Phaidon 2001

160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0714839655

25 x 29 cm English text. Softcover

Swiss-born artist Pipilotti Rist creates colourful multi-screen video works which, often with the pace and seduction of a pop promo, signal the birth of a new interdisciplinary art form. With such lighthearted artworks as Ever Is Over All presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale (which won Rist the Biennale’s Premio 2000), showing a princess-like young girl blithely smashing car windows, Rist invents new possibilities for poetry, feminine identity and the traditional genre of portraiture. The highly accomplished technological skill reflected in her work since the late 1980s, incorporating in unprecedented ways the art forms of film, music, sculpture and performance, have established Rist among the world’s best-known contemporary video artists.

Critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses with Rist the collaborative nature of her work, from her college-day video experiments to her recent large-screen installation in New York’s Times Square. In her Survey feminist theorist and critic Peggy Phelan looks at the many sources behind Rist’s art, from other contemporary artists working with video, to Andy Warhol, MTV, Impressionist flower painting and Hollywood film. In her Focus, theorist Elisabeth Bronfen makes a psychoanalytical study of Rist’s portrait of defeat and failure, the 1998 video (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes. The subtle poetry of Rist’s work is reflected in her two Artist’s Choice selections, the poem Barefoot by Anne Sexton and a short story by Richard Brautigan, as well as in her dreamy diaristic Artist’s Writings.


Price:  £24.95

Ikon Gallery 2002

48pp Colour and B&W repproductions. ISBN 0907594808

20 x 24 cm English text. Softcover

This catalogue is published on the occasion of British artist Graham Gussin’s exhibition at the Ikon - a survey of his work since 1990.

Graham Gussin was born in London in 1960. He studied at Middlesex University, and Chelsea College of Art & Design, London. Using a wide range of media including text, film and drawing, Gussin's work is concerned with our notions of time, space and scale. Through his use of science fiction titles, film scenes or pieces of dialogue, Gussin explores or fuses together ideas about landscape, translation and movement. The viewer often plays a vital role when encountering the work as, to complete the picture, we project our own experiences and information on to what we see and hear.


Price:  £9.95

96 pages Colour reproductions throughout. ISBN 0953977218

27 x 21.5 cm English text. Hardcover

Francesco Lo Savio died aged only twenty-eight in 1963. Because of this, and perhaps because his work is seen mostly in bad reproduction where it might seem dry and disengaged, he is little known outside his native Italy. Lo Savio worked on blueprint, and on canvas, and on sheet metal, but always he pared down the materiality of the work. Each surface hovers, and appears to meld into the surrounding space. Canvas and steel are translated into direct experience of space and light. In structure the work anticipates American Minimalism but in its effect - apprehension is apprehended - it prefigures the achievements of conceptual art.


Price:  £20.00

Book Works 2001

64 pages Colour and B&W reproductions.ISBN 1870699580

15 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover

In Of Lives Between Lines Daniel Jewesbury uses the fictional account of an Anglo-Indian woman in John Masters' 1954 novel Bhowani Junction as a template to construct his own hybrid autobiography. This questioning of the supposed monadic modern self highlights the move toward a post-colonial, situational subjectivity

Jewesbury constructs a comparative mapping between the original text and the screenplay from the 1956 George Cukor Hollywood adaptation, tracing his own Anglo-Indian background by photographing certain locations from his past that denote potential sites for events in the novel. A newly commissioned text by Kathleen J. Cassity, ‘Identity in Motion', further questions the nature of the fluid subject.


Price:  £7.50

49th Venice Biennale 2001

138 pages Colour reproductions throughout. ISBN 9057790173

23 x 27 cm English/Flemish/French text. Hardcover

Tuymans denies the possibility of producing anything original, and the majority of his paintings arise out of an existing image. In contrast to modernist theories, Tuymans emphasises the notion that meaning is more important than the image. With this in mind he has in recent years touched upon a number of highly charged themes. These range from such relatively topical subjects as the horrors of World War II to historical subjects going back to a distant past. In each case it involves the transposition of a piece of reality into an image on canvas. In the late eighties he sought a way of depicting the horror of the Holocaust through ‘amnesia and emptiness’.

For the Biennale, Tuymans developed a concept for an exhibition that combined a series of new works with smaller groups of existing paintings which were displayed as a sort of ‘aura’ around the core series. This new series, called Mwana Kitoko - Beautiful White Man refers to the colonial issue and more especially to the situation in the Belgian Congo. The topic he wishes to deal with has in recent times once more come to the fore in, among other things, several controversial publications. A commission has also recently been appointed to investigate Belgium’s involvement in the murder of the founder of the Congo National Movement, Patrice Lumumba.

Essays by Robert Storr, Philippe Pirotte and Jan Hoet


Price:  £33.50