In this artist’s book, Piero Gilardi reveals his working methods and explains how to create sculptures like those he has produced since the early 1960s. A pioneer of Arte Povera and a proud advocate of an ecologically concerned undertaking in the visual arts, Gilardi is also a political activist. The technique he developed for his sculptures has often been applied to produce masks, signs, and props for rallies and demonstrations, as this book and an interview with Andrea Bellini explains. For all this and for much more—his design and fashion creations, his social endeavors, etc.—Piero Gilardi is emblematic of the evolution of art and society over the last five decades. He is an artist whose works and theoretical research are still relevant to map what art might achieve and how art might be useful in the “real world.”
The first comprehensive monograph on the pioneer of Arte Povera, inventor of a “relational aesthetics” in the 1960s, political activist, and advocate of an ecologically concerned undertaking in the visual arts.
Piero Gilardi (born 1942 in Torino) is a pioneer of Arte Povera and a proud advocate of an ecological-concerned undertaking in visual arts. He is a peripatetic artist who gathered information about experimental art and creators in the 1960s, promoting the work of Richard Long or Jan Dibbets, and introducing Bruce Nauman or Eva Hesse into Europe. He is also a political activist who marched with FIAT workers in the 1970s, and who founded, in the 2000s the Living Art Park, commissioning earthworks to contemporary artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster or Lara Almarcegui.
Secret Outlines: Versailles (1996–2020) is the facsimile reproduction of one of the eight variations of the Secret Outlines (1996) series in which Jacqueline Mesmaeker over her way into books through graphic interventions, collages, and cuttings. For this edition, published by Keijiban (Kanazawa) and printed by Cultura (Wetteren) on Gardapat 150g paper, the artist has added five original drawings made with Caran D’Ache sapphire blue pencil to each of the thirty signed and numbered copies.
More images of the associated exhibition can be seen here.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Prozesse: physikalische, biologische, chemische at Haus an der Redoute, Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 21 September–22 October, 1978. Including artists: Michael Badura, Monika Baumgartl, George Brecht, Jan Dibbets, Michael Enneper, Hans Haacke, K.H. Hödicke, Peter Hutchinson, Wolf Kahlen, Wolfgang Mally, Nam June Paik, Klaus Rinke, Dieter Roth (Diter Rot), HA Schult, Helmut Schweizer, Timm Ulrichs and Dorothee von Windheim.
In 2020, CMMC (Céline Mathieu and Myrthe van der Mark) were invited by organisers NICC Lodgers to perform at M HKA in Antwerp in response to art subsidy cuts in Flanders. Their contribution, The Writing Performance, was an attempt to write a novella each in three days, during the museum’s opening hours and in full sight of visitors. Throughout The Writing Performance, CMMC subsisted on water and sugar. Printed in an edition of 120 copies.
Curatorial Feelings is a book that collects arts practitioner Eloise Sweetman’s writing from the past decade, written on the occasion of exhibitions she curated, written on and for individual artworks, as well as for public talks. Sweetman often wrote while, and not before, the artworks were on view. The time of retrospection, and of being with artworks, imbues her language. Moving between prose and poetry, impressions and reflections, coursing through the writing is a commitment to senses, to subjectivity, to social responsibility.
Sweetman writes to the work of Malin Arnell, Gwenneth Boelens, Katarzyna Kobro, Charlotte Posenenske, Miyeon Lee, Arin Rungjang, Jo-ey Tang, Katie West, Zarouhie Abdalian, Ruth Buchanan, Sofia Caesar, Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Kiaer, Lee Kit, Liu Chao-tze, Ma Qiusha, K.R.M. Mooney, Elena Narbutaitė, Kate Newby, Shanta Rao, Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tapperser, and Louwrien Wijers.
Edited by Eloise Sweetman and Jo-ey Tang. Designed by Dongyoung Lee.