Lawrence Weiner Is Your Alphabet’s Sixth Letter
Reinier Vrancken
Published by Reinier Vrancken, Rotterdam, 2018, unpaginated (colour & b/w ill.), 14.8 × 21 cm, English
Price: €5 (Out of stock)

A photograph depicting Lawrence Weiner leaning casually against the wall next to his work was uploaded to a website to point out in which letter the work was typeset. The website ascribes Weiner to the alphabet’s sixth letter (that letter that starts the word we use when we describe moving through the air with wings). Edition of 50.

#2018 #lawrenceweiner #reiniervrancken
What’s Love Got to Do With It
Lutz Bacher
Published by Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2018, foldout poster (colour & b/w ill.), 10.5 × 21 cm (folded) 42 × 38 cm (unfolded), English / German
Price: €2 (Out of stock)

Invitation produced on the occasion of Lutz Bacher, What’s Love Got to Do With It at Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 7 September, 2018–6 January, 2019.

American artist Lutz Bacher made work spanning an array of media since the 1970s. The game of hide-and-seek she played with her own self by working under a masculine pseudonym since early on in her career can serve as a helpful entry point to Bacher’s artistic practice. It centered around issues of identity, power structures, and violence, all the while remaining ambiguous and enigmatic.

In Untitled (2017), Donald Trump’s signature is enlarged and repeated on white paper that runs across the walls of all three exhibition galleries. The work is intersected by hastily scribbled notes from everyday life in Open the Kimono (2018), and ostensibly meaningful, zen-inspired sentences in Black or White (2018), which pass by in an endless loop on giant screens.

#2018 #ephemera #lutzbacher
Dead Marble
Ruth Buchanan
Published by Artspeak, Vancouver, 2018, 2 pages (b/w ill.), 14.7 × 10.5 cm (folded), English
Price: €2 (Out of stock)

Invitation card produced on the occasion of Ruth Buchanan’s exhibition Dead Marble at Artspeak, Vancouver, 9 June–28 July, 2018.

In 1958, weaver Ilse von Randow was commissioned to produce a major work of woven curtains for the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in New Zealand. Her ‘Auckland Art Gallery Curtains’ became the largest piece of hand weaving created in New Zealand. In her first presentation of work in North America, Dead Marble revisits von Randow’s curtain, and the newly designed Auckland Art Gallery sculpture court (1953) in which they were hung, as a departure point to reconfigure the complex relationships between gendered representations, institutional hierarchies and the burden of inherited legacies.

#2018 #ephemera #ruthbuchanan
Katinka Bock
Radio Piombino
Published by The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2018, 16 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 14.5 × 23 cm, English
Price: €14

Produced to accompany Katinka Bock’s exhibition Radio Piombino with text by art critic and curator Anne Bonnin. Designed by graphic design collective Åbäke, the publication includes a selection of black and white photographs by Katinka Bock alongside installation images by Ruth Clark, two of which appear as gloss colour stickers. Printed on recycled matt paper and bound with red staples.

#2018 #katinkabock #thecommonguild
The Name of Philippe Thomas / Philippe Thomas’ Name
Élisabeth Lebovici
Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2018, 112 pages, 11.5 × 18 cm, English/German
Price: €9

In the artistic activities of Philippe Thomas (1951–1995), there was a determination to disappear: it was his procedure to transfer his title of author onto his collectors. This was the case when selling an artwork, or whenever the author’s credit was needed for a commissioned text, and in the institutional co-operations that Thomas was a participant of. With this strategy Thomas worked against his own historicization, erasing his name from the reigning European and North American art fields and with prescience Thomas “put up obstacles to block his future ‘googleability’” (Hanna Magauer). In recent years, the works and writings of the artist, who also acted on behalf of the semi-fictional agency readymades belong to everyone®, again gained greater visibility and as of current are being assigned a place in art history.

With this book, Élisabeth Lebovici elaborates on Thomas’s strategy to cede and fictionalize authorship and suggests a reading of his work that incorporates questions of gender and reproduction, the multiplicity of the subjects involved, and the unbearable disappearance of Thomas (who died of AIDS-related complications), into the process of enunciation. It is Lebovici’s suggestion that the performativity of Thomas’s work requires two versions at once: “the one where one enters into the fiction and the one where one observes the beauty of the arrangement and the plot at work. The one where one is inside and the one where one contemplates it.”

Designed by HIT.

#2018 #elisabethlebovici #hit #philippethomas #readymadesbelongtoeveryone #sternbergpress #theory
The Weather is Quiet, Cool, and Soft
Guy Mees
Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2018, 188 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 20 × 26 cm, English
Price: €25

Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterized by a formal rigor combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied art.

The Weather is Quiet, Cool, and Soft is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (February 1–April 8, 2018), and at Mu.ZEE, Ostend (November 25, 2018–March 10, 2019). Borrowed from a note the artist jotted down on one of his works on paper, the title pays homage to the atmospheric impermanence of Mees’s works, as well as his infra-ordinary, relativistic, and poetic approach.

Edited by Lilou Vidal. Texts by François Piron, Fernand Spillemaeckers, Lilou Vidal, Wim Meuwissen, Dirk Snauwaert, Micheline Szwajcer. Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien. Designed by Joris Kritis.

Lilou Vidal, curator of the exhibition and François Piron, art critic, curator and editor, to discuss Guy Mees’ work here.

#2018 #dirksnauwaert #guymees #joriskritis #kunsthallewien #lilouvidal #sternbergpress