Fair Game Leipzig

New series of paintings by the Swiss artist, that examine the role of humankind in nature and within its social fabric on a philosophical-anthropological level.

"I asked Andriu Deplazes if he had always wished to be a painter. No, he said. For a time, he had trained to be a classical musician, but turned away from music because there was something repellent about the need to demonstrate virtuosity. To be a virtuoso, as the moral world depicted in these paintings clearly shows, is not the same as having virtue. And yet, at the same time, there are still traces of virtuosity in Deplazes' practice: in the idealised landscapes that he renders, and in the easy depiction of animal life. It is only humans that he will not denigrate with such perfection. Their overpainted faces do not allow them to be captured as things, but rather present them as subjects. They elude categorisation because they are responding, in real time, to what they see in us." Adam Jasper

Born 1993 in Zurich, Andriu Deplazes lives and works in Zurich, Brussels and Marseille. His paintings create a kind of parallel cosmos that questions the habitual ways of seeing and expectations of the beholder. Wide landscapes in colourfully powerful large format are the setting for curious characters who sometimes melt into the vegetation around them or appear strangely remote from it. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe since 2015.

Caroline Bachmann's dawn paintings.

Caroline Bachmann's paintings owe as much to turn-of-last-century Symbolism—in their attempt to depict an infinite stillness, whose synthetic depiction of nature could be mistaken for that of eternity—as to plein air painting. The artist lives and works on the shore of Lake Geneva, where she spends hours contemplating the scenery, recording with a lead pencil on paper minute details of atmospheric events, making notes in the margins of subtle colour changes—not unlike comic book colourists of the pre-digital age, whose job it was to pass on to engravers written codes corresponding to the 64 possible combinations of percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black at their disposal. Back in the studio, the paintings are then built up over a lengthy period of time with translucent glazes of oil paint.

A previously unpublished collection of 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.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

Ingo Giezendanner's wild herbarium.

Density in the foliage, branching of the tree, structure in the bark: this book is entirely dedicated to organic, wild-growing greenery, mostly in black and white, but patterns emerge, the leaves become a frenzy, and grimaces from the thicket smile at us. The volume is deliberately overwhelming, making it impossible to get an overview. Rather this thick paperback serves as a reference for untamable, rampant, sprawling kraut.

Since 1998, Ingo Giezendanner, alias GRRRR, has been documenting the urban spaces in which he has travelled and lived. Apart from his native city of Zurich, his travels have taken him to diverse cities from New York and New Orleans to Cairo, Nairobi, Karachi and Colombo. Everywhere he travels, he captures his surroundings on location with pen on paper. His drawings have been presented in numerous magazines, books and animated films as well as in spacious installations and wallpaintings.

Campo di Marte was devised in March 2020, at a time when Nathalie Du Pasquier was not painting. After cutting out photos of paintings produced between the 1980s and 2020, the French artist then placed them in a sequence as if they were a series of typefaces, focusing solely on their formal qualities and the scope for interpretation offered by their assembly. What comes out is an enchanting game of nonsense, an everyday surrealism in which the images make up sentences of sorts, interwoven with various elements taken from the world of books: titles, poems or mere calculations – times when the artist was lost for words.

As Du Pasquier states: "The book was supposed to come out at the same time as the exhibition opening. That won't be the case, but it doesn't matter as they really are two separate things. This paperback is not a catalogue at all: it's something you can browse through even while sitting on the underground."

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

A facsimile of Graham's ultra-rare artist's book documenting early performance works.

Originally published in 1978 and produced here in facsimile form, Theatre is an artist's book documenting seven early performance works by Dan Graham (born 1942) taking place from 1969 to 1977, with notes, transcripts and photo documentation for each performance. These performances catch the artist at a unique moment, as he shifts away from his early media works and towards his hallmark video and written work around underground music and youth culture.
The works in Theatre focus primarily on the psychological and social space between individuals and the roles they serve inside the arena of performance, subverting them by creating conditions by which a performer or audience simultaneously functions as both (creating a type of feedback loop through social transgression). Like most of Graham's work, these performances also serve as a critique of cultural norms, with many of the performances utilizing quotidian, social acts that are amplified over time.

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.