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      A New Book Highlights an Eclectic Collection of Paper Works by 24 Artists Defining the Medium

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      Art
      Craft

      #books
      #paper

      March 31, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      JUDiTH+ROLFE. All images courtesy of Gingko Press, shared with permission
      A celebration of contemporary paper art, a new book gathers a wide-ranging collection of collages, quilled portraits, and intricately cut landscapes from 24 artists and studios around the globe. Published by Gingko Press, Paperists: Infinite Possibilities in Paper Art spans 256 pages that explore the unexpected ways the medium is used today and features work from a slew of artists featured on Colossal, including Estudio Guardabosques (previously), Makerie Studio (previously), Yulia Brodskaya (previously), and Zim & Zou (previously), to name a few. Grab a copy of the forthcoming volume on Bookshop.

      Pippa Dyrlaga

      Left: Pippa Dyrlaga. Right: Ale Rambar
      Zim & Zou
      Left: Diana Beltran Herrera. Right: Sam Pierpoint
      Zim & Zou
      Hazel Glass

      #books
      #paper

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      A Massive Catalogue of Stitched CMYK Studies by Evelin Kasikov Merges Printing and Embroidery

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      Art
      Craft
      Design

      #books
      #color
      #cross-stitch
      #embroidery
      #thread

      March 25, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      “XXXX Swatchbook” (2010-2016), 180 x 210 millimeters. All images © Evelin Kasikov, shared with permission
      In “XXXX Swatchbook,” Evelin Kasikov (previously) explores all of the variables of CMYK printing without a single drop of ink. She catalogs primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, two-dozen combinations showing how rotation affects the final pigment, and a full spectrum of rich gradients. In total, the printing-focused book is comprised of four base tones, 16 elements, and 400 swatches of color entirely hand-embroidered in 219,647 stitches.
      The original idea came from Kasikov’s desire for a reference tool, one similar to loose sheets of Pantone swatches, that she could share with potential book design clients interested in CMYK embroidery. During the next six years, though, the project evolved into the uniquely comprehensive artist book it is now.
      “XXXX Swatchbook” features three-dimensional color studies in the style of precisely arranged halftone dots employed in four-color printing. “I use cross-stitch technique to replicate this. It’s a very simple idea,” Kasikov says. “I prepare the image in InDesign or Illustrator, then pierce the design onto paper and stitch with CMYK colored threads. Of course, my ‘print resolution’ is very low, about 3-4 lines per inch compared to 300 in print.”
      Stitched with varying thickness, the swatches use conventional screen angles—cyan 105˚, magenta 75˚, yellow 90˚, and black 45˚—to produce a wide range of colors and gradients, all of which you can view on the artist’s blog. Each French-folded page features geometric patches of thread, alongside hand-written details about the CMYK values shown. The spine of the book also reveals a vibrant gradient spanning magenta to cyan.

      “XXXX Swatchbook” is founded on Kasikov’s earlier “CMYK Embroidery,” a project that grew out of her MA studies at Central Saint Martins and was influenced by her background in advertising. Merging the two into the broader project of graphic stitching grew organically and offered an outlet to create a piece that was the artist says was “valuable, timeless, and trend-less,” in comparison to the more transitory projects of commercial work. “When you add tactile qualities to graphic design, it changes perspective. The structure of color can be touched. The printed image becomes three-dimensional. A flat page comes to life so to speak,” she writes.
      Kasikov splits her time between Tallinn and London, where she’s working on a project called Small Hours. Centered around a theme of silence, the collection features still-life photographs with freehand dots stitched on top in a pointillist style. Follow the ongoing project and find a larger archive of Kasikov’s book designs and embroidered works on her site and Instagram. You also might enjoy Tauba Auerbach’s RGB colorspace atlas. (via Present & Correct)

      #books
      #color
      #cross-stitch
      #embroidery
      #thread

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      Six Quirky Houseplants Made from Collaged Photos Spring from a Pop-Up Book by Daniel Gordon

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      Art
      Photography

      #books
      #collage
      #fruit
      #paper
      #plants
      #pop-ups
      #sculpture

      March 9, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      From Daniel Gordon: Houseplants (Aperture, 2020). All images © Daniel Gordon/Aperture, photographs and video by Black&Steil/Aperture
      Say goodbye to the days of buying succulents only to watch them wilt and shrivel. Just flip open a pop-up book by photographer Daniel Gordon, and find a collection of forever-perky shrubs and greenery sprouting from the pages.
      Published by Aperture, Houseplants features quirky still lifes of potted vegetation and fruit that Gordon developed using photographs found online, a process that’s central to his overall practice. The obviously constructed forms, which were created by self-described paper engineer Simon Arizpe, juxtapose the realistic nature of the plants with saturated colors and unusual depth, resulting in scenes that are distinctly informed by the internet and the melding of digital and analog techniques. “The seamlessness of the ether is boring to me, but the materialization of that ether, I think, can be very interesting,” Gordon says in a statement.
      To add the sculptural greens to your collection, pick up a copy of Houseplants from Aperture or Bookshop, and explore more of the Brooklyn-based photographer’s vibrant, collaged projects on his site and Instagram. (via Juxtapoz)

      #books
      #collage
      #fruit
      #paper
      #plants
      #pop-ups
      #sculpture

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      A Massive Seven-Volume Collection Chronicles the Pioneering Legacy of Abstract Artist Hilma af Klint

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      Art

      #abstract
      #art history
      #books
      #painting

      February 22, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images © Bokförlaget Stolpe, shared with permission
      Following a wildly successful retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2018, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) has firmly secured her place as a groundbreaking figure in abstract art. In recent years, her colorful, spiritually-minded body of work has reshaped art historical timelines, supplanting male artists like Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers, who have long been regarded as the pioneers of the 20th-century movement.
      Throughout her lifetime, the prolific Swedish artist created more than 1,600 works, an impressive output now collected in Hilma AF Klint: The Complete Catalogue Raisonné: Volumes I-VII. Published by Bokförlaget Stolpe, the seven-volume series is organized both chronologically and by theme, beginning with the spiritual sketches af Klint made in conjunction with The Five, a group of women who attended séances in hopes of obtaining messages from the dead. These clairvoyant experiences impacted much of her work, which the books explore in her most famous series, The Paintings for the Temple, in addition to her geometric studies, watercolor pieces, and more occasional portraits and landscapes.
      “What makes her art interesting is that the works are highly interconnected. A catalogue raisonné is necessary in order to see the different cycles, motifs, and symbols that recur in a fascinating way,” said Daniel Birnbaum, who co-edited the volumes with Kurt Almqvist. Each book is around 200 pages with hundreds of illustraitons.
      The first three volumes are available now on Bookshop, where you also can pre-order the entire collection, and the remaining four are slated for release later this year. You also might enjoy Beyond the Visible, a 2020 documentary exploring af Klint’s iconic legacy. (via Artnet)

      #abstract
      #art history
      #books
      #painting

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      Oversized Butterflies, Moths, and Beetles Cloak Vintage Books in Paintings by Rose Sanderson

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      Art

      #acrylic
      #books
      #butterflies
      #found objects
      #insects
      #painting

      January 27, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images © Rose Sanderson, shared with permission
      Worn copies of World Books, agricultural texts, and classic novels become canvases for Rose Sanderson’s insect studies. Now a few years old, the expansive series boasts more than 100 paintings featuring beetles, moths, and butterflies that splay across the printed material. Each specimen is enlarged to showcase the details of their bodies as they wrap around the tattered spines.
      In a note to Colossal, Sanderson shares that her process is more cyclical than linear as she’s constantly resurfacing themes, materials, and methods from earlier works or those she previously set aside. While her focus currently is on abstract interpretations of the lichens found near her home in West Wales, she draws a connection between the intricacies of the organisms she paints today and the insects of her book series.
      Keep an eye out for Sanderson’s work in Issue #24 of Create! Magazine that’s curated by Colossal’s Editor-in-Chief Christopher Jobson. You can follow her specimen-centric projects, which include forays into miniature and 3-D, on Instagram.

      #acrylic
      #books
      #butterflies
      #found objects
      #insects
      #painting

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      Textural Sculptures by Artist Jessica Drenk Use Junk Mail, Book Pages, and Q-Tips to Explore Materiality

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      Art

      #books
      #installation
      #paper
      #pencils
      #sculpure
      #wood

      October 22, 2020
      Grace Ebert

      “Dendrite” (2019), Q-tips and plaster. All images © Jessica Drenk, courtesy of Galleri Urbane, shared with permission
      Montana-born artist Jessica Drenk (previously) employs simple materials, like shopping flyers and standard No. 2 pencils, to create organic sculptures that are chaotic and arresting explorations of the substances themselves. Bundled Q-tips spread across a site-specific installation like the roots of a tree, a carved section of plywood reveals concentric patterns, and strips of junk mail are plastered together in long waves.
      While Drenk’s latest series, titled Transmutations, is diverse and ranges from wall pieces to cavernous sculptures, each artwork explores materiality and how disparate shapes and textures combine to create forms that are new both physically and conceptually. The artist explains in a statement:
      In treating everyday objects as raw material to sculpt, I practice a form of conceptual alchemy: through physically manipulating these objects their meanings become transmuted. Each piece is a direct response to material—a subversion of the meanings associated with it, and a reference to the life cycle of objects through time.
      If you’re in Dallas, Transmutations is on view at Galleri Urbane through October 31. Otherwise, follow Drenk’s textural works on Artsy, and watch an interview with the artist at her studio below.

      “Contour 3” (2020), carved plywood, 47 x 38 x 3 inches
      “Implement 68” (2020), pencils, 22 x 18 x 17 inches
      “Cerebral Mapping” (2020), books and wax, 132 x 80 inches
      “Compression 3” (2020), books, wax on wood panel, and wood frame, 44 x 38 x 2 inches
      “Dendrite” (2019), Q-tips and plaster
      Top: “Aggregate 3” (2020), junk mail, 28 x 130 x 2.25 inches. Bottom: “Aggregate 2” (2020), junk mail and plaster, 20 x 78 x 2.5 inches
      Left: “Circulation 18” (2020), books and wax, 31 x 29 x 1.5 inches. Right: “Circulation 19” (2020), junk mail and cardboard, 36 x 36 x 1.5 inches

      

      #books
      #installation
      #paper
      #pencils
      #sculpure
      #wood

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      Fringed Paper Networks Peek Out From Vintage Encyclopedias, Textbooks, and Classics by Artist Barbara Wildenboer

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      Art

      #books
      #paper
      #sculpture

      August 31, 2020
      Grace Ebert

      “Kennis.” All images © Barbara Wildenboer, shared with permission
      From the covers of René Descartes’s Cogito Ergo Sum and Homer’s The Odyssey emerge vast webs of spliced pages. Artist Barbara Wildenboer (previously) overlaps countless strands of paper as part of her ongoing Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large series. The new sculptures similarly feature masses of fringed pages, with the hand-cut forms lining the edges of the opened texts and peeking through the hollowed covers. Each spine is left intact.
      Wildenboer tells Colossal she’s been preparing for SUPER/NATURAL, a solo exhibition in November at Everard Read, that considers the relationship between science and the supernatural and has influenced her recent choices in books. Alongside photographic collages, the text-based sculptures “function as narrative clues, intertexts, or ‘subtitles,’” she says.
      A lot of the new book works deal with subject matter that relate to my understanding of the nature of invisible or quantum reality—a reality that we cannot see with our physical eyes. Where nature is the visible realm, supernature also operates on ‘natural’ laws, although we can’t always see them, i.e. for example, magnetism, gravity, and electricity, the celestial orbits, and star cycles. But it’s all levels of ‘nature.’
      Since Cape Town, where Wildenboer is based, was locked down due to COVID-19, she’s been altering the vintage copies she’s had stored. The result is sculptural series fashioned from the pages of Camera Obscura, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Inventions, and the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Compared to the massive encyclopedias and atlases she often utilizes, the smaller works appear almost miniature.
      To keep up with Wildenboer’s sprawling artworks, head to Instagram.

      “Cogito Ergo Sum”
      “Classical Atlas”
      “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
      Left: “Tales of Mystery and Imagination.” Right: “Illustrated Pocket Medical Dictionary”
      “Aristotle’s Politics and Athenian Constitution”
      Left: “Astronomy.” Right: “Homer’s Odyssey”
      “The Garden of Lies”
      “World Atlas”

      #books
      #paper
      #sculpture

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      In ‘Human,’ Artist Beth Cavener Chronicles Nearly Two Decades of Evocative Sculptural Creatures

      by

      
      Art

      #animals
      #books
      #sculpture

      August 19, 2020
      Claire Voon

      All images © Beth Cavener, shared with permission
      In the hands of Montana-based sculptor Beth Cavener (previously), clay transforms into mesmerizing, life-size animal figures charged with raw emotion and vitality. ​Human​, her recently released and award-winning monograph, gathers and celebrates nearly two decades of these extraordinary creations, featuring 160 color plates of work from six series. The curious menagerie includes hares, foxes, goats, and other common mammals, with graceful and luminous bodies depicted in situations that are often tinged with a sense of violent tension. They are figures of pathos: Some creatures recoil, as though in fear; others seem paralyzed by some unseen force. Many are suspended, tethered, or slumped over, having seemingly surrendered to their perpetual state of entrapment. Still, others are beasts exuding tenderness, their body language and eyes inviting viewers to draw close.
      Cavener is a prolific artist, and as ​Human​ reveals, she has experimented with diverse materials including crystallized sugar, black sand, and smoke. Some of her most compelling pieces engage evocative devices like steel chains and glass vitrines, with several incorporating distinctive objects like a 24 karat gold ring and a wasps’ nest. The resulting animals could be displaced from dark fables. They are haunting, unlucky characters whose precise body language and inescapable gazes express unfiltered views of human nature.
      Writing the foreword for ​Human​, critic Garth Clark identifies Cavener’s sources of inspiration: People she personally has encountered during her lifetime—including her own self—“whose psychodramas, emotional catastrophes, and sexual peculiarities play out in her work.” Roiling with unspoken affect, these animals serve as unflinching mirrors capable of appealing at one glance and suddenly unsettling at another. As Cavener has said about her own visions: “Entangled in their own internal and external struggles, the figures express frustration for the human tendency towards cruelty and a lack of understanding. Something conscious and knowing is captured in their gestures and expressions. An invitation and a rebuke.”
      Explore this beguiling bestiary by picking up a copy of ​Human​ from the artist’s ​website​ or Bookshop.

      #animals
      #books
      #sculpture

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