Les Fleurs

A previously unpublished collection of 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.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

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 series of “Bad Paintings” by the Geneva-based artist.

White noise escapes from the 3rd floor of an opulent building located in the Eaux-Vives district. In an apartment, converted into a laboratory, hum a whole bunch of complicated machines linked together by a tangle of multicolored electrical wires. In the middle of all this mess, wrapped in transparent plastic sheets, a new experience will take place in a few moments.

Indeed, for the first time in history, a team of researchers will be able to precisely decode the creative process of an artist. Plunged into an artificial coma, the Genevan painter Josse Bailly wears a sort of motorcycle helmet, from which colorful cables spring. At the end of the test, Bailly's abundant pictorial practice will no longer have any secrets for the scientists present. The mechanism of his artistic frenzy, this true fury to paint, will be translated in an intelligible and logical manner.

Suddenly, a crackling sound is heard. Eyes rolling back, Bailly suddenly sits up square on the massage table transformed into an electric chair. Foaming at the mouth, he chants a series of names of old rock groups from the 70s. Sparks come out of the artist's blackened nostrils. His head looks like it's going to explode any minute. The screens light up in the smoke. Words scroll continuously on the monitors: "The beanbag chair", "Harvard beets", "I love wiener dog".

The pellets go off, putting an end to the strange scene which is more reminiscent of a planned execution than a scientific study. An expression of perplexity freezes on the stunned faces of the team of researchers. In a heavy silence where there is a smell of scorching, a young assistant risks slipping in a confused voice: "I think he likes to illustrate wiener dogs because he finds them cute and it's cool to draw them."

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.

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

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”

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.