The Weather is Quiet, Cool and Soft
Guy Mees
Published by MuZEE, Oostende, 2018, 22 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 10.5 × 14.8 cm, English
Price: €4

Exhibition brochure produced on the occasion of Guy Mees: The Weather is Quiet, Cool and Soft at MuZEE, Oostende, 24 November, 2018–10 March, 2019. The Weather is Quiet, Cool and Soft presented works from different stages in the career of the Belgium artist Guy Mees (1935–2003) to shed light on his intuitive and conceptual approach. The selected works ranged from early lace pieces generically entitled Lost Space to the films and the photographs of the series of portraits Difference of Levels, never before shown structuralist works from the 1970s, pastel on paper series from the mid-1970s and paper cut-outs from the 1980s. Together, these allow a study of Mees’s practice and his ideas of mutability, fragility, porosity and the expansion of pictorial space into social space. The title of the exhibition (taken from a note by the artist) is a reference to the atmospheric impermanence in Mees’s work and his relativist poetical approach.

#2018 #ephemera #guymees #joriskritis #lilouvidal
Female Orgasm: A codex of sorts, after Ursula K Le Guin
Emily Floyd
Published by Negative Press, Melbourne, 2019, concertina (colour & b/w ill.), 29.5 × 16.3 cm (closed), 29.5 × 130.4 cm (open), edition of 30, English
Price: €1255

Female Orgasm: A codex of sorts, after Ursula K Le Guin is a hand screen-printed artists’ book by Emily Floyd produced in collaboration with Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam, published and printed by Negative Press, Melbourne, with text supplement by Anneke Jaspers. A typographic response to Le Guin’s Kesh word BANHE, meaning “acceptance, inclusion, insight, understanding; female orgasm. To include; to comprehend; to have orgasm (female).” The project belongs to a body of works that retrieve Le Guin’s language from an indefinitely deferred future, activating its revolutionary desire in the present.

#2019 #emilyfloyd #experimentaljetset #negativepress #ursulaleguin
Sherrie Levine
Published by the Städtischen Museum, Leverkusen, 1998, 60 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 20 × 30 cm, French, German
Price: €13

The oeuvre of American artist Sherrie Levine takes on one of the most radical and purist positions concerning the examination of existential questions of contemporary art: she transfers the great Platonic theme that Marcel Duchamp transported into the 20th century into the present.

The exhibition catalogue of the Städtisches Museum Leverkusen Schloss Morsbroich and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Genève illustrates the artist’s first European solo exhibition.

#1998 #sherrielevine
Complete Writings 1959–1975
Donald Judd
Published by the Judd Foundation, New York, 2016, 240 pages (b/w ill.), 21.6 × 27.9 cm, English
Price: €25

Complete Writings 1959–1975 was first published in 1975 by The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and since then it has been the primary source for Donald Judd’s early writing. Working as an art critic for the magazines Arts, Arts Magazine and, later, Art International, Judd regularly contributed reviews of contemporary art exhibitions between 1959 and 1965, but continued to write throughout his life on a broad range of subjects. In his reviews and essays, Judd discussed in detail the work of more than 500 artists showing in New York in the early and mid-1960s, and provided a critical account of this significant era of art in America. While addressing the social and political ramifications of art production, the writings frequently addressed the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Kenneth Noland and Claes Oldenburg. Judd’s essay “Specific Objects,” first published in 1965, remains central to the analysis of the new art developed in the early 1960s. Other essays included in this publication are “Complaints I” (1969), “Complaints II” (1973) and his previously unpublished essay “Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism” (1975), all of which establish the polemical importance of Judd’s writing.

#2016 #donaldjudd
EVERY SINGLE DAY
Haim Steinbach
Published by Museum Kurhaus, Kleve, 2018, 8 postcards (b/w ill.), 10.5 × 15 cm, German
Price: €30

Set of 8 postcards produced on the occasion of Haim Steinbach: every single day, a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 22 September, 2018–27 January, 2019.

For more than four decades, Haim Steinbach has explored the psychological, aesthetic, cultural and ritualistic aspects of collecting and arranging already existing objects. His work engages the concept of “display” as a form that foregrounds objects, raising consciousness of the play of presentation. Steinbach selects and arranges objects—which range from the natural to the ordinary, the artistic to the ethnographic—thereby emphasizing their identities, inherent meanings and associations. An important influence in the growth of post-modern artistic dialogue, Steinbach’s work has radically redefined the status of the object in art.

#2018 #ephemera #haimsteinbach
PEINTURES
Atsuko Tanaka
Published by Galerie Stadler, Paris, 1987, 8 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 21 × 15 cm, French
Price: €40

Publication produced for Atsuko Tanaka’s exhibition Peintures at Galerie Stadler, Paris, 30 January– 7 March, 1987.

Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist best known for her Neo-Dada Electric Dress (1956), a garment made from hundreds of lightbulbs painted in primary colors. This iconic work, which she wore to exhibitions, functions as a conflation of Japanese traditional clothing with modern urbanization, bringing an unexpected and challenging interpretation to both. “I wanted to shatter stable beauty with my work,” Tanaka once said. A member of the Gutai movement, much of her work used domestic objects like lightbulbs, textiles, doorknobs, and doorbells. With these objects, the artist was able to create work about the body without a body present. She maintained a broad practice that included performance “happenings,” sculpture, and installation, while her later work focusing on two-dimensional painting, with colorful organic abstract shapes connecting circles and lines.

#1987 #atsukotanaka #japaneseavantgarde