Michael E. Smith occasionally creates drawings as organisational notes for his exhibitions: a to-do list may be intertwined with a sketch outlining an idea for a sculpture, and at times, drawings emerge as impromptu phone scribbles. Over the past fifteen years Smith has accumulated a substantial collection of drawings, collected here for the first time in this publication produced on the occasion of the exhibition Michael E. Smith at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, 3 February – 28 April, 2024.

This publication, conceived as an extension of the eponymous exhibition, paying tribute to Léon Bakst, the greatest set designer of the modern era. Viewing theatre as a total artwork in which choreography, music, costumes and sets were of equal importance, Léon Bakst (1866–1924) worked closely with artists such as Serge Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jean Cocteau, Ida Rubinstein and Igor Stravinsky, transforming the perception of ballet.

The book and offers a detailed presentation of Bakst’s drawings, costume and textile designs, previously unpublished writings on ornament and fashion, new scholarship on Bakst’s sources and the impact of his vision, as well in situ views of the scenography created by Nick Mauss for the exhibition.

Second edition.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition One to One at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, 29 September, 2017–7 January, 2018. With a text by Kirsty Bell.

Józef Robakowski, a key figure of the 1960s and 1970s neo-avant-garde rebellion, is a master of structural cinema and a pioneer of Polish video art. In his practice he has tested viewers’ perceptual habits, developed ideas about mechanical recordings beyond any aesthetic convention, and criticized methods of visual persuasion in films, highlighting in particular the pompousness of political spectacles. A radical experimentalist and media analyst, Robakowski is known for his unique approach, “his own cinema,” in which autobiography replaces dubious history, and in which the artist proposes his own scenario for perceiving the reality of life under communism.

Autoreduction is a project initiated by Dora Budor at Progetto (Lecce, Italy) in the summer of 2021 that began with detouring a solo exhibition onto a collaborative course to traverse the itineraries of work, leisure, and consumption in southern Italy. Conceived as a companion to the exhibition, the book features commissioned texts by Noah Barker and Marina Vishmidt, with contributions by all the artists originally participating in the exhibition (Noah Barker, Dora Budor, Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter, Niloufar Emamifar, and Ser Serpas), together with an addendum by Stefano Faoro.

Artist and fashion designer Cinzia Ruggeri (1942–2019) made her artistic research a tool for inquiry into the functional and semantic properties of the object and the architectural and social dimension of the body, according to an original and nonconformist perspective enriched by irony and oneirism.

Cinzia Says… is the first monograph on this unconventional figure who moved across disciplines with absolute freedom. Her life and versatile practice were driven by the desire to redefine the formal and functional status of elements of everyday life, from apparel to accessories, from furnishings to lighting. Ruggeri created imaginative, provocative, elegant, and never predictable worlds. This book is constructed as a broad, expanded chronology offering documents, photographs, accounts, and essays.

You can see more of Cinzia Ruggeri’s work here and here.