Book of the Day Posted Mar 30, 2021

Book of the Day > Frank Horvat: Side Walk

● Purchase ● The legendary photojournalist’s early ’80s New York photographs, published alongside his autobiographical musings in an elegant clothbound edition
 
From 1979 to 1986, the city of New York functioned as a kind of refuge for photographer Frank Horvat (born 1928). Born in present-day Croatia, for years Horvat lived and worked rather nomadically, traveling extensively through Asia and Europe on photojournalist excursions with a brief stopover in Paris where he shot fashion photography for Jardins de Mode and Elle. Eventually he found himself in New York; during this period, he allowed himself to surrender to the daily hustle and bustle of the city streets. In between commissions, Horvat created a prolific series of photography and writing that was not intended for public consumption, instead functioning as a reflection upon his own craft as well as the significance of photography itself.
 
Frank Horvat: Side Walk publishes many of these photographs for the first time alongside the photographer’s writing. The elegant presentation of this clothbound volume is representative of the great pride that Horvat took in the creation of his personal projects as well as his professional pursuits: the photojournalist's texts are published on thin Munken offset paper and his photographs are printed on deep matte photo paper. This publication is both a compelling depiction of a beloved city and a portrait of the sensitive man behind the camera.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 27, 2021

Book of the Day > Dear Elio: A Marvelous Journey into the World of Fiorucci

● Purchase ● The world and creativity of Elio Fiorucci seen from the inside and recounted by those who took part in his fashion adventure.
 
The fashion and stores created by Elio Fiorucci in the late 1960s were a great creative hotbed for the following decades, anticipating many of the trends that emerged later and the ideas of the next generation of designers.
 
Elio Fiorucci's innate curiosity led him to explore the unknown, to broaden his vision towards new currents of freedom of expression, beyond the borders of his country, in search of other energies.
 
This book recalls his new, joyful, mocking, free realm, and the conception of unconventional clothing that upset the rules of the bourgeois, conformist world of the 1960s. It is a choral fresco, told through the letters of those who worked with him, including absolute beginners, professionals who knew him and shared his passions, family, and friends: architects such as Antonio Citterio and Michele De Lucchi, photographers, artists (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, who decorated the entire Milan store in 1983), singers, and actors who attended his stores and parties. Direct testimonials come from the likes of Biba (Barbara Hulanicki), Oliviero Toscani, Donna Jordan, Terry Jones, Italo Lupi, Alessandro Mendini, Paul Caranicas and Joey Arias. The book also features a preface by Janie and Stephen Schaeffer, the current brand owners.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 26, 2021

Book of the Day > Mark Templeton: Ocean Front Property

● Purchase ● “I was in search of water and the effect its absence had on me,” writes Canadian sound artist and photographer Mark Templeton about his second photobook, Ocean Front Property. From this sense of absence and geographic isolation grew a new body of work with two components: A book of color photographs, made entirely in the landlocked province of Alberta (“where the nearest ocean is a thousand kilometers away”), and an Audio Experience (a ‘soundtrack’ to the book, included as a digital download or available on a limited edition cassette). Rooted in the same sense of longing — for the imagined comfort of warm blue water and an escape from one’s familiar surroundings — these complementary sensory worlds form a kind of mirage: a prism of banal surfaces, spaces, and sonic textures through which the fragments of an intangible fantasy can be glimpsed, a circular psychic journey from the desolate to the sublime. The photobook also contains an 8-page supplement, compiling selections by eight artists whom Templeton invited to choose pairings of sound and image, suggesting possible feedback loops and alternative readings between the eight audio tracks and his photographs.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 25, 2021

Book of the Day > Shapes From Out of Nowhere

● Purchase ● Adventures in abstract ceramics, from George E. Ohr and Ken Price to Kathy Butterly
 
A comprehensive overview of 20th-century non-representational ceramics from the earliest years of the modernist revolution to the postwar period through to the present, Shapes From Out of Nowhere features an unparalleled gathering of over 150 works from New York City-based collector Robert Ellison. It explores the featured artists’ rejection of symmetrical, utilitarian forms in clay in favor of the sculptural and abstract, and challenges the boundaries between function, non-function, design, drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture. Built over a period of 40 years, this singular collection reflects the personal and discerning eye of a collector focused on the exploration of shape and form.
 
Ellison’s introduction to abstraction in clay was the work of George E. Ohr, whose late 19th-century creations represent the first seismic shift in a challenge to form itself. Ohr was the catalyst for this new direction in clay, and his vision foreshadows 20th-century postwar experimentation in fine art. The book showcases the sculptures by Ohr along with artists from the second half of the 20th century to the present, including seminal works by Axel Salto, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, the progenitor of the American studio movement.
 
Shapes From Out of Nowhere tells this important story through the work of these key figures, but also introduces lesser known artists who transformed—and continue to push—the possibilities of the medium, including Kathy Butterly, Elisa D’Arrigo, Anne Marie Laureys and Aneta Regel.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 24, 2021

Book of the Day > David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979

● Purchase ● The first book dedicated to these pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image making. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body—or that of another person—with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Hammons’ body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States.
 
More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper exemplify Hammons’ celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body, and his biting critique of racial oppression. The 32 body prints highlighted in this volume introduce the major themes of a 50-year career that has become central to the history of postwar American art. The book features a conversation between curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, as well as a photo essay by photographer Bruce W. Talamon, who documented Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 23, 2021

Book of the Day > Lee Friedlander

● Purchase ● A new, up-to-date retrospective on photography legend Lee Friedlander
 
One of the masters of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander has dedicated his career to the documentation of everyday life in the United States. His images are characterized by a composition that utilizes the urban geometry of storefronts and street signs—and later car windows and telephone poles—as a framing technique. This catalog, published in conjunction with a retrospective organized by the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, surveys the wide scope of Friedlander’s career from the 1960s to today. High-quality reproductions of all of the exhibited works are supplemented by text written by curator Carlos Gollonet and photographer Nicholas Nixon.
 
The volume serves as a comprehensive guide to Friedlander’s body of work, with personal insight provided through an interview between Maria Friedlander and gallery director Jeffrey Fraenkel, as well as a chronology of the artist’s life by his grandson Giancarlo T. Roma.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Carlo Scarpa: Beyond Matter

● Purchase ● A tribute to a great master of postwar Italian architecture, through a photographic journey with high visual impact.
 
Carlo Scarpa was one of the great masters of postwar Italian architecture. This book proposes a photographic itinerary that unfurls through Venice, Treviso, Verona and Bologna, before reaching the Dolomites.
 
His most significant projects have been photographed specifically for the book, including constructions and installations in public spaces, such as museums, shops and offices. Each example illustrates Scarpa's ability to approach the architectural volume as a whole while at the same time tending to its interior layout down to the smallest details, exploring the potential of the material, giving rhythm to the volumes through light, and expressing the poetics of the shape, even in its simplest lines.
 
The projects featured in the book alternate between overviews and close-ups, with a very high photographic quality. They are all briefly introduced by a text that describes their genesis, explains the context in which they were made and focuses on the details that best represent Scarpa's style, with a summary and clear key to understanding the architect's work.
 
The volume ends with a postscript by his son, Tobia Scarpa, who is currently designing the forthcoming Scarpa Museum in Treviso.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 19, 2021

Book of the Day > Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings

● Purchase ● The most recent body of paintings of this New York-based artist, featuring the artist's examination of consumer culture in his handmade, "do-it- yourself " aesthetic.
 
This is the first publication to focus exclusively on the roughly hewn paintings by Tom Sachs (b. 1966), tracing his interest in combining cultural icons and corporate logos with a handcrafted aesthetic. Mining the American landscape for iconography, Sachs investigates themes of corporate and cultural identity--such as consumerism, branding, cultural dominance, and technological development--to explore the achievements, failures, and inherent contradictions of contemporary society. In addition to the essay by David Rimanelli and twenty-two plates, there is a conversation with the artist and an extensive chronology.
 
Sachs's meticulously handcrafted paintings depict such diverse topics as the Reese's candy bar, Fanta logo, Family Guy, Air Force One, Krusty O's cereal box, and the American flag; all modern icons that document successes and failures of the American experience and the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in its society and culture.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 18, 2021

Book of the Day > Nick Cave: Stranger Than Kindness

● Purchase ● A journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller, and cultural icon Nick Cave.
 
One of the world’s most celebrated artists, Nick Cave has enthralled and intrigued fans for more than four decades. With Stranger Than Kindness he reveals his innermost creative process as never before. Vibrant, evocative, and startlingly intimate, this remarkable volume peels back the layers of a unique artist, illuminating the inspiration that drives his work and exploring his many universes, both real and imagined.
 
Featuring full color reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs, and collected personal artifacts, Stranger Than Kindness ponders the origins of our deepest influences—what shapes our lives and makes us who we are—and celebrates the curiosity and power of the creative spirit.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 17, 2021

Book of the Day > Martine Syms: Shame Space

● Purchase ● Shame Space is an artist book that explores the possibilities of narrative and identity. The book collects a selection of journal writings by Syms from 2015-2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self alongside a selection of image stills from the recent video project Ugly Plymouths (2020). The diaristic commentary in Shame Space is gathered into fifteen chapters that stage narrative as a process of being in the making.
 
Text entries in Shame Space have formed the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced ‘my thick being’), a “black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme” digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms’s recent exhibitions. In the artist’s dense, multi-channel media installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, in pre-programmed audio recordings of the artist’s voice, and as an interactive chatbot, which responds to the viewer’s communications with images, messages, and animations.
 
Shame Space’s design mimics the bible form, with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover, and gold edge painting. Translating Syms’s ongoing research and interest in new media technologies to the page, the book’s still images were coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot’s SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.
 
Martine Syms is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. She has shown extensively including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts CCartalkLA, a monthly radio show on NTS. She also runs Dominica, a publishing imprint for artists’ books.
more