Optimundus accompanies Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s major exhibition at M HKA of the same title—the term they use for their particular conception of the parallel world. Narratives and criticism by Michael Van den Abeele, Nav Haq, Jennifer Krasinksi, Dieter Roelstraete, and artist Peter Wächtler are presented along with photos, drawings, and text illustrating the unsteady barriers and tense contact between Optimundus and the real world.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern in 2020–2021. A cultural examination of the enigmatically iconic figure of the Dandy, both in history and as a figure for the future.

With Kai Althoff, Lutz Bacher, Kévin Blinderman / Pierre-Alexandre Mateos / Charles Teyssou, Marcel Broodthaers, Ursula Böckler, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Hanne Darboven, Stephan Dillemuth, Victoire Douniama, Lukas Duwenhögger, Cerith Wyn Evans, Sylvie Fleury, Andrea Fraser, Sophie Gogl, Gogo Graham, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, David Hammons, Birgit Jürgenssen, K Foundation, John Kelsey, Michael Krebber, Miriam Laura Leonardi, David Lieske, Mathieu Malouf, Ulrike Ottinger, Mathias Poledna, Raymond Roussel, Heji Shin, Reena Spaulings, Sturtevant, Bernadette Van-Huy, James McNeill Whistler, Virginia Woolf.

Designed by HIT.

Like a pictorial encyclopedia, Das Wunder des Lebens contains over four hundred drawings that show all that the modern world has to offer, from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system.

Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien and Kunsthalle Basel on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the former, 7 February–4 May, 2014, and Projekt 13 at the latter, 16 January–14 March, 2010.

Designed by Antoine Begon and Boy Vereecken.

The eighth instalment in Kunstverein München’s ‘Companion’ series, this “Verkaufskatalog” contains images, prices, material descriptions, and gallery designations for each of the works by artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys included in the exhibition 30 Jahre Kunst. The diverse spectrum of the duo’s collaborative practice—drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, kinetic objects, and videos—is represented over the book’s 192 pages, all printed in black and white. In addition, a number of lost, destroyed, or forgotten works are featured, as well as new works that were specially commissioned for the exhibition. Designed by Julie Peeters and Harald Thys.

Mondo Cane presents itself as a local folkloric museum that displays the human figure. Silent, pale and frightened, the pavilion’s inhabitants appear as aestheticized shells, stuck in a loop of formal activity that the visitor perceives as odd and out of touch with contemporary reality.

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys have the habit of distilling fictions out of a reality that is, sometimes, ‘too real.’ Both willingly concede that they feel attracted to the psychotic state of contemporary societies, a state that they simultaneously dread and disseminate in their work.

Designed by Boy Vereecken and Antoine Begon.