Michael E. Smith occasionally creates drawings as organisational notes for his exhibitions: a to-do list may be intertwined with a sketch outlining an idea for a sculpture, and at times, drawings emerge as impromptu phone scribbles. Over the past fifteen years Smith has accumulated a substantial collection of drawings, collected here for the first time in this publication produced on the occasion of the exhibition Michael E. Smith at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, 3 February – 28 April, 2024.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Francis Picabia, which travelled to Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo, 12 August–7 September, 1999; Iwaki City Art Museum, Fukushima, 17 October–14 November 1999; Kintetsu Art Museum, Osaka, 26 January–9 February, 2000.

Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France and was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

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

This publication, conceived as an extension of the eponymous exhibition, paying tribute to Léon Bakst, the greatest set designer of the modern era. Viewing theatre as a total artwork in which choreography, music, costumes and sets were of equal importance, Léon Bakst (1866–1924) worked closely with artists such as Serge Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jean Cocteau, Ida Rubinstein and Igor Stravinsky, transforming the perception of ballet.

The book and offers a detailed presentation of Bakst’s drawings, costume and textile designs, previously unpublished writings on ornament and fashion, new scholarship on Bakst’s sources and the impact of his vision, as well in situ views of the scenography created by Nick Mauss for the exhibition.

Second edition.

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

New Book is the title of a new poem composed of three existing poems re-edited by Simone Forti. As reading this poem, one moves forward with wonder amid everyday memories, recollections of life, a sense of civic duty, glimpses of a precarious world, the beauty of nature, melancholy, a rage to live.

American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance.

Produced on the occasion of Christopher Williams: Radio / Rauhfaser / Television at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago, 8 February – 19 April, 2024. Designed by Petra Hollenbach.