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.