“You throw something into the sea, and the sea (after an unspecific and indeterminable amount of time) hands it back to you carved, finished, smoothed, shiny or polished according to the material and wet too because that way colours are brighter”. Reflections on the sea as creator of ‘useless’ design objects.

Bruno Munari (24 October, 1907–30 September, 1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition The Music of Color, Sam Gilliam, 1967–1973, 9 June–30 September, 2018, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel. Texts by Sam Gilliam, Jonathan P. Binstock, Lynette Yiadiom Boakye, Larne Abse Gogarty, Josef Helfenstein, Rashid Johnson and Rafael Squirru.

Sam Gilliam emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways by suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces. For an African-American artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change.

For more than twenty years, Jean-Luc Moulène has developed a complex body of work, both analytical and mysterious. Moulène’s works explore the question of representation in his chosen media, while at the same time drawing on their essential physicality and materiality to engage tirelessly with political, social and ontological issues ‘made flesh’—notably through the concept of ‘transaction’.

This monograph spans forty years of drawings and works on paper, offering an insight into a lesser-known part of Moulène’s artistic practice. A jubilant documentation rich with autobiographical elements.

Nightcleaners (1975) by the Berwick Street Film Collective has long been recognised as a landmark of British experimental film and political cinema. Together with its companion film ’36 to ’77 (1978), it pioneered a film form as radical as the Collective’s politics. The films chronicle one of the key campaigns of the women’s movement in the 1970s. The campaign to unionise women night cleaners in London anticipates contemporary issues regarding precarious labour. To celebrate the first digital release of the films, a special box set has been produced containing the two films on disc, reproductions of historical material, including news sheets of the women’s movement – one designed by Mary Kelly, a member of the Film Collective, an interview with whom is also included as well as rare illustrations and contributions from the filmmakers.

Designed by John Morgan studio.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition, Jochen Lempert at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 1 June–23 September 2018.

The work of Jochen Lempert portrays the animal world in the most varied contexts: ranging from the natural habitat to Natural History museums, from the zoo to the city, in remote locations or in banal situations and objects.

In his tireless quest, Lempert has managed to create a vast archive of images that covers a wide spectrum spanning everything from everyday views to compositions that tend more towards abstraction.

A new volume of aphoristic prose and philosophical poetry from Etel Adnan, whose work The New York Times recently described as the “meditative heir to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Rilke’s Book of Hours and the verses of Sufi mysticism.” She writes: “Reality is messianic / apocalyptic / my soul is my terror.”