Blinky Palermo, is known for his large fabric and metal pictures as well as his objects and installations. Less well known, yet no less interesting, are the works he created in editions: screen prints and offset prints, lithographs, objects, and a template for painting. In their entirety, these works not only reflect Palermo’s development from the 1960s to his early death in 1977, but also show how the artist deliberately expanded his work with the possibilities of technical reproduction. Thanks to a donation from the Cologne collector Ulrich Reininghaus, in 2018 a complete set of Palermo’s editions became part of the Museum Ludwig’s collection. After having been subject to an in-depth scholarly research, they will now be presented in an exhibition for the first time. This exhibition catalogue also includes an updated version of Fred Jahn’s out-of-print catalogue raisonné from 1983.
The reprint of two out-of-print artist’s books self-published in the 80’s by the Japanese artists collective The Play, with a previously unreleased documentation.
Staging most of their actions, “without particular reason,” in “natural outdoor spaces,” and admitting they “only like[d] the infinite time and space of open air,” The Play is a fluctuating art collective gathering individuals with various personalities and skills, formed in 1967 in the Japanese Kansai region. Still active today the group has constantly devised its own methods for collective actions and the ways for transmitting them, its members coming together to create the possibility of an event without any concern for its result. Its persistence and longevity have set The Play apart from other groups in Japanese art history, never completely integrated, yet never completely at the margins. Refusing to distinguish art from life, The Play underlines an attitude and an outlook focused on playing, sincerity and humour, notions that remain crucial today.
“God is a circle whose centre is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere”. Circle means perfection, cyclicity, superiority of the divinity, but also instability and movement. Bruno Munari selects and describes in this little, extraordinary encyclopedia, several uses of this fascinating and mysterious form, unstable and hieratic at the same time.
Bruno Munari (24 October, 1907–30 September, 1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.
“You throw something into the sea, and the sea (after an unspecific and indeterminable amount of time) hands it back to you carved, finished, smoothed, shiny or polished according to the material and wet too because that way colours are brighter”. Reflections on the sea as creator of ‘useless’ design objects.
Bruno Munari (24 October, 1907–30 September, 1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.
Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterised by a formal rigour combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied art.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Le choix des femmes at Le Consortium and Frac Bourgogne, Dijon. Including Hanne Darboven, Gretchen Faust, Isa Genzken, Marthe Wéry, Laurie Parsons, Jessica Stockholder, Judith Barry, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, François Vergier. With texts by Eric Colliard, René Denizot, Xavier Douroux, Franck Gautherot, Bernard Marcadé.