“Things can be freer and reach higher when they conceal themselves.”–Rita Ackermann

Rita Ackermann was born in Budapest in 1968 and today lives and works in New York. Arriving in America from Hungary in the early 1990s, she is immediately faced with a major challenge: to be able to survive in a foreign country as a young artist, she must be able to integrate the aesthetics of her cultural background together with what the new country offers her in her artistic practice. Her first drawings and paintings made between 1993 and 1996 show adolescent female figures multiplied within the composition and engaged in various self-destructive activities, expressed to the public through understandable and direct language. About twenty years later Ackermann abandons the figure and develops the series of works he entitles Mama, a set of compositions in which lines and gestures, figures and motifs rise to the surface of the canvas to then dissolve and reappear elsewhere. On the occasion of the exhibition at MASI Lugano, in 2022 Ackermann begins a new series of paintings entitled War Drawings, where oil, grease pencil and acrylic are heavily worked on rough linen canvas. In these works, the figures get lost and the lines are scraped away to reveal fragmented compositions.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at the MASI in Lugano, entitled Hidden, this book contains reproductions of all the works in the exhibition and others selected personally by the artist.

Text by Pamela Kort, a conversation between Rita Ackermann and Donatien Grau.

Order here

“Healing The Museum” is a mid-career monograph looking at Grace Ndiritu’s diverse practice over the last twenty years, which encompasses performance, film, shamanism, social actions, painting, publications, textile work, and collection research. The large selection of artworks included in the publication are in a dialogue with each other, further enriched by in-depth conversations with Brook Andrew, Gareth Bell-Jones, and Philippe Van Cauteren, and written contributions from Ifeanyi Awachie, Ann Hoste, and Hammad Nasar. The monograph’s publication coincides with the eponymous exhibition at S.M.A.K.–Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent.

Order here

Le Livre Art Publishing is proud to announce the upcoming release of Julio Le Parc, the most comprehensive monograph to date on revered Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc. Following Le Parc’s prolific and visionary body of work, this extensive 492 page volume takes a deeper look into the intellectual and creative process of the artist.

Featuring a critical anthology dating back to 1967, an opening essay by Jean de Loisy, an entire section dedicated to Julio Le Parc’s writings and over 600 color plates, this monograph takes us on a journey through the innovative and ground-breaking work of the artist, thus surveying the pivotal « Before Paris » era before diving into the Surfaces and Color Surfaces periods, and continuing its exploration with Contortions, Light, Installations, Games, Alchemies, and Le Parc’s Virtual Museum.

An in-depth photo-biography of the artist further deepens our understanding of Le Parc’s portrayal, along with an anthology of texts by Mario Benedetti, Alberto Biasi, Jorge Romero Brest, Jean Clay, Gérard Fromanger, Julián Gállego, François Morellet, Pablo Neruda, Jean-Louis Pradel, Paco Rabanne, Pierre Restany, and Julio Le Parc.

Order here

When Eye Touches Cloud is the first monograph dedicated to the manifold oeuvre of Romanian artist Constantin Flondor (born 1936, in Czernowitz), the leading protagonist of the art groups 111, Sigma and Prolog. This richly illustrated publication takes a closer look on the influential body of work he had produced in painting, kinetic & Op art, land art, action, experimental film & photography from the 1960s until today. It surveys the various steps of his practice: from the lyricism of the first pictorial constructs to the optical and kinetic art of the Group 111, from the study of form and land art characteristic of the Sigma Group, defined as the effort to connect within a single equation visual research and experiment, to the Prolog Group’s spirit of communion and conviviality.

The book offers a comprehensive overview of the principles that shape Constantin Flondor’s art, of reflecting and theorising starting from the inventory of terms, themes, and concepts that have guided him as an artist over seventy years of uninterrupted work and of restoring them to the international context of art through the contributions of invited authors, Dieter Roelstraete & Abigail Winograd, Rainer Fuchs, and Katarzyna Cytlak. Besides the commissioned essays, the book includes a selection from the artist writings and several archival materials which enlarge our view on artist’s singular mode of thinking.

*
P+4 Publications is an independent publishing programme dedicated to the promotion of Romanian contemporary art, photography and architecture, exploring the book medium as a point of encounter between theoretical research, graphic design experiment and artists’ ideas and subjects present in their practice. Presently, the programme brings together the Artist Book Series and the Architecture Book Series, supported between 2013–2021 by the PEPLUSPATRU Association, and Parkour and Exhibition-Dossier series, developed by the Institute of the Present since 2017. Starting from 2021, P+4 Publications is coordinated by the Institute of the Present.

Order here

This book is the first essay in French devoted to David Hammons, a major artist on the international scene.

On a winter’s day in 1983, David Hammons set up shop in the street to sell snowballs of various sizes. He set them up in rows according to their size and spent the day playing the role of a friendly salesman. He places this event – which he later calls Bliz-aard Ball Sale – in a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, uses a lexicon of discrete actions and materials considered typically “black” to construct a critique of the nature of the artwork, the art world and racism in the United States. 

Although Bliz-aard Ball Sale is often mentioned and the work’s reputation is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through meagre descriptions and a few photographs. In this fascinating study, Elena Filipovic shares the vast history of this ephemeral work, which she has gathered through oral testimonies, the discovery of images and rarely shown documents, giving us some insights into an essential artist who has made an art of making himself elusive. 

This book is the first essay in French devoted to this major artist of the international scene. 

Since 2014, Elena Filipovic has been the director and curator of the Kunsthalle Basel, where she has organised more than fifty exhibitions. She was curator of WIELS (Brussels) and co-curator with Adam Szymczyk of the fifth edition of the Berlin Biennale in 2008. She has published texts in numerous exhibition catalogues and journals and edited several collections, the most recent of which are The Artist as Curator: An Anthology (Milan, Mousse Publications, 2017) and Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form (London, König Books, 2017). She is also the author of The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2016). 

Order here

Texts by: Emi Fontana, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Angelika Stepken and Ketty La Rocca.

This book is the first international monograph on Ketty La Rocca’s works and writings.

Initially, inspired by the experimental visual poetry of the mid-sixties, Ketty La Rocca critically investigated questions of communication in the age of mass media. She soon began addressing herself in her work as both an artist and a woman in a desire to find “another” language to express difference and the non-identical. She worked with collage, photography, video, text, drawing, and performance to develop a language of gestures and appropriated imagery of disempowerment. But her work was only granted the short time span of a decade’s production, during which she underwent a rapid artistic development with enormous energy and intelligence.

Order here

Cut a Door in the Wolf, published on the occasion of the exhibition by Jason Dodge at MACRO Museum for Contemporary Art of Rome.
Photography Adrianna Glaviano.
Book design Julie Peeters.

Japanese binding, wrapped in a printed sheet.
This is the first in a series of monographs by BILL.

Order here

Monograph dedicated to the film series incorporating central Neanderthal figures produced by British artist Nathaniel Mellors since 2012.

This book, which brings together for the first time the entire series of films around the figure of Neanderthal Man produced by Nathaniel Mellors since 2012, is also the only monograph currently in circulation on the work of this British artist, since the catalogue The Aalto Natives – A Transcendental Manual published in 2017 on the occasion of the 57th Venice Biennale. This book is not only a documentation of the exhibition, including numerous installation views, but also an extension of this project with a text by Marie de Brugerolle and two interviews by the artist with Italian art critic Mattia Tosti and American editor Clayton Eshleman, notably known for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Palaeolithic imagination.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Frac Bretagne, Rennes, in 2021-2022.

Nathaniel Mellors (born 1974 in Doncaster, United Kingdom) develops an art based on film-making; writing scripts as well as directing and editing them, and working closely with actors such as Patrick Kennedy and David Birkin. To these films, he adds works based on sculpture and photograms, such as the ones that can be seen in this show. His studio works incorporate humor, irreverence, the poetic and the absurd but to address themes of ownership, history, power, morality etc. By drawing inspiration from the techniques linked to cinematographic fictions, he inscribes his work within given contexts of the social reality that he questions and analyzes. He explores our tastes, morality, habits and the various ideas anchored in our collective memory.

Nathaniel Mellors is graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2001. His work has notably been shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and at the Art: Concept Gallery, Paris (2014); at the 57th Venice Biennale with Erkka Nissinen for the Finnish Pavilion (2017); at the New Museum in New York (2018); at The Box, Los Angeles and at Matt’s Gallery in London (2019).

Order here

First monograph devoted to the work of video artist and performer Wolfgang Stoerchle (1944-1976), an artistic figure of the Californian scene in the 1970s, based on extensive research and three international exhibitions.

Wolfgang Stoerchle is a particularly notable artistic figure of the early seventies who left a certain but little advertised mark on a generation of Californian artists, especially through videotapes and performances involving his body as raw material. His short but eventful life is surrounded by rumors, and his abrupt death in 1976 may have emphasized the myth around him even more. His entire body of work was produced in eleven years, between 1965 and 1976. Forty-five years after he passed away, his name still drifts across the West Coast art world, awaiting wider recognition.

Wolfgang Stoerchle: Success in Failure is the first monograph on the artist’s work, written by Alice Dusapin who has dedicated extensive research into his life and work since 2017 and organized several international exhibitions during this time (Ampersand, Lisbon; Gallery Overduin & Co, Los Angeles; Gallery Air de Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome).

The publication includes interviews with Daniel Lentz, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, David Salle, Helene Winer, and an unpublished review by James Welling, alongside ephemera and documentation of Stoerchle’s video works and performances, as well as rarely seen sculptures, installations, and paintings.

Order here