Josef Bauer’s practice combines sculpture, installation, painting, and performance to disturb our perception of words and colours as mere “carriers” of meaning. By removing their two-dimensional context, letters become objects that communicate directly with our bodies in an unfiltered and urgent language called “tactile poetry.”

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

Works 1965–Today stems from a retrospective held at the Grazer Kunstverein showcasing Josef Bauer’s experiments with language, colour, and their spatial contexts nearly forty years after his last exhibition in Graz. His practice combines sculpture, installation, painting, and performance to disturb our perception of words and colours as mere “carriers” of meaning. By removing their two-dimensional context, letters become objects that communicate directly with our bodies in an unfiltered and urgent language called “tactile poetry.”

Edited by Krist Gruijthuijsen. Designed by Marc Hollenstein.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Andreas Slominskyyy at Metro Pictures, New York, April 26 – May 25, 2018, an installation comprising new wall reliefs, constructed from the colourful side paneling of a specific model of German portable plastic toilet. Taking over the factory’s production line, the artist vacuum-formed maternal-themed found sculptures and symbolic natural and utilitarian objects, like rope and wood, into the high-density polyethylene panels. In one work the profile of a veiled young woman emerges from a single red panel surrounded by wood and pinecones in an asymmetrical composition. This group of symbols, with their religious and naturalist overtones, alludes to themes of purity, conception, and fertility. The works not only obscure the line between mass-produced and art objects, but also conflate canonical art historical imagery with fetish motifs.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Jasper Johns/grafiek at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 7 April–22 May, 1972.

SM Cat. No 526.

Designed by Wim Crouwel.

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

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Sherrie Levine’s Newborn at Galerie Deux, Tokyo, 1 December, 1995–16 March, 1996.

Continuing the artist’s interest in challenging modernist assumptions about originality and authenticity, this piece comprised recreations of Constantin Brancusi’s marble sculpture Newborn (1915) in glass placed on top of nine black baby grand pianos.

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

Cards produced on the occasion of B. Ingrid Olson’s exhibition Elastic X At Secession, Vienna, 29 June–4 September, 2022.