FRI JUNE 10 from 6.20pm > BLACK MED * book launch + listening session @ Dropcity, Milan

Posted in art, Artist Book, events on June 10th, 2022
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Motto is pleased to invite you to the presentation of Black Med (Humboldt Books), by Invernomuto, with Giovanna Silva, Alexis Zavialoff, moderated by Luca Galofaro.

Dropcity
Auditorium tunnel 60
Via Sammartini, 20125 Milano


Friday 10 June
from 6.20 to 7pm

//

See you there!

intervals and forms of stones of stars. Nanna Debois Buhl. Humboldt Books.

Posted in Artist Book, distribution, science, travel, Wholesale on August 31st, 2017
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intervals and forms of stones of stars investigates a Nordic man-made beach landscape. Located near Copenhagen, Køge Bay Beach Park is a 7-kilometer-long recreational area reclaimed from the sea. While highly planned and regulated, the idea was to create a landscape that looked like wild nature. The book is a reflection of this anthropocene biotope, its botany, and its cultural context. Through a series of cameraless photographic registrations, Buhl maps the biotope’s flora, fauna, and particles and draws connections between the characteristics of the site and its photographic representation. Her photographs are inspired by the cameraless photographic works of W. H. Fox Talbot (1840s) and A. Strindberg (1890s); images created without a photographic lens, only by use of light and light sensitive surfaces. In the photographs, dust particles resemble the night sky and the wings of an insect look like a topographical map. The book contains the series of full-page photographs as well as a text of field notes and two conversations, with N. Bubandt, Professor of Anthropology, Aarhus University and with L. Gallun, Assistant Curator of Photography at MoMA, New York.

Nanna Debois Buhl is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. She participated in The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, New York (2008-09), and received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2006). Her practice is a continuous investigation of historical and cultural knowledge through botany, animal life, imagery, and architecture. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Pérez Art Museum, Florida; SculptureCenter, New York; Art in General, New York; The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; ARKEN Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthal Charlottenborg; Kunsthallen Brandts; Museum for Contemporaty Art, Roskilde; and Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark.

 

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War Games. Diego Perrone. Humboldt Books.

Posted in art, Artist Book, distribution, Wholesale on June 29th, 2017
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Conceived on the occasion of the first edition of the project “Davanti al Mare” directed by Vittorio Dapelo for the Amixi di Villa Croce – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Genoa, War Games is an artist’s book by Diego Perrone, edited by Francesco Garutti. Imagined as a book-cum-artwork and as such an integral part of the installation of Perrone’s work in Villa del Principe, the Palazzo of Andrea Doria in Genoa, War Games is a photographic collection of painstaking details and fragments. The tapestries of the battle of Lepanto housed in the Villa del Principe, the hands, the features of the miniature craftsmanship of a selected group of Ligurian artisans and details of the sculpture in glass paste by Diego Perrone are mixed together without a specific order so as to make up an almost cinematographic sequence. In the short essay by Francesco Garutti, a simple and indirect game of reflections take shape: the naval games of the historian and science-fiction author Fletcher Pratt, the ambiguous inclined planes of the visionary architect Bel Geddes, the warp and weft of the tapestries of Villa del Principe, the hands and the construction techniques of those Ligurian masters all dialogue here with Perrone’s work by virtue of their inhabiting ‘another’ time.

€25.00

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Berlin, Zürich, Zürich, Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, London. Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. Humboldt Books

Posted in distribution, photography, Wholesale on December 19th, 2016
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Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s book collects black and white photographs taken at apartment viewings in Berlin, London and Zürich in 2015, and exhibited at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin the same year. The images render a landscape of apartments, mostly empty, punctuated by potential buyers or renters projecting their own possible futures onto the spaces. The photographs blend into each other as if one building, aggregating material treatments, fixtures, flooring, and faucets in their extraordinary specificity; or as if one city, seen from the inside as a picture of a private public sphere. The book includes a new text by writer Pablo Larios elaborating on the staging of personal environments and the relationship between figure and ground in Henkel and Pitegoff’s work.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff (b. 1988/1987, US) are artists who work together in Berlin. From 2013 until 2015 they ran New Theater in Berlin, a theater and performance space where they produced amateur plays with writers, musicians and visual artists. Their work has been shown at the 9th Berlin Biennale, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; the Galerie für Zeitgennössische Kunst, Leipzig; the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; the Kunsthalle Bern,; and the Whitney Museum, New York.

 €28.00

One Hundred Meals Between Rome and Berlin. Jonathan Monk. Humboldt Books.

Posted in art, Artist Book, distribution, Wholesale on December 13th, 2016
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British artist Jonathan Monk replays, recasts and re-examines seminal works of Conceptual and Minimal art by variously witty, ingenious and irreverent means. Speaking in 2009, he said, ‘Appropriation is something I have used or worked with in my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now) I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work.’

A few years ago Monk moved to Rome for a while with his family. In Rome he adopted a pleasant gastronomic routine: restaurants and pizzerias, alone or with friends, but most of all with his family. Once back home, between the name of the restaurant and the total of the bill, on top of all the various dishes consumed, the artist used a pencil, sometimes with watercolours, to reproduce the image of a work by another artist on the receipt or scrubby hand-written note. Clearly, the appropriationist approach which had characterised most of his work thus far also continued through this new life experience. This book collects One Hundred Meals between Rome and Berlin.

Language: English, Italian
Pages: 216
Size: 12 x 15 cm
Weight: 206 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9788899385224

€20.00

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A Step Towards the Sea (+ DVD). Roman Signer. Humboldt Books

Posted in art, distribution, exhibition catalogue, video, Wholesale on August 29th, 2016
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A Step Towards the Sea tells the relationship between the artist and Italy through a selection of installation views and video works. The accompanying DVD includes an unreleased film and a documentation on every actions carried out in Italy by Signer since the 1990s.
Signer’s bond with the country is a special one, bearing in mind some of his most renown works, produced on the Stromboli volcano, or the numerous actions and sculptures that revolve around an Italian iconic subject such as the Ape Piaggio. The central section of the book is dedicated to Sardinia, with a conversation between Lorenzo Giusti and the artist and a photographic essay by Barbara Signer. A text by Barbara Casavecchia contextualizes Signer’s Italian dimension by introducing the viewing of Reisen Italien: a personal collection of filmic notes produced by the artist in the course of his journeys with the family in the 1990s. The essay by Rachel Withers introduces the hefty iconographic setting of his entire Super-8 production, which consists of 205 clips filmed between 1975 and 1989 and presented in a large installation within the exhibition in Nuoro. The book is accompanied by a DVD which, in addition to the unreleased film, gathers all of the actions Signer carried out in Italy starting from the 1990s and a piece he produced specifically for the exhibition, after which the book is titled.
Published following the exhibition “Roman Signer. Films and Installation,” at the MAN, Nuoro, from April 22 to July 3rd, 2016.
Born 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland, Roman Signer lives and works in St. Gallen.

 

€30.00

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Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond. Nanna Debois Buhl (ed.). Humboldt Books

Posted in art, books, distribution on June 9th, 2016
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Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond

A peculiar phenomenon of the Northern Italian city Merano is its large population of palm trees. The majority of the Merano palm trees belong to the species Trachycarpus fortunei, which was brought to Europe from East Asia in the 1830s. The first palms were planted in the city around 1880 as Merano was transforming into a health resort and a tourist destination. With her artists’ book Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond, Nanna Debois Buhl seeks to trace the palm trees’ botanical trajectories and symbolic dimensions.
The publication presents Buhl’s research through a collection of materials including conversations with the Merano-based botanist Otto Huber, the design scholar specialized in wallpapers Joanna Banham, and the architect Susanne Stacher specialized in alpine architecture, as well as photos and photograms by the artist, old postcards and touristic posters of Merano, historical and scientific images of palm trees. Through this manifold material, the publication unfolds the “cultural biography” of the palm tree in Merano and elaborates on the incorporation of this exotic element in 19th century design and garden culture in the region and on a larger scale, also creating a link to utopian alpine architecture and its relation to landscape.

Published on the occasion of the public art exhibition Art & Nature 2016 Walking With Senses, Merano Spring Festival, Merano, Italy, March 24 – June 5, 2016 Curated by BAU.

Nanna Debois Buhl is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. Her practice is a continuous investigation of historical and cultural knowledge through botany, animal life, imagery, and architectural components. She participated in The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, New York (2008-09), and received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2006). Her installations and films have been exhibited widely, recently at Pérez Art Museum, FL; SculptureCenter, NY; Art in General, NY; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; Kunsthal Charlottenborg; Kunsthallen Brandts; Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde; and Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark.

12 €
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Railway Flora. Ernesto Schick. Florette, Humboldt Books.

Posted in art, books, distribution, illustration on March 16th, 2016
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Railway Flora. Ernesto Schick.
Third Edition published by Florette and Humboldt Books.

Schick devoted a decade of his life (1969-1978) to observing, classifying and illustrating the wild vegetation that infests the grounds of the international railway marshalling yard in Chiasso. First published in 1980, Railway Flora has maintained all its original charm. Its bond with the territory and with the history of one of the symbols of its economic development, the painstaking research of an all but common man and his scrutiny of the complex relationship between human beings and their environment offer a testimony which remains as intriguing as it ever was.
The new edition features writings and original illustrations by the author, as well scientific updates by Nicola Schoenenberger and a literary contribution by the poet Fabio Pusterla.

25€
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USA 1972. Mario Bellini. Humboldt Books

Posted in architecture, art, photography on August 11th, 2015
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In June 1972, Mario Bellini arrived in New York to take part in ‘Italy, the New Domestic Landscape’, the MoMA exhibition where he was to present his ‘Kar-a-sutra’, the very first MPV, a revolutionary space-mobile. Once the show was over, Bellini set off on a journey-cum-enquiry into the American way of living. He was accompanied by Francesco Binfaré, Davide Mosconi and a ‘safe- conduct’ issued by the MoMA which was to open many doors: those of Andy Warhol’s studio in New York, of Hugh Hefner’s Mansion in Chicago, and of Beverly Hills villas occupied by hippies. Bellini plotted his itinerary day by day, moving among the Mormons of Salt Lake City, the utopia of Arcosanti, and villages of mobile homes along the roads of the Midwest. His Hasselblad was to record the dreams and hopes of an unexpected America, one which perhaps no longer exists.

Mario Bellini is internationally renowned as an architect and designer. He has received the Compasso d’Oro eight times, and other prestigious architecture awards including the Medaglia d’oro awarded by the President of the Italian Republic for his contribution to furthering design and architecture in the world (2004). He was the editor of the magazine “Domus” from 1985 to 1991. 25 of his works belong to the permanent design collection of the New York MoMA, which dedicated a personal retrospective to him in 1987. The manifold buildings he has designed include the Portello Trade Fair district in Milan, the Villa Erba Exhibition Centre in Cernobbio (Como), the Tokyo Design Centre in Japan, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the headquarters of the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, the Verona Forum complex, the City History Museum in Bologna, the Department of Islamic Art at the Louvre in Paris, and the new Milan Convention Centre, the largest in Europe. He has various projects at the design stage, which include the “New Eco-City” of Zhenjiang in China and a large Residential, Cultural and Sports Complex in Qatar.

€24.00

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“Fara Fara” – a Film Not Made. Carsten Höller. Humboldt Books

Posted in art, Artist Book, books, distribution on June 26th, 2015
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Fara Fara means face-to-face in Lingala and is a musical phenomenon deeply rooted in Congolese culture. Two groups play at the same time at adjacent locations, and the ones who play longest win. In times gone by, disputes were sometimes settled in this way; nowadays, it is more about musical leadership. A Fara Fara is a massive event attracting huge crowds, but it happens very rarely.

This book is about a film where a Fara Fara takes place in Kinshasa, a musical battle between the two major proponents of Congolese contemporary rumba. The film has not been made yet. It will be directed by the artist Carsten Höller and the film director Måns Månsson.

The book contains photographs taken during various preparatory trips, made since 2001 by Pierre Björk, Hoyte van Hoytema, Reed Kram, Armin Linke, Giovanna Silva, Patrik Strömdahl and the directors. The Swedish writer and music cognoscente Elin Unnes provided the text.

Concept: Carsten Höller
Graphic design: Christoph Steinegger/ Interkool
Text: Elin Unnes

PVC softcover, hot foil

€30.00

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