Treatise of a Coat gathers for the first time works on paper by Helen Marten. Featuring coloured pencil, watercolour, ink, airbrush, acrylic and graphite, alongside other more unusual media like sand, silicone or olive oil, this book is a sumptuous, visual document of Marten’s drawing and painting practice on paper. Designed as an unruly “artist’s book”, Treatise of a Coat has multiple physical and linguistic folds. The title is a forcing of the homonymic similarities of coat: the literal jacket that is unfurled to expose the naked and unruly shame of human forms; the fur or hair of an animal; the verb-function of to coat, with its intentional building up of visual desire – the acts of lacquering, spreading, enclosing, flooding, directing, or husking that line and colour expedite when creating an image. The constituent materiality of this book is designed with the physicality of making a work on paper in mind.

Edited by Taylor Walsh, Sam Agnew, Helen Marten, Matthew Stuart & Jeffrey Rowledge. Designed by Matthew Stuart.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions at Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 8 November, 2012–15 April, 2013 and Kunsthaus Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz, 7 June–1 September, 2013. With texts by Eva Badura-Triska, Archiv HZ, Jürgen Bock, Achim Hochdörfer, Andrew Renton and Gertrud Sandqvist.

Heimo Zobernig’s contribution to the Venice Biennial responded directly to the existing exhibition situation in the Austrian Pavilion, built in 1934 based on plans by Josef Hoffmann and Robert Kramreiter. The Pavilion’s structure, with its rounded classical arches and majestic visual axes, on the one hand, and clear, rational forms and modern construction materials, on the other, moves between the poles of historicism and modernism. At the same time, Zobernig’s intervention connected inside and outside, to create an enclosed site where one can linger and reflect on human presence in space.

Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Forrest Bess at Fridericianum, Kassel, 15 February–6 September, 2020.

Forrest Bess was one of the most interesting figures in US-American post-war art. Starting in the 1940s, he lived in isolation in Texas and created small, biomorphic abstractions that reflected his visionary experiences between wakefulness and sleep. Bess combined art with an intense exploration of mythology, psychology, and sexology, believing that the path to completeness and immortality could only be achieved through what he called hermaphroditism. His unconventional works received posthumous recognition in international exhibitions and influenced many contemporary artists such as Amy Sillman, Richard Hawkins and James Benning.

With texts from Tomma Abts, Dieter Schwarz, Amy Sillman & Moritz Wesseler.

Produced on the occasion of Manfred Pernice’s exhibition 1A – Dosenfeld’00, at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 11 March–30 April, 2000.

Since the early 1990s, Berlin-based artist Manfred Pernice has created sculptural vessels with scales, materials, and aesthetics derived from the worlds of architecture, shipping cargo, and mass packaging—these works serve as complex, open-ended meditations on the increased segmentation, containment, and, to use Pernice’s term, “canning” of objects and space. His seemingly slapdash sculptures are often juxtaposed with sketches, maquettes, photographs, text and, more recently, video to create systems of meaning.

With texts by Kasper König, Angelika Nollert, Harald Fricke, Peter Herbstreuth, Angelika Nollert, Isabel Podeschwa.

Stellproblemen (which means “set-problems”, and is purposely misspelled in German), is an artist book by Heimo Zobernig. Along with notions like alter ego, copy, dummy, imitation, mimicry, proxy, remake, substitution, and, of course, coincidence, the book addresses for the first time a central aspect of his work: the notion of repetition, which is inscribed into the very design of the book.