Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Zig Zag and Many Ribbons… at MAMC Saint-Etienne in 2022–2023, this reference monograph revisits the conceptual and sensorial developments pursued by the artist since the 1970s.

Includes a ribbon drawn by the artist as an inserted bookmark. Edited by Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Anna Clifford. Text by Marie Canet. Designed by Zak Kyes.

From 1962 to 1976, Paul Thek traveled to Italy, for multiple extended stays. In Rome, he discovered ancient sculpture, the achievements of the Renaissance, the Baroque churches, but above all the contemporary artistic effervescence of the capital. In Sicily, with his friend the photographer Peter Hujar, he was confronted with the question of death through reliquaries, religious processions or the extraordinary Capuchin catacombs. On the island of Ponza, he immersed himself in an ecstatic Mediterranean lifestyle, in osmosis with nature and the sea in particular.

This new publication, the third in the ongoing series of aica press / Les presses du réel’s publications, Art Critics of The World, is the first English-language anthology of writings by the Slovak critic, Tomáš Štrauss.

Tomáš Štrauss (Budapest, 1931–Bratislava, 2013) was a key theoretician of the post-war neo-avant-gardes in “socialist” Central and Eastern Europe. “A critical reading of his texts unavoidably demands that we situate them in the context of that theory that began to establish itself in the second half of the 1990s, and whose chief younger proponents included Boris Groys, Igor Zabel, Piotr Piotrowski and Edit András”—Daniel Grúň

In this artist’s book, Piero Gilardi reveals his working methods and explains how to create sculptures like those he has produced since the early 1960s. A pioneer of Arte Povera and a proud advocate of an ecologically concerned undertaking in the visual arts, Gilardi is also a political activist. The technique he developed for his sculptures has often been applied to produce masks, signs, and props for rallies and demonstrations, as this book and an interview with Andrea Bellini explains. For all this and for much more—his design and fashion creations, his social endeavors, etc.—Piero Gilardi is emblematic of the evolution of art and society over the last five decades. He is an artist whose works and theoretical research are still relevant to map what art might achieve and how art might be useful in the “real world.”

From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her works included artists’ books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender.

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.