Pierre Klossowski
Published by Libro Port, Tokyo, 1991, 1 volume in cardboard slipcase and dust jacket 168 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 26 × 30.3 cm, Japanese
Price: €88

With a text by Jacques Henric, translated by Masashi Ogura.

Pierre Klossowski was a French writer, translator and artist. A prolific late in life artist who was internationally acclaimed for his writings and translations on Sadeian erotic expression, Klossowski is a pivotal yet underrepresented figure in the history of 20th-century art, often overshadowed by his earlier literary work and his younger brother, Balthus. Primarily working with pencil and charcoal, the laborious drawings he produced reference a variety of subjects, including Greek mythology, Sadean decadence, medieval fantasy and sexualized scenarios involving a recurring female figure, Roberte. These imagined scenes depict a perplexing and intriguing array of mature, familiar and fantastical situations involving cartoonish human figures set in fictitious landscapes that uniquely relate back to the dystopic realities he creates.

#1991 #pierreklossowski
Working Conditions:
The Writings of Hans Haacke
Published by MIT Press, Cambridge, 2016, 344 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 18.5 × 23.7 cm, English
Price: €18

This volume collects writings by Haacke that explain and document his practice. The texts, some of which have never before been published, run from straightforward descriptions to wide-ranging reflections and full-throated polemics. They include correspondence with MoMA and the Guggenheim and a letter refusing to represent the United States at the 1969 São Paulo Biennial; the title piece, “Working Conditions,” which discusses corporate influence on the art world; Haacke’s thinking about “real-time social systems”; and texts written for museum catalogs on various artworks, including GERMANIA, in the German Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennial; DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population) of 2000 at the Berlin Reichstag; Mixed Messages, an exhibition of objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum (2001); and Gift Horse, unveiled on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2015.

*Please note this publication is missing it’s original dust jacket.

#2016 #hanshaacke
Michael E. Smith
Published by Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2024, 208 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 17 × 24 cm, English / German
Price: €35

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.

#2024 #drawing #michaelesmith #moussepublishing
1999/2000
Francis Picabia
Published by APT International, Tokyo, 1999, Two volumes in cardboard slipcase, 225 pp. & 120 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 18 × 25 cm, English / French / Japanese
Price: €105

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.

#1999 #francispicabia #painting
Designing Dreams:
A Celebration of Léon Bakst
Published by Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2024, 208 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 24 × 33 cm, English / French
Price: €50

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.

#2024 #dance #leonbakst #moussepublishing #nickmauss
Dispersed Events. Selected Writings
Nick Mauss
Published by After 8 Books, Paris, 2024, 296 pp. (b/w ill.), 12 × 18.5 cm, English
Price: €20

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.”

#2024 #after8books #florinestettheimer #ianwhite #jochenklein #lorraineogrady #nickmauss #nicolasmoufarrege #rezaabdoh #rosemarymayer #susancianciolo