Aube

In 1962 at the age of 71, Joseph Elmer Yoakum (circa 1891–1972) reported having a dream that inspired him to draw. Thereafter the retired veteran began a daily practice and over the next 10 years produced some 2,000 works. 

Yoakum was born into poverty, had very little schooling, and at an early age left home to join a circus. He wound up working with several circuses, traveling across the United States as well as abroad and becoming intimately familiar with the world's various landscapes. These experiences would provide the foundational memories that fueled his deeply spiritual vision decades later. 

When he began to put that vision to paper in his apartment on Chicago's South Side in the early 1960s, Yoakum quickly developed a unique visual language, independent and distinct from other artists in the city, such as those involved in the flourishing Black Arts Movement or the up-and-coming Chicago Imagist group. His drawings—predominantly landscapes in ballpoint pen, colored pencil, pastel, and watercolor and inscribed with locations from all seven continents—reflect the scope of his national and international travels as well as his idiosyncratic and poetic vision of the natural world.

A previously unpublished collection of 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.

An early progenitor of the artist's book genre, Warja Honegger-Lavater was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1913. She worked as an illustrator for the magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958, and moved to New York shortly thereafter where she began a wonderful series of artist's books. 
These books were published between 1962 and 1971, an exceptionally ripe time for artists to turn to the bookform, a time when the most often cited "first" artist's book also appeared, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) by Ed Ruscha.

All of Honegger-Lavater's books are made using the accordion-fold binding. Her aesthetic has been aptly described as "very clean, very Swiss." Each book tells a story, sequentially, like traditional books, but varying from them by rarely using words. Instead she chooses a symbol to represent, for example, a character, as in the red dot standing in for Red Riding Hood in Little Red Riding Hood.

The new, adapted and expanded edition of Benjamin Sommerhalder's  children's book (the story of the little ghost Knigi, learning how to read).

On little Ghost Knigi's birthnight he receives a book from his Aunt Abel. When she hands it to him all she says is, ‘I hope you enjoy reading this!' Knigi is quite young, but still at an age when human children normally learn to read. And it's the same for ghost children. ‘But something is wrong', Knigi worries. The book is absolutely white – every page, from cover to cover. Knigi is forced to embark on a journey to find out how to read.

Ghost Knigi is the first book drawn and written by Benjamin Sommerhalder and published in a first edition by Nieves in Zurich.

Graphic designer and publisher based in Zurich, Benjamin Sommerhalder is the founder and editor-in-chief of Nieves.

This new body of work consists of paintings featuring heart-headed figures in various emotional states and situations that sometimes teeter between the ordinary and extraordinary. From tender amorous moments to unexpected skate scenes, the work is full of the next iteration of emotive "schmoo" characters.

Mark Gonzales ("The Gonz") is an American artist and professional skateboarder best known for his profound contribution to the development of street skateboarding from the mid-1980s onward. Gonzales' creative outlook is evident in his ability to perform inventive new tricks using the existing framework of urban architecture like handrails, stairs, and ledges. His artwork grew out of the same environment as his skateboarding and includes illustrating zines, which often have surreal and humorous characters, as well as producing and collaborating on projects with Harmony Korine and Spike Jonze. Born on June 1, 1968 in South Gate, CA, he began skateboarding by the age of 13 and formed the company Blind Skateboards in 1989. While pursuing his sporting career, the artist began drawing in his free time and created graphics for Krooked Skateboards. Since then, he has collaborated with the clothing brand Supreme and Adidas to name just a few. He lives and works in New York.

Chris Korda (b.1962) is an American antinatalist activist, techno musician, software developer, multimedia artist and founder of the Church of Euthanasia. For the past 30 years, her work has spanned avant-garde performance, happenings, culture- jamming, photography, video, audio and so much more - though her work as an engineer, coder and software developer remains less known to the general public.

This book posits that her software and coding work are linked to her more well-known activist and music work, informing and reforming each other for over 30 years, inhabiting up until now parallel timelines that have been closening over the decades, honing in on a common creative goal: to reveal her as she should be revered, as an Inventor-Artist.

“Any outcome is inevitably shaped by the tools used to achieve it. In industrial civilization, most people use the same standardized tools and therefore achieve similarly standardized outcomes. But imagine discovering a tool for making tools. The outcomes are now limited only by toolmaking skills. This is how computer programming changed my life.”

She refers to her generative artworks, audio and visual, as kinetic sculptures. Working in collaboration with her algorithms, she does not use the machine as a ‘servant’ but rather:

“I invite them into the creative space as equals. They have abilities that I don’t have, and I also have abilities that they don’t have, so we complement each other. They supply speed and precision, I supply desire and intuition, and what emerges is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Thus, on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, we dedicate this book to Korda’s generative audio-visual synesthetic work 'Adagio For Color Fields' (2023) - a piece that breaks the silence - using it as a lens to bring into focus Korda’s work as an innovative Inventor-Artist.

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."

TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Painting Photographs, a new book by Creative Growth Art Center artist Alice Wong. Wong's bold interpretation of vintage vernacular photographs breathes new life into family album kitsch and cliché shots of plants and landscapes, transforming them into a hyper-color plane of vivid abstraction. Using paint markers to enhance and obscure the formal qualities of appropriated imagery, Wong's hand brings energy to each underlying image, recalibrating the viewer's eye and sparking appreciation for otherwise still compositions. With fluid mark-making and a striking approach to color-blocking, Wong's craft merges with the photographic process to create work that feels at once of times past and completely contemporary.

Creative Growth Art Center is the oldest and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in the United States. Since 1974, Creative Growth has played a significant role in increasing public interest in the artistic capabilities and achievements of people with disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation.

Published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, NYC, this book beautifully gathers pictures of the latest series of paintings by Amy Sillman – and, yeah, reproductions of the full series of 74 amazing works on paper, UGH for 2023 – “Torsos” and “Words” – where marks become membres become shapes become letters become layers bodies become shades – a diagram of time, “a broader contemplation of transformation and temporal fluidity”! 

With an essay by Felix Bernstein titled, “AMY SILLMAN’S DIALECTICAL JACULATIONS”