Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Peter Hujar, Eyes Open in the Dark at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 27 February–23 August 2026.

Peter Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his photography was largely unknown to a broader art world. Hujar’s principal concern was with portraiture, whether photographing his friends and denizens of the downtown scene – whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio, and sought out at performance venues – or turning his attention to animals, architecture and landscapes.

Portrait Mode presents a new essay by artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey. In aphoristic texts paired with her own photographs, Davey interweaves accounts of her experiences as a photographer with reflections on canonical practitioners and theorists of the medium. With a particular focus on framing, light, contingency, and temporality, she considers the work of photographers who have challenged conventions of (self-)portraiture and representation, connecting their approaches to contemporary queer and feminist protagonists of the genre.

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.