Passing Images: Art in the Post-Digital Age. Marie-France Rafael. Floating Opera Press

Posted in politics on November 17th, 2022
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Since the 2010s, the line between public and private, online and offline have increasingly become blurred by digitalization and social media. In contemporary art, digitality has assumed a new type of presence—no longer only as a virtual sphere of sociality, but increasingly as a technological interface that structures our embodied experiences. What is presented in an “exhibition“? And how should we write about the new types of post-digital images we are seeing (in them)? In Passing Images: Art in the Post-Digital Age, Marie-France Rafael provides an attempt to write with art, rather than just about it. Rafael aims to retrace the living spirit of art and the procedural-performative experience of art in her writing.

Marie-France Rafael is a tenure-track professur at the Zurich University of the Arts. She studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris, and holds a PhD in art history. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 taught at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. Her interview book with French artist Brice Dellsperger, On Gender Performance, was published with Floating Opera Press in 2019.

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Prunella Clough a small thing edgily. Camila McHugh (Ed.). Floating Opera Press

Posted in Exhibition catalogue on August 23rd, 2022
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With texts by Amy Sillman and Emily LaBarge

Exhibition catalogue with twenty color illustrations of paintings by the British painter Prunella Clough (1919–1999). Published to commemorate the first German presentation of the artist’s work at June gallery, Berlin, the book focuses on the artist’s late-career departure from the industrial figuration for which she was known into a wry, quietly influential approach to abstraction. Included works date from 1960–1993. Prunella Clough’s abstraction developed largely out of step with any artistic movement or milieu: impervious to the advent of Pop, she was more taken by the Minimalism of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, which may have accentuated her sense of restraint. Amy Sillman calls Clough “a ‘conceptual painter’ avant la lettre,” while Merlin James emphasizes how she “anticipated many traits in post-modern painting.” Awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1999 shortly before her death, and recognized with significant solo exhibitions at Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery (1989), the Camden Arts Center (1996), and a posthumous Tate Britain retrospective (2007), Clough’s legacy remains bogged down by emphasis on her early figurative works, tethering her innovative abstraction too tightly to an industrial origin story. This catalogue is a remedy to this situation.

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Start Over Every Morning. Steve Bishop. Kunstverein Braunschweig; Motto Books; Floating Opera Press

Posted in Motto Books on March 12th, 2021
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Catalogue of Steve Bishop’s solo exhibition ‘Start Over Every Morning’ (2019) at Kunstverein Braunschweig:

In his artistic practice Steve Bishop explores how mental states can be materialized and conveyed in space, through installations often involving personal belongings and mementos. By subtly distorting familiar, often intimate domestic scenarios, Bishop creates intermediate worlds in which concepts of time are suspended, and clear boundaries between private and public space, exhibition and non-exhibition are blurred.

In the exhibition, we encounter the remnants of a celebration recently passed. Constructed in the main room is a simple white kitchen, which surreally extends over the entire length of the space. Here the profoundly everyday nature of the counter meets the attempt to grasp abstract concepts of infinity. A blankness pervades the room which is punctuated by a few scattered objects: leftover cake is carefully stowed away in Tupperware boxes, recordings of jazz instrumentals drift out from a radio, and outside garden furniture is already tucked in under its plastic cover. A longing to preserve fleeting situations repeatedly arises, no matter how temporary the moment might be. In a second room, found photographs are framed together with pages of text taken from a largely forgotten self-help organization called Re-evaluation Counseling. Slogans call for self-empowerment and optimization, and one might also discern from the neat surroundings that a desire for structure, for inner and outer clarity, seems to be as desirable as it is acutely endangered.

Publishers: Kunstverein Braunschweig; Motto Books; Floating Opera Press

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