Primarily known for his paradigmatic “shelves” displaying everyday objects, Haim Steinbach (born 1944) has developed a practice that evolved from early minimalist painting with grids and monochromes to later large-scale installations that have seldom been seen in the US. Growing out of a traveling exhibition that features works drawn from throughout Steinbach’s career, as well as archival materials and new site-specific installations, Object and Display urges readers to take a closer look at this seminal artist’s works. Hundreds of full-color illustrations document the exhibition, which included photographs, models and recreations from past works, along with photography of the site-specific installations that appeared at each institution. New essays by writers Johanna Burton and Germano Celant explore the evolution of Steinbach’s practice and his investigations into what constitutes an art object and how art and objects are displayed.

Produced on the occasion ofContinuous Moment: Big Foot’s Studio, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 5 October–5 November, 2016.

Continuous Moment: Big Foot’s Studio is part of Bertoli’s ongoing research and investigation into Picasso’s play Le Désir Attrapé par la Queue (Desire Captured by the Tail). Referring to both a 1944 reading of the play and a staging of the play in 1967 by Jean Jacques Lebel, Bertoli’s work addresses ideas of repetition, reprise and continuity. Like Picasso’s text and Lebel’s production, Bertoli draws on a vast network of references and influences. In this light, Continuous Moment: Big Foot’s Studio can be understood as an assemblage of existing voices through which Bertoli is part of the aggregating authorship around ‘Le Désir’.

Text By Rex Butler. Designed by Warren Taylor.

This book aims to collect and present a comprehensive overview of the work of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. It is the result of a long and intense immersion into her archive, and intends to establish the importance of this unique artist – who did not have much recognition in the past—not only to the present day, but also to the precise political context and time to which she and her work belong.

The book presents her typewritings series, all produced between the early 1970s (some of the earliest works are dated 1972) and 1989. Mail Art was her way to be in contact with the world outside the GDR, otherwise impossible to reach. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification, the artist stopped producing any art: She felt her involvement was no longer “needed”.

With a text by Zanna Gilbert, edited by Jennifer Chert, designed by Till Gathmann.

Produced on the occasion of Vincent Fecteau’s 2016 exhibition at Secession, Vienna.

Fecteau’s abstract sculptures defy summary description. Out of everyday staples like papier-mâché, cardboard, pictures from magazines, and paint, he fashions complex objects in which spaces simultaneously collapse and explode. Reminiscent, in many instances, of the elemental forms of early twentieth-century art, his works evoke associations ranging from utopian architecture and avant-garde stage design to masks and industrially manufactured components, yet they do not spell out their references. They keep their secret in a deliberate and insistent refusal to communicate definite meaning, indicating the artist’s emphasis on sculpture as sculpture and the agency it possesses as a real thing in the world.

In his exhibition in the Secession’s main gallery, the first time his work is on display in Austria, Vincent Fecteau presents a new series of ten painted sculptures. Their fairly large rectangular shapes only distantly recall the boxes for cut flower with which the artist started. Alternately adding and removing elements in a playful cumulative practice that is characteristic of his art, Fecteau has transformed them into convoluted volumes.

Pamhplet produced on the occasion of Nairy Baghramian’s solo show Déformation Professionnelle, 26 November, 2016–19 February, 2017.

Déformation Professionnelle was a new production that built on 18 sets of works in the artist’s oeuvre from 1999 to 2016. Baghramian alludes to existing work and associated elements, from discarded ideas to working material. In this exhibition she was, in her own words, “surveying the survey”. By refusing to show what exists and nevertheless reconsider it in the ‘new’, the exhibition connected to fundamental questions about progress and economy and asks when something ceases to exist, and how something new comes into being.

Florian Pumhösl processes the tropes of art, architecture and graphics of the modernist avant-garde to create new aesthetic systems through painting, film and installation. He addresses the legacy of modernism through its canon of abstract visual language, from utopian architectural plans and buildings to innovations in publishing, the politics implicit in exhibitions and the motifs of early experimental filmmaking.

This particular body of work furthers the artist’s involvement with cartography and territorialization. The reliefs originate from stamp drawings of simple linear and rectangular progressions, and are made by pouring plaster into silicone molds; however, the initial forms are hand-constructed, and the final works hand-painted.

Designed by Martha Stutteregger.