Published on the occasion of Běla Kolářová: Neznámé Písmo–Fotogramy, derealizace, asambláže 1956–1996, at Galerii U prstenu, Prague, 11–30 March, 1998

Prague-based artist Běla Kolářová (1923–2010) began experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 1960s, creating photograms and X-ray photographs that continued the Bauhaus tradition of photography as an abstract medium. Thus, for a series of photograms she called vegetages, she produced miniature “artificial negatives” by pressing natural materials into soft paraffin and using them for the exposure of the photographic paper instantaneously as “negatives.” In the late sixties Kolářová increasingly began creating assemblages out of found objects including household items such as snap fasteners, needles and safety pins. Kolářová arranged these objects according to conceptual grids, and thus they are somewhat akin to the work of Nouveaux Realistes as well as to various conceptual practices. The work she produced in this way defied the aesthetic canon of Socialist Realism, and Kolářová developed a remarkable conceptual feminist style that was all her own.

In recent years, Kolářová’s work was shown at the documenta 12 (2007), at the Raven Row gallery in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umění in Olomouc (2007).

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

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Prunella Clough, Working Drawings 1946 – 1998 at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 24 September–24 October, 1998.

Prunella Clough found her subjects by touring London’s industrial wastelands and bombsites – docks, power stations, factories and scrapyards – creating gritty, urban images. Her work – comprising paintings, collages, drawings, reliefs and graphics – increasingly centred on the components of the cityscape as her art, shifted away from representation through various influences including cubism and European abstraction.

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

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Isa Genzken/Caroline Van Damme at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, 17 May–5 July, 1998. Curated by Luk Lambrecht. Designed by Studio Luc Derycke.

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

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Parallelepipede & Trame Travail in situ by Daniel Buren at the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, 1 – 19 December, 1997.

The visionary paintings of Martin Wong, one of the unsung geniuses of New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s, are collected here and examined in depth for the first time. Entirely self-taught, Wong created intricate compositions that combine gritty social documents, cosmic witticisms, and highly charged symbolic languages-customised manual alphabets for the deaf, street graffiti, Nuyorican poetry, hand-lettered signs, meticulously rendered brick facades, rearrangements of Zodiac signs-sometimes within a single painting.

The urban landscape of Loisaida, the Hispanic section of the Lower East Side where Wong lived, is the source of his imagery. Whatever the theme-the survival of a neighbourhood besieged by drugs and crime, homoerotic fantasies of men in uniform, the multiplicity of meaning in language, the kitsch and ornamentation of Chinatown USA-Wong’s work is visually startling and movingly autobiographical.

Produced on the occasion of Performance into Politics by Yvonne Rainer at the Barbican Centre, London, 10 June–15 July, 1998.

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