Published on the occasion of Běla Kolářová: Neznámé Písmo–Fotogramy, derealizace, asambláže 1956–1996, at Galerii U prstenu, Prague, 11–30 March, 1998

Prague-based artist Běla Kolářová (1923–2010) began experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 1960s, creating photograms and X-ray photographs that continued the Bauhaus tradition of photography as an abstract medium. Thus, for a series of photograms she called vegetages, she produced miniature “artificial negatives” by pressing natural materials into soft paraffin and using them for the exposure of the photographic paper instantaneously as “negatives.” In the late sixties Kolářová increasingly began creating assemblages out of found objects including household items such as snap fasteners, needles and safety pins. Kolářová arranged these objects according to conceptual grids, and thus they are somewhat akin to the work of Nouveaux Realistes as well as to various conceptual practices. The work she produced in this way defied the aesthetic canon of Socialist Realism, and Kolářová developed a remarkable conceptual feminist style that was all her own.

In recent years, Kolářová’s work was shown at the documenta 12 (2007), at the Raven Row gallery in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umění in Olomouc (2007).

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of Tony Conrad’s retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2018), MIT List Visual Arts Center and Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University (2018/2019) and ICA, University of Pennsylvania (2019). With texts by Rachel Adams, Vera Alemani, Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, David Grubbs, Henriette Huldisch, Branden W. Joseph, Andrew Lampert, Christopher Müller, Annie Ochmanek, Tony Oursler, Tina Rivers Ryan, Jay Sanders, Paige Sarlin, Christopher Williams.

Bar of soap as part of the exhibition Cut a Door in the Wolf by Jason Dodge at MACRO, Rome, 11 November, 2021–16 March, 2022.

Marina Xenofontos collects and catalogues the musings of an otherwise unknown inventor known as Christophoros Kyriakides. Born in Cyprus in 1949, he invented a board game called Six Continents Stars Compass that received little recognition and was printed in a very small number of editions. By chance encounter, Xenofontos stumbled across the game, and thus started a practice-based research into the inventor’s impressive archive—documented here in photocopies of complex scribbles, diagrams and drawings. Edition of 150.

Sven Stilinović was still a schoolboy when he started exhibiting with the Group of Six Artists on the streets of Zagreb in 1975. Photographic enlargements of small collages in which he recycled fragments of older photographs and tiny objects, as well as series where photographs of garbage interchange in a photographic sequence with photographs of cluttered shops raise the issue of photographic motif, while in “Comparison of the development of painting and non-development of photography” (1975) he concludes that that which is offered as a history of photography does not lead to its openness and creativity.

With texts from Ivana Bago, Branko Cerovac, Suzana Marjanić, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Branka Stipančić, Raša Todosijević, Goran Trbuljak.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition R. H. Quaytman: Modern Subjects, Chapter Zero at Wiels, Brussels, 10 September, 2021–30 January, 2022, which explored Brussels’ artistic history and, more specifically, the relationship to power of some of the artists with whom the artist shares an affinity, such as Magritte and Broodthaers. In preparatory research, Quaytman came across the painter Antoine Wiertz and his personal museum, which is now nestled in the heart of the European Quarter. With its unique and spectacular hanging, this museum bears witness to the golden age of monumental painting, which was in the throes of decline in the face of photography and film. Wiertz sought to compensate for this waning with an overabundance of moralising subjects condemning injustice and inequality. He depicted chilling scenes of poverty, war, suicide, or cholera.

Designed by Goda Budvytytė.