*1977
Kateřina Šedá
Published by JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2007, 160 pages (colour & b/w ill.), hardcover, 21.9 x 32.2 cm, Czech / English
Price: €34 (out of stock)

This book brings together the first complete survey of projects by the young Czech artist Katerina Sedá (*1977). The artist’s book is in the form of a box containing 10 folders which document each project (diagrams, graphs, drawings, texts, photographs, questionnaires) that Sedá carried out from 1999–2007.

Katerina Sedá bases her work on the observation of “invisible” contexts and social relationships between individuals in her most immediate surroundings—within her family and her birthplace, Ponetovice, a village in the Moravian countryside. The observations she makes (in the form of drawings, texts, and diagrams) then prompt a series of assignments, tasks, and games which she carries out in those surroundings. For example, her “society game” called “Nic tam není” [There’s Nothing There] (2003), involved the participation of all the inhabitants of Ponetovice. Based on observations she made, she created a universal “Regime for a Day”—an ordinary Saturday in a Moravian village. After cajoling her fellow villagers for some time, she was able, one Saturday, to get them to synchronise all their activities according to the regime she devised for the day, doing all the same things at the same times throughout the day. Katerina Sedá also collaborated on several projects with her grandmother. In “It Doesn’t Matter” (2005), her grandmother created several hundred drawings from memory, documenting the objects she had sold at the household goods shop where she’d worked her whole life. Sedá’s latest project was exhibited at Documenta XII.

Fourth volume of the series “Tranzit,” edited by Vít Havránek and focusing on Central and Eastern European artists.

#2007 #jrpringier #katerinaseda
Burning Window
Jack Goldstein
Published by Corps de Garde, Groningen, 1978, postcard, 14.7 × 10.3 cm, English
Price: €15 (Out of stock)

Exhibition postcard from Jack Goldstein’s exhibition Burning Window at Corps de Garde, Groningen, Netherlands 12 August–9 September, 1978

#1978 #ephemera #jackgoldstein
Tetsumi Kudo
Published by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1972, 32 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 20.8 × 27.4 cm, Dutch/French
Price: €95 (Out of stock)

Published on the occasion of Tetsumi Kudo’s exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 25 February–9 April, 1972. Designed by Wim Crouwel.

#1972 #stedelijkmuseum #tetsumikudo #wimcrouwel
Tetsumi Kudo
Published by The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2013, 625 pages (colour & b/will.), 26 × 19 cm, English/Japanese
Price: €105
This publication is produced on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo of the same title at The National Museum of Art, Osaka from November 2013 to January 2014, then at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo from February to March 2014, and finally at Aomori Museum of Art from April to June 2014. 'Your Portrait' was one of Tetsumi Kudo's most frequently used titles. While the word 'you' indicates the audience constrained by a variety of established values and conventions, it also refers to Kudo himself as the work's first viewer. It is intended as a portrait of the human race as the unavoidable victim of radioactive contamination. Kudo's works might seem to be weird or repulsive, but they display his vision of a paradoxical paradise in which, in order to survive, human beings would be forced to live in harmony with nature and technology. Includes Tetsumi Kudo's writings, his biography and exhibition history, bibliography, and a catalogue of his works from 1955 to 1988. (Text from Asia Art Archive)
#2013 #tetsumikudo
A BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allan Kaprow
Published by Mousse Publishing, Milan & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2012, 126 pages (colour & b/w ill.), softcover, 23 × 17 cm, English
Price: €75

This bibliography catalogues and illustrates, with a wide selection of images, Allan Kaprow’s entire body of published work: from his first artist’s book in 1962, to his last anthological projects in the 1990s. This lesser-known side of his oeuvre unfolds through 32 books, booklets, and pamphlets produced over a period of 40 years. Kaprow’s work moved along two parallel tracks: Happenings—of which he was an unchallenged pioneer, starting in the 1950s—and “Activity Booklets,” which functioned as a tool to help people understand and experience these performances.

The layout of his books, the originality of their structure, the literary stature of their texts, and their aesthetic quality as objects shifted his exploration of print into a higher realm, where the book became a fully-fledged work of art.

#2012 #allankaprow #moussepublishing #verlagderbuchhandlungwaltherkonig
Běla Kolářová
Published by the Egon Schiele Art Centrum, Prague, 2003, 176 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 21 × 25.5 cm, English/Czech
Price: €24 (Out of stock)

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 Raven Row in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umění in Olomouc (2007).

#2003 #abstractphotography #belakolarova