Sweat
Alex Farrar
Published by 7.45 Books, 2020, 206 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 18.3 × 27.5 cm, English
Price: €24

Sweat brings together images of sweat forms taken by Alex Farrar and collated from Instagram, celebrity websites and photo libraries. Stock and staged imagery are displayed alongside paparazzi shots and documentary images. The suggestion of a figure builds accumulatively as we flick through the pages, our eyes grow accustomed to seeing a body that is never fully explicated. Why sweat?’ Hand numbered in an edition of 150.

#2020 #alexfarrar
...(illegible)...
Andrew Atchison
Published by MADA Gallery, Melbourne, 2020, foldout poster (monotone ill.), 21 × 29.7 (folded), 84 × 59.4 cm (unfolded), English
Price: €5

Produced on the occasion of …(illegible)…, an exhibition that explored queer abstraction as a contemporary conceptual methodology. The term ‘queer abstraction’ describes the potential of an artwork to communicate something of lived queer experience(s) through seemingly non-referential, abstract visual language. This position makes space for a critique of the notion that artworks should present as explicitly, legibly queer according to signs or qualities allocated to the art-historical category of Queer Art.

Curated by Andrew Atchison and including artists Briony Galligan, Mathew Jones, Paul McKenzie, John Meade, Fiona Macdonald and Scott Redford.

Designed by Paul Mylecharane.

#2020 #andrewatchison #johnmeade #paulmylecharane #scottredford
Artist Books
Mladen Stilinović
Published by Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2007, 143 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 16.5 × 23.5 cm, English
Price: €22

The early work of Mladen Stilinović was marked by his involvment in poetry and experimental film. His interest soon evolved in the relationship between visual symbols and words, leading to the creation of a series of collages, hundreds of artist’s books, paintings, installations, and videos. Stilinovic’s artwork is characterized by the use of everyday materials, simplicity, social criticism and questioning the role of art.

With an introductory text by by Branka Stipančić. You can see Stilinović interviewed about his artists books here.

#2007 #artistbook #brankastipancic #mladenstilinovic
Even the Dead Rise Up
Francis McKee
Published by Bookworks, London, 2017, 150 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 11.5 × 17.5 cm, English
Price: €13

In Francis McKee’s first novel, observations of séances, scientific advances, group education outings, Kurdish protests for the ‘disappeared’, become mixed with his own Tarot influenced visions: a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy, celebrating the ecstatic moment. Histories of isolated early Christians and twentieth century mystics affect the psyche, all of this documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. Influenced by forms of 1960s new journalism, McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which become more erratic, signalling the looming fate of the text and its author.

Francis McKee is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. He is Director since 2006 of the CCA, Glasgow, and a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art.

You can hear the author discuss the book here.

#2017 #bookworks #francismckee
Werkmonographie
Franz Erhard Walther
Published by DuMont-Schauberg, Köln, 1972, 282 pages (b/w ill.), 20 × 24.5 cm, German with an English introduction
Price: €22 (Temporarily out of stock)

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther: Arbeiten 1955–1969, at Kunsthalle Tübingen from 11 May–9 July, 1972.

Franz Erhard Walther is a key figure in the departure from the image since the European postwar period. Beyond the classical understanding of sculpture and painting, Walther formulated a completely new concept of work that included the viewer as an actor. Early in his work, fabric—until then an unusual artistic material—became a source of innovation for Walther, from which the “activation objects” emerged. In the wall formations of the 1980s, he achieved an incomparable interweaving of painting, sculpture, and architecture that continues to this day.

#1972 #franzerhardwalther
BOOK/MARK
Mitchel Cumming and Maria Smit
Published by AFAAAR Publications, Sydney, 2020, Two-sided Risograph print on 300gsm card, 19 × 5.4 cm, English
Price: €5

Assigned its own ISBN, which also serves as its textual and/or graphic content, BOOK/MARK is a publication in the form of a bookmark. Produced on the occasion of the Moveable Types book fair at Witte de With, Rotterdam in February, 2020 by Mitchel Cumming and Maria Smit.

#2020 #ephemera #mariasmit #mitchelcumming