s accordion-style pages are accompanied by a text insert by Simon Delobel.

'i THINK and I think i've THOUGHT a thought' collects the various components of Pyl's practice from 2014 to 2021 in one publication by making use of the frottage technique. Working with pencil and paper, Pyl has inscribed each page with elements taken from different works. From these fragments, when they are taken together, a new vocabulary can be assembled: a collection of semantic artifacts rendered in binary patterns of light and shadow, negative and positive, and in no gradated or hierarchical order. The images that can be composed from these fractured parts are revealed only gradually as they superimpose upon each other, conjuring new associations, new ways of reading, with each turn of the page.

Since 2003, Philippe Van Wolputte has explored urban landscapes and created site-specific interventions. He particularly focuses on abandoned, forgotten, but above all devalued urban sites waiting to be demolished once they no longer serve a function in the current economic or utilitarian hierarchy. This overview of works by the Belgian conceptual artist spans from ‘Indicated Locations’ (2003) to ‘Looking Back While Walking Forward’ (2012) and the more recent ‘Indicated Locations Revisited’ (2023).

Jeff Weber juxtaposes several bodies of work in ‘Serial Grey’. As part of his collaborative project Kunsthalle Leipzig (2012–2017), he investigated Coptic Christianity, and more specifically its gnostic component, with artist Snejanka Mihaylova in 2013. This idea of ​​gnosis as a personal journey to knowledge resonates with his ongoing photographic project since 2009, ‘An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology’. Further, the large-format photograms ‘Untitled (Neural Networks)’ are a speculation on neuronal activity and its transposition into a digital circuit. These grid images are generated by a data processing software Weber developed to emulate the way neurons connect in the brain.

‘Træfængslet’ (The Wooden Prison) is a collection of photographs made by Nick Geboers in the prison cells of the historical buildings of Kunstmuseet Tønder, part of Museum Sønderjylland in Southern Jutland, Denmark. The close-ups reveal marks, traces, glyphs, pictograms, and messages scratched, etched, and carved into the wooden walls, a collective evidence left behind by years of imprisonment. Geboers is an image-seeker fascinated by the rich history of photography. He also presents his own images in carefully thought out constellations. Switching between the position of an archaeologist and a visual author, he moves in a free space between hard and soft sciences.