One Big Bang

Carole Vanderlinden's first monograp covers over a decade of the artist's practice. It gathers close to 200 paintings and works on paper, alongside texts by Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, essays by curators Ann Hoste, Ory Dessau, and Hans den Hartog Jager, as well as a conversation between musician and composer Joëlle Léandre and Vanderlinden.

Born 1973 in Brussels, Carole Vanderlinden has been developing a highly improvisational, rich artistic practice since the mid-1990s. While her work is primarily focused on painting (often using thick, hand-mixed oil paints), it regularly encompasses drawing, watercolor, collage, and small objects. Vanderlinden's practice is famously unhampered by the constraints of a single style. Her work nimbly blurs the line between figuration and abstraction, reacting intuitively to the rhythm, color, and possibilities of her medium rather than adhering to a single signature aesthetic.

Bridget Mullen is the ruler of an unruly roost. Between 2021 and 2023, she gave birth to forty-seven paintings, each twelve-by-nine inches: kin ugly and cute, monstrous, fleshy, repulsive, droopy-eyed, and sneering as they cross the universal threshold into the no less frightening world that awaits. Birthday reunites Mullen's uncanny litter alongside a conversation between the artist and Lucas Blalock.

The paintings in New York-based artist Bridget Mullen's Birthday series utilize two distinct parameters to guide the creation of the iterative works: a vertical orientation at an intimate scale of 12 x 9 inches and a visualization of perhaps the ultimate creative act—the moment of birth. Through this consistent scale and thematic hyper focus, the artist employs endless formal variations in composition, color, and paint application. The result is a series of paintings that share a common structure yet champion individuality.

Contrasting colors provoke a visible tension, one that is at times compressed and, in other moments, elastic. Suddenly, abstract shapes come into focus as human anatomies, capable of expressing emotion. Undulating lines of various thicknesses and layered colors squeeze together, revealing peculiar faces and gestures that emerge from a central point. The repetition of thin lines creates a visual stutter of pigment, alluding to the passage of time or rapid movement.
The works in Birthday build on Mullen's practice, combining color, decisive mark-making, intuition, and experimentation to conjure psychedelic configurations. Sculptural dimensionality and flatness, representation and abstraction, and solidity and fluidity, serve not as dichotomies within these works, but as two complementary halves of a whole. Together, the forms and figures of the Birthday series are imbued with a sense of life, pregnant with agency and potential.

For Sebastian Black, 2020 was a year like no other: a pandemic; three exhibitions; a move to Los Angeles; a presidential election; a baby, too. Local Warming is Black's tale of it all, as recorded in his diary.

One million years ago, when I started making the paintings compiled here, I was listening to lots of audiobooks and recorded philosophy lectures. It was the winter of 2019, my paintings were about this and about that, and every brushstroke drifted safely over a net of ideas. I was gathering a list of things that I knew to be true because I was sick of having nothing to say when people asked me to explain myself. Then a professor, who to me is now a holy exegete, said that difference precedes identity as the substance of reality. I'd been eavesdropping on YouTube as he taught a continuing-ed class on Deleuze for a claque of narrative therapists. Difference before identity. I couldn't grasp the idea— only touch it. That's okay, said the professor, as though speaking directly to me, the point of thinking isn't to grasp things that are true but rather to prod things that are interesting. — Sebastian Black

Sebastian Black is an artist/writer. He was born in New York City in 1985. He lives and works in Los Angeles. 

A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis.

‘Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound… To be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.’  Jamieson Webster

‘Language in Cixous’s hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities.’  Maggie Nelson

‘With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.’  Lidia Yuknavitch

Foreword by Jamieson Webster

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.

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.

Caribbean Carnivals have been taking place around the UK since 1959. These joyous celebrations of culture and community began as acts of resistance in the face of enslavement — a defiant stand from communities who refused to lose who they were and where they came from.

Drawing from this rich and radical history, Aisling Serrant explores Carnival through one of its most vibrant and unmissable features: costume. First turned to by former slaves in the Caribbean as an act of reclamation and quiet resistance, with roots in West African and European masquerade alike, the colourful costumes of Carnival weekend remain a vital mode of self-expression, protest, and camaraderie. From Canboulay to Leeds and Notting Hill, the costume makers, wearers, and the communities they attract, embody Carnival in the spirit of an expression used across the Caribbean to signify unity among nations and peoples: all ah we is one.

This first monograph includes all of Van der Stokker's murals and most of her drawings.

In an interview in this collection of Van der Stokker's wall paintings and drawings, John Waters says, 'Millions of teenage girls have drawings that are good, but no one ever tells them that they are'. Van der Stokker celebrates teenage girlishness, and has since 1983 found both immense support and immense rejection within the art world community. Includes interviews with Van der Stokker and a complete presentation of her works in situ, printed on full-page spreads on quality mat paper.

Dutch-born van der Stokker (1954, Hertogenbosch), active artist-gallery owner on the East Side of New York in the 80's, now lives between Amsterdam and New York. She developed pictorial murals with happy candy-coated slogans that incited acid sarcasm from her contemporaries.

Texts by Anne Pontégnie, Éric Troncy, John Waters/Charles Esche, Mirjam Westen, Amy Kellner.

I am not deep, although my eyes are, like a black sea that has been forgotten, as many have told me.

Noura Alsouma’s zine “Nawar’s Sketchbook” is a liquid lament by the Berlin-based Syrian visual artist and printmaker, riveted to eyes that see and therefore shed tears, channeling the heartfelt exposure of the sketchbooks Noura fills to the bleed.

With a moving text by the artist in the original Arabic, reproduced in her handwriting, as well as in English translation by Suja Sawafta.