Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) started writing about photography from the moment he became a photographer: for his own publications, for Italian magazines and newspapers, as well as private reflections committed to paper, where his thoughts would settle and then often depart in new directions. Born in Scandiano in 1943, Luigi Ghirri spent his working life in the Emilia Romagna region, where he produced one of the most open and layered bodies of work in the history of photography.

“Italian sculptor, painter and poet, Fausto Melotti is considered a pioneer of Italian art and is acknowledged for his unique contribution to the development of mid-century European Modernism. Coming of age in prewar Milan, and living through the horrors of the Second World War, Melotti metabolized wartime devastation in his work by returning to Renaissance principles of harmony, order, geometry, and musical structure, which he integrated into a highly personal yet universally accessible artistic language that expresses the full range of emotional experiences in modern human existence.”—Hauser & Wirth

Anna Viebrock studied stage design at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her collaboration with Christoph Marthaler has taken her to numerous theatres such as the Volksbühne Berlin, the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, the Frankfurt Opera, the Opéra de Paris, the Teatro Real Madrid, the Salzburg and Bayreuth Festivals, the Wiener Festwochen, the Festival d’Avignon and the Schauspielhaus Zürich, where she was a member of the management team until summer 2004. Since 1994, she has worked on opera productions with the Jossi Wieler/Sergio Morabito directing team and designed stages for René Pollesch and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

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

Produced on the occasion of the cycle of exhibitions dedicated to the work of Giorgio Griffa at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto; Bergen Kunsthall; and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome in 2015 and 2016.

In 1968, Giorgio Griffa abandoned figurative painting in favour of a format of abstract painting that still characterises his work to this day. Painting with acrylic on raw un-stretched canvas, burlap and linen, Griffa’s works are nailed directly to the wall along their top edge. When not exhibited, the works are folded and stacked, resulting creases that create an underlying grid for his compositions. In keeping with his idea that painting is “constant and never finished”, many of his works display a deliberate end-point that has been described as “stopping a thought mid-sentence.”

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

Published here for the first time, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s little known poems which preceded her typewritings and participation in the international mail art network from East Berlin.

Produced on the occasion of Josef Strau’s exhibition A Turtle Dreaming (… Echoes from an Encapsulated Space Exiled Sounds of Letters Requiring Symphonic Treatment) at Secession, Vienna, 24 April – 21 June, 2015.

Josef Strau’s experimental artistic practice developed out of the written word. In his installations he relates texts and objects to each other in manifold ways. On the surface, the texts are characterized by the typographic interplay of printed word and blank space. At another level their distinctive feature is Strau’s idiosyncratic style of writing, which nimbly and playfully tracks his stream of consciousness. Oscillating between the meaningful and the meaningless, he interweaves everyday stories and urban scenes with personal revelations and literary motifs. Both in his exhibition at the Secession and in the accompanying publication, Josef Strau references an old-established motif of literature and film—the artist as dreamer, resembling a turtle, an encapsulated observer and recorder of his urban surroundings.