ART

The Dwarf in the Chess Machine - Benjamin's Hidden Doctrine

nai010 publishers 2018 ISBN 9789462084971 Acqn 29235
Pb 15x23cm 512pp £33.75

This thorough study on the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin exposes - in
Benjamin's own metaphor - the 'dwarf of theology' hidden in the machinery of his work, his own
form of 'historical materialism'. In doing so it unearths and explains his language theory, his art
theory, his most cryptic baroque book, his philosophy of history, and, last but not least, his
famous labyrinthine unfinished opus magnum on Paris, The Arcades project (the first
philosophical book ever on the city). The result is a detailed, meticulous, and lucid analysis of the
structure of Benjamin's texts and an indispensable book for everyone who admires the work of
one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

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Manzoni in Holland
nai010 publishers 2019 ISBN 9789462085053 Acqn 29320
Pb 17x24cm 160pp 100col ills £29.95

As one of the greatest pioneers of international conceptual art, Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-
1963) maintained strong ties with the Netherlands. The unlocking of his intensive correspondence
with Rotterdam gallery owner Hans Sonnenberg has revealed the extent of Manzoni's influence
on the post-war avant-garde in the Netherlands.

During his short artistic career Piero Manzoni produced more than a thousand canvases,
sculptures and other objects. He radically rejected the conventional context of the work of art,
even integrating the body of the artist in the work. He also created so-called Achromes, literally:
'without colour.' Manzoni considered the surface of the canvas to be a space of unlimited
possibilities. It no longer accommodated the illusion of the painted representation, or the artist's
personal expressive gesture, but it became an autonomous entity instead. Manzoni's work was of
great influence on artists associated with the Dutch nul-groep and the international ZERO
movement.

Manzoni in Holland is the untold story of the special relationship that one of the most prominent
avant-garde artists of the twentieth century had with the Netherlands.

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Emil Pirchan - Universal Artist

Nimbus 2018 ISBN 9783038500438 Acqn 29253
Hb 23x31cm 368pp col ills £52.50

Emil Pirchan (1884-1957), born in Brno, started his artistic career as a student of the Viennese art
nouveau architect Otto Wagner, then switched to interior design. Soon he broadened his field into
commercial art with the focus on poster art and in 1913 he founded a school in Munich for applied
arts and set decoration whose promising development got interrupted by the First World War. As
the head of stage design at the Bavarian State Theatre Pirchan caused a sensation with
revolutionary expressionistic stage decorations. During the time of National Socialism he
increasingly withdrew into writing and published diverse monographs and relevant works about
theatre arts and dance.

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Jos Houweling - Amsterdam 744

Voetnoot 2018 ISBN 9789491738524 Acqn 29331
Pb 30x21cm 200pp col ills £42

Jos Houweling celebrates the founding of Amsterdam 744 years ago with a collection of pictures
and photo collages filled with realism, self-mockery, and irony. This book is a sequel to '700
Cents Book', which Houweling published in 1975 to mark the 700th anniversary of the Dutch
capital. In that book, he focused on street furniture; now, in 'Amsterdam 744', he inhabits the
minds of tourists. What do the hordes of visitors to the city hope to see? Full of tongue-in-cheek
Amsterdam humour and vivid details, the book follows the famous canals and sights from one
side of the city to the other, and back again. It is for people who love Amsterdam and for tourists
not planning to go there.

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Fountain - Vanessa Billy And Thodgin Ripley

Rollo Press 2018 ISBN 9783906213255 Acqn 29339
Pb 17x24cm 18pp col ills £12.25

Vanessa Billy is a Swiss artist whose work utilises a wide variety of materials, such as bronze,
silicone, bio-resin, metals, glass and plastics. Within her practice she addresses broader
concerns regarding human consumption by including industrial products and objects, drawing
parallels between physical and mental constructs and thereby also posing questions about the
impact of human activity and its effects on life on our planet. 'Fountain' comprises a series of
highly detailed, close-up and abstract images of various surfaces and shapes that have a fluid
quality, reminiscent in colour and form to water or ice. The series is accompanied by a
commissioned text by Thogdin Ripley.

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Makiko Tanaka - Vu Vu
He He 2018 ISBN 9784908062223 Acqn 28991
Pb 18x30cm 64pp col ills £54.50

Born in Tokyo but currently based in Paris, Makiko Tanaka portrays people, animals, and objects
as a dynamic and imaginative motif in her works, often with hints of French culture. Inspired by
her observations in the city, her expressive body of work includes pencil, pastel, oil, sculpture,
and more. Recognised especially for her bold painting style, in recent years Tanaka has also
produced humorous and charming works with a lighter touch in mediums such as watercolour.
'Vu Vu' is the artist's second book, and showcases her wide-ranging and whimsical oeuvre,
including drawings, watercolours, and playful ceramic figurines.

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F.R. David Spring 2019 - Black Sun

Uh Books 2019 ISBN 9780995713376 Acqn 29371
Pb 9x12cm 264pp ills £11.50

'Black Sun' is edited in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen, currently the director of KW Institute
for Contemporary Art in Berlin, to accompany the exhibitions 'David Wojnarowicz Photography &
Film 1978-1992', 'Reza Abdoh', and 'TIES, TALES AND TRACES: Dedicated to Frank Wagner,
Independent Curator (1958-2016)'. The issue departs from Wojnarowicz's grief at the loss of
loved ones during the 1980s AIDS crisis and anger at the US government for its wilful neglect. It
assembles a selection of various gendered and sexual positions, all seeking support, love, and
intimacy in linguistic, architectural, and bodily structures while under threat of collapse.

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Dieter Roth – Pages

Corraini Editore 2018 ISBN 9788894388701 Acqn 29341
Pb 17x23cm 352pp col ills £80

Dieter Roth, one of the most prominent artists of the late 20th century and a key figure in the
history of Artists' Books, has poured his entire life onto countless pages. From his beginnings in
the 1950s and throughout the years of his artistic practice, he produced over 230 books. Roth
constantly took notes and wrote journals from which he drew the wide range of materials used in
his works. Twenty years after his death, his work still represents today an endless source of
inspiration for contemporary artists.

The volume Dieter Roth. Pages brings together for the first time all of his books, diaries and
notebooks in one single publication-complete with images and technical descriptions-showing
how, in every page, as well as in all his visual artworks, Roth followed a principle of inexhaustible
variation. Starting from an original, often handwritten text, which he generally arranged in layers
and complemented with writings and drawings, he developed a series of consecutive texts, each
being fully shaped in a self-contained form, and yet providing the very reason and possible
starting point for the following book. Roth and his series of copies and alterations narrate the
journey of a 20th-century Self who, at every step, and with every development, is forced to
observe his own gradual and inescapable disgregation.

The critical essay by curator Elena Volpato and the text by the artist's son and collaborator Bjorn
Roth on the production of the Copy Books, in which he personally took part, are accompanied by
the writings of two internationally renowned artists, Lawrence Weiner and Pavel Buchler, who
have paid their tribute to Dieter Roth, celebrating his revolutionary power and the founding value
of his research.

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Loie Hollowell - Dominant / Recessive

Pace London 2018 ISBN 9781909406315 Acqn 29346
Pb 23x28cm 96pp 50col ills £30

Reminiscent of luminary painters like Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe and Judy Chicago as well
as Light and Space artists such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, Hollowell's geometric
ephemeral and meditative new works expand on previous depictions of sexual acts. For the first
time, the pieces presented in Dominant / Recessive deal with thoughts surrounding conception.

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Alan Reynolds - A Small Retrospective. Works From 1951-2014

Annely Juda Fine Art 2019 ISBN 9781904621874 Acqn 29347
Pb 22x25cm 108pp 76col ills £22.50

It is not unusual for an artist to find his true voice mid-life. Barnett Newman claimed that he
finished his 'first painting' on his fifty-third birthday, having already been painting for a quarter of a
century. Perhaps especially for artists growing up after the first revolutions of modern art, there
was a need to feel their way forward amongst a confusion of options. This is more unusual in the
case of an artist, such as Alan Reynolds, who is loudly celebrated from the outset and who then
turns his back on popularity, quietly to pursue his inner convictions; he spent his lifetime
investigating the interplay between horizontal and vertical, shadow and light.

For fifty years Alan Reynolds has been described as an abstract or 'concrete' artist. At the
beginning of his career he was often referred to as a landscape painter, from which his later
abstract paintings developed. However, in 1967 he abandoned painting entirely and began to
create constructed reliefs, which led him to make only white reliefs, tonal drawings and woodcuts
for the last forty years of his life.

Texts by David Juda, Michael Harrison, Susanne Pfleger, Bryan Robertson and Alan Reynolds.

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Zhang Wei & Wang Luyan - A Conversation with Jia Wei

Holzwarth Publications 2019 ISBN 9783947127108 Acqn 29373
Hb 12x19cm 104pp 42ills 36col £17.50

Between them, Zhang Wei (born 1952) and Wang Luyan (born 1956) have witnessed and co-
written the story of Chinese contemporary art, which begins in 1976, with the death of Mao and
the wider opportunities opening up after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Like many of their
later friends and colleagues, the two were in their early 20s, self-taught, and setting out to
discover art out of an inner urge. Zhang Wei went to the Beijing parks to paint and met similarly-
minded young men and women with whom he would form the core of the No Name Group, then
mainly an association of plein air painters in a roughly impressionist style. Wang Luyan became
an early member of the more political Stars Group. When both groups staged their influential first
exhibitions in 1979, Zhang Wei was already on his way to abstraction, while Wang Luyan went on
to develop his own kind of conceptual art founded on paradox in the late 1980s. The one
emigrated to New York in search of greater artistic freedom, the other stayed in Beijing, where he
played an active role as an artist, collector, and curator. Today, both of them are based in Beijing,
enjoying international success amid the rising interest in Chinese contemporary art. In this book,
they discuss their shared history, their bodies of work as well as their larger ideas on art with Jia
Wei, an expert in Chinese art and managing partner of Beijing's Boers-Li Gallery. Their
conversation makes us follow them on their own artistic path as both a collision and a fertile
dialog between their personal roots and a global world.

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