Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Daniel Spoerri
















Daniel Spoerri celebrates his 94th birthday today. 




Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Daniel Buren | 1000 Placements







Daniel Buren
1000 Placements from the Rubber Stamp Portfolio
New York City, USA: Parasol Press, Ltd, 1977
20.3 x 20.3 cm.
Edition of 1000 (250 in each of 4 colours)


Offset print on cardboard. From the MoMA Rubber Stamp Portfolio, which also included works by Joe Zucker, Tom Wesselmann, Don Nice, Agnes Martin, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Mangold, Sol LeWitt, Chuck Close, Richard Artschwager, Myron Stout, Barry Le Va, and Carl Andre. 

Produced in an edition of 1000 - 250 red, blue, green and yellow copies. 




Monday, March 25, 2024

Yoko Ono | 3 Rooms





Yoko Ono
3 Rooms
Milan, Italy: Skira Editore, 1995
130 pp., 27 x 23 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown


A catalog for the exhibition of the same name, held in Trento, Italy in 1995. 3 Rooms contains critical essays on Ono’s work, and is illustrated with photographs of drawings, paintings, readymades, and sculptural works. Text in English and Italian

The catalog is available from Printed Matter, here, for $40.00US. 





Sunday, March 24, 2024

Hans-Peter Feldmann | Bilder / Pictures






Hans-Peter Feldmann
Bilder / Pictures
München, Germany: Kunstraum München, 1975
344 pp., 15 x 21 cm., softcover
Edition of 500


Hans-Peter Feldmann studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria, but 
abandoned the medium and gravitated towards artists’ books, following the realization that photographs were “entirely sufficient” to convey his ideas. From the age of five he had kept scrapbooks of carefully cut out images from books and magazines, and this act of accumulating, cataloguing and arranging became central to his practice. He was a photographer best known for found photographs, and didn’t begin working with his own photographs until he was in his fifties. 

Between 1968 and 1971 he produced about thirty little handmade booklets, all titled Bild or Bilder (Picture or Pictures). These typically focused on a single subject, ranging from women’s knees to airplanes off in the distance, from a hotel maid making a bed to images of ships and chairs. In 1972 he was invited to exhibit these bookworks at Documenta 5 in Kassel.

This 1975 volume collects all of these Bilder booklets, plus two postcard series. The book features an introduction by Hermann Kern, and a text by Josef Kirschbichler. 

A reissue followed, over a quarter century later, in 2002, which has itself become scarce and costly. 


“[Bilder] constitutes one of the most important bodies of artist’s bookworks in the twentieth century, along with those of [Ed] Ruscha and [Christian] Boltanski. The key lies in the books’ deadpan nature. Next to Feldmann, Ruscha is a galloping expressionst. Of all collections in this vein – and it is a popular genre of artists’ books – Feldmann’s are the most deadpan, the least expressive.”






















Friday, March 22, 2024

Piero Manzoni | UOVO











Piero Manzoni
UOVO
Self-published, 1960
6.7 x 8.2 x 5.70 cm.
Edition of 54 signed, dated and numbered copies


Uova sculptura (Egg Sculpture) are works consisting of hard-boiled eggs on which Manzoni left his fingerprint as a signature. The addition of the fingerprint ‘consecrates’ them, he wrote. 

They were first presented at Galerie Arthur Køpcke in Copenhagen, in June of 1960 (see below). Køpcke - an interesting artist in his own right - was born in Hamburg but had settled in Copenhagen at the end of 1957 with his Danish wife, Aase. Their gallery became a contact point for the international avant-garde movements in Denmark, particularly Nouveau Realisme and Fluxus. 

The exhibition featured a basket of hard boiled eggs with Manzoni’s fingerprint that could be eaten, and the boxed version above, for purchase. 

The works were exhibited again a month later at Azimut gallery, which Manzoni had founded with Enrico Castellani in 1957.  The July 1960 exhibition, Consumption of Art by the Art-Devouring Public
was the final show by Manzoni at Azimuth, after which the gallery was forced to close when the lease expired. 

While numbered, the works did not state an edition size. To date, 54 examples have been catalogued.









Thursday, March 21, 2024

John Baldessari pillow cases













John Baldessari
The Thing Quarterly, Issue 22
San Francisco, USA: The Thing Quarterly, 2014
33 x 25 cm.
Edition size unknown


Issue 22 of The Thing Quarterly consists of two 100% cotton sateen pillowcases featuring an image of a woman clutching a pillow. The black and white image is taken from a Hollywood film still in Baldessari's collection and has been silkscreened on each pillowcase with environmentally-friendly, water-based ink.  The pillowcases are standard-sized and envelope-style, with a thread count of 320. 

The work was intended as an open edition, but The Thing Quarterly folded in 2017, after operating for just under a decade. The edition is unsigned, though the artist signed a few copies which were sent out at random to purchasers. 

For other Thing Quarterly editions see the hashtag below. 

See also: pillows by Michael DuMontier and Neil Farber, Marina Abramovic, Miranda July, Christian Marclay, Bless and Lucas Grogan, here





Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Barbara Kruger | Untitled [Flag]





Barbara Kruger
Untitled [Flag]
Los Angeles, USA: Los Angeles Museum of Art,  2020
 55.9 × 54 cm
Unlimited edition


Kruger’s untitled flag is a silkscreen print on a fine cotton blend bandana, produced for the Artist's Band Together, in support of grassroots “Get Out The Vote” programs in the United States, during the first Biden/Trump run. 

Initiatlly released through an exclusive arrangement with Ebay (allowing 100% of the proceeds to go towards voter-registration organizations Mijente, Rise and Woke Vote). Other artists in the series include Victoria Cassinova, Shepard Fairey, Jenny Holzer, Luchita Hurtado, Juliana Huxtable, Alex Israel, Merritt Johnson, Christine Sun Kim, Marilyn Minter, Christina Quarles, Umar Rashid, Xavier Schipani, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Hank Willis Thomas.

Many of these pieces now appear in auction for hundreds of dollars, but can still be had for much cheaper with a little sleuthing.