Shahryar Nashat inserts his art in the pages of this new artist’s book, which takes the form of a catalogue-turned-manual: but instead of explaining its meaning, he strips it of its aura, flaunts its nature as an object and describes step-by-step how to create it.
Martin Heidegger, Glenn Gould, Jacques-Louis David, Cy Twombly, Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein: characters that Francesco Arena has chosen or rediscovered in multiple contexts over the time recur in this book. Ranging from philosophy, to music, to visual arts, they embrace the whole world of knowledge.
This first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri aims to highlight the themes and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects at GAMeC, Bergamo; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; Swiss Institute, New York; Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; and the National Gallery, London.
The book highlights the main characteristics of the collective trauma that gave rise to Rachel Whiteread’s project for GAMeC. The psychoanalysts Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis map out a composite picture, starting from the sense of vulnerability and collective loss associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.
This book, with follows the eponymous exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, is constructed as a story, with a prologue, four acts, and an epilogue: an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative.
Dreaming Alcestis is an artist’s book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. It features a commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley’s 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?
Francesco GennariI’d Like to Lose Myself, Never to Find Myself Again
Edited by Francesco Gennari and Edoardo Bonaspetti
Design by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2024, softcover, 15 x 20 cm, 320 pages
ISBN: 979-12-80579-55-3
Through a rich selection of images, this artist’s book, published in two editions—gold and silver—explores the birth, life and death of Francesco Gennari’s work Vorrei perdermi e non trovarmi più, 2022, exhibited for the first time at the Ciaccia Levi Gallery in Paris.
Almost twenty kilos of melon-flavored ice cream mixed with gin fill a triangular bronze prism, flooding the room with a pungent aroma, almost saturating the air and enveloping anyone who approaches in a feeling of freshness and vitality. Slits at the ends of the triangle allow the ice cream to melt and flow beyond the confines of the stainless bronze structure, dispersing into space yet leaving tangible traces of its passage. Hidden in the midst of the ice cream, a multitude of bronze stars emerge little by little. The disintegration of organic matter thus reflects its ephemeral and changeable nature, evoking a sensation of fluidity and transformation—a metaphor for the artist’s own approach to self-representation. By juxtaposing materials in unexpected and sometimes contradictory ways, Gennari generates a dialogue between form and concept that induces a profound sense of introspective reflection in the viewer.
Instinct, creativity, and loss of control also characterize the artist’s book, in which the artist further develops his research into the concept of “identity” along with the sense of the boundary and dispersion in space. This volume is created in two editions, one gold and one silver, and provides an escape from reality towards a broader and more mysterious experience, one in which the limits of human existence and the desire/need to go beyond them remain at the heart of the narrative.