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Cover of Quelle Aventure !

MER. B&L

Quelle Aventure !

Jacqueline Mesmaeker

€40.00

Reference monograph on the work of one of Belgium's most discreet, yet most important, female artists, with a dozen essays and contributions.

The work of Jacqueline Mesmaeker is intangible, discreet and captivating. Starting from analytical intentions and experimental protocols linked to perception and representation, her practice remains anchored in a literary and poetic universe, including references to Lewis Carroll, Mallarmé, Melville or Paul Willems. Minimal, sometimes even unnoted, her rare and precise work is nonetheless present. It willingly takes over space, playing with the actual and symbolic architecture, revealing the structures and lines of force, but also the errors, by thwarting their perspectives or correcting them with delicate touches.

In the year of 2020, CC Strombeek, BOZAR and Museum Roger Raveel have exhibited new selections of Mesmaeker's fragile ensembles; poetic works that evade every semantic description. CC Strombeek succeeded—in consultation with the artist—to reconstruct the work Enkel Zicht Naar Zee, Naar West (1978) to its original presentation, after 35 years. The work consists of 5 projections captured on transparent, natural silk scrims. They show a flock of flying birds, circulating and mingling in space, appearing and disappearing through the veils.

This book forms a catalogue of Mesmaeker's trilogy of solo-exhibitions in 2020: Ah, Quelle aventure ! at Bozar (May–July 2020) and CC Strombeek (January–March 2020) and De page en page at Museum Roger Raveel (December 2020–March 2021). 

Jacqueline Mesmaeker (born 1929 in Brussels) started her career as fashion designer from 1962 till 1972, before she turned to visual and artistic issues. Drawing, an art form she teached in several art schools (ERG, La Cambre...), runs throughout her rich work that includes installation, video, photography, writing and design. She won the Norwich East Award, in 1996.

Texts by Luk Lambrecht, Lieze Eneman, Michel Baudson, Jean-Michel Botquin, Saskia De Coster, Anne Pontégnie, Melanie Deboutte, Sophie Lauwers, Philippe Van Cauteren.

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Cover of Paradis catalogue

Claude Balls Int.

Paradis catalogue

Marie Angeletti

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

Cover of Wind & De wilgen - Wind & The Willows

Gevaert Editions

Wind & De wilgen - Wind & The Willows

Lawrence Weiner

Wind & De Wilgen (English/Dutch) was designed by Lawrence Weiner and published on the occasion of the execution of his work Wind & The Willows in the Openluchtmuseum voor beeldhouwkunst Middelheim, Antwerp.

Lawrence Weiner was an American artist and one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in de 60s. His work was strongly language-based and often took form in typographic texts, also visible in this artist book. 

Edition of 1000 copies

Cover of Fous Moi La Paix

Goswell Road

Fous Moi La Paix

Vava Dudu

Goswell Road presents Fous Moi La Paix a book of drawings by multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu. Vava made 37 exclusive drawings for the publication, which launched at Paris Ass Book Fair 2024 at Palais de Tokyo. The drawings are offset with her texts, poems and several images of her iconic clothing and accessories.

"The multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu refuses to follow convention: she draws and writes poetry, makes clothes and accessories, and builds furniture and guitars. She asserts her position as an outsider in contemporary art by stating that she “prefers extremes to the middle ground.” Her work as an independent stylist goes hand in hand with her activity as a singer in La Chatte, an electro-zouk punk new wave band founded in 2013 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, aka “Nikolu.” Her underground artistic world, which joyously combines text and image, is expressed through various media.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works."

Text from Lafayette Anticipations website

Cover of Un-Break My Walls

Mousse Publishing

Un-Break My Walls

Christianne Blattmann

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

Cover of If You Don’t Believe in Yourself, Someone Else Should

Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst

If You Don’t Believe in Yourself, Someone Else Should

Katharina Höglinger

The publication If You Don’t Believe in Yourself, Someone Else Should is between a monograph and an artist book with a text by Florentine Rungrama Muhry and a conversation between Anna Schachinger and the artist. Together with the graphic designer Alexandra Möllner, they developed a book concept that makes the various strands, the instinctive, methodical and processual working methods as much as the joyful experimental approaches in Katharina Höglinger's work tangible and entertaining.

"The image pulsates with alternating contrasts of light and dark. A sweeping, purple- coloured line unites a human countenance in half profile with the little head of a blue dog. Red strokes in the middle of the canvas, perhaps the arms of an animal-like being, reach into the widened eyes of the one facing it. Expressing its pleasure, the lively creature cheekily sticks its tongue out of its mouth, while the facial expression of the person remains indifferent, in spite of the affront."

(Excerpt from the text "Wandering Thoughts" by Florentine Rungrama Muhry, Translation: Miriam Stoney)

Cover of Writing Out Loud

If I Can't Dance

Writing Out Loud

Jon Mikel Euba

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.