Mousse Publishing

Lucio Fontana: Ambienti / Environments

7 January 2019 in Books Comment

Lucio Fontana: Ambienti / Environments
English Edition : Italian Edition

Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vicente Todolí, eds.
Texts by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, Enrico Crispolti, Paolo Campiglio, Luca Massimo Barbero, Orietta Lanzarini, Anne Rana, Jennifer Josten, Maria Villa

“The spatial environment was the first attempt to liberate the viewer from a static plastic form, the environment was completely black, with black Wood’s light. Upon entering, you were absolutely alone, each visitor engaged with their own immediate reaction, not dictated to by an object, or by things laid out like merchandise, man was faced with himself, with his own conscience, his own ignorance, his own physical being, etc. etc. The important thing was not to do the usual exhibition of paintings and sculptures, and enter in the spatial debate—immediately afterwards I did the ‘holes,’ the rupturing of a dimension! The void, etc. etc.” —Lucio Fontana

This publication is produced in conjunction with Ambienti/Environments, held at Pirelli HangarBicocca from September 2017 to January 2018. Focused on Lucio Fontana’s pioneering work in the realm of installation art, the exhibition presented a selection of his most experimental yet least-known works, Ambienti spaziali (Spatial Environments), seen together for the first time. Fontana’s environments, conceived before the famous “holes” (Concetti spaziali), were revolutionary for their time for their use of innovative materials such as neon and Wood’s lamps and they anticipated the research on light and space that would develop in the following decades. But the endeavor also has contemporary relevance inasmuch as Fontana’s research touches on several aspects of relational aesthetics, and is connected to contemporary practices of an environmental character, such as those of Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, or Tomás Saraceno. The exhibition was the result of long and in-depth study in several museums and private archives carried out by the co-curators, the art historian Marina Pugliese and the art conservator Barbara Ferriani. Some of the environments were reconstructed for the first time since the artist’s death, in collaboration with Fondazione Lucio Fontana.

The book collects the most up-to-date research on this body of Fontana’s work and will prove useful for any future investigation of the spatial environments, as well as meeting the need for a new and critical look at the historical and artistic period in which they were conceived. A detailed collection of work entries dedicated to the entirety of Fontana’s environmental production accompanies an extensive selection of essays, historical images, and installation views.

2018
English
228 pages
Hardcover, 22 × 28.5 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 291 6

Mousse Publishing

How Evil Is Pop Art? — New European Realism 1959–1966

6 January 2019 in Books Comment

How Evil Is Pop Art? New European Realism 1959–1966

2018
English / Italian
144 pages
Softcover, 23 × 30 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 341 8

Texts by Tobia Bezzola and Vincenzo de Bellis

Tullia Zevi’s question “How evil is Pop Art?” posed in her 1964 review of the Venice Biennale, neatly summed up the moral indignation of the times with which large parts of the audience viewed this new form of art. Pop was not simply just another new “-ism” in the established tradition of the avant-garde, and it was not a style either. Pop was the new, iconoclastic statement of a young generation of artists, breaking for the first time since the Dadaists with fundamental premises of modern Western art. –Tobia Bezzola

This richly illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the group exhibition curated by Tobia Bezzola How Evil Is Pop Art? New European Realism 1959-1966, at the Spazio -1. Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati, which stems from the desire to re-read the European Pop phenomenon via a sophisticated selection of works thanks to the encounter between two private collections: the Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati, and one of the foremost private collections of this artistic current. With forty-two works, all of which executed between 1959 and 1966, the show compares the works of thirty-one artists, including pioneers of early British Pop such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Allen Jones, and David Hockney, alongside some of the major exponents of French Nouveau Réalisme, names like Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Daniel Spoerri; also on display are the works of Peter Klasen and Konrad Lueg representing a radical break from German abstract painting. An important position is occupied by the different groups of Italian Pop Art, including famous representatives like Mimmo Rotella, Franco Angeli, Gianfranco Baruchello, Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, who distinguished themselves for the multiplicity of their languages, as well as for the inescapable link with the cultural tradition of their country.

Mousse Publishing

Furla Series: Time After Time, Space after Space

20 August 2018 in Books Comment

Furla Series: Time After Time, Space after Space

2018
English / Italian
152 pages
Softcover, 19 × 26 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 331 9

Texts by Helga Christoffersen, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Hendrik Folkerts, Aram Moshayedi, Bruna Roccasalva, Joanna Zielińska

Dancing, talking, singing, playing music, walking, writing, eating, screaming, sleeping… we’ve seen artists do all this and much more, at museums, galleries, art fairs, and foundations. In books, catalogues, and art history texts, we’ve read about works made of bodies, gestures, movements, and actions that unfold in space and time. We’re talking about performance art: a constantly evolving language that artists have always used to respond to change, the “avant-avant-garde” that even today “continues to defy definition, remaining as unpredictable and provocative as it ever was.” –Bruna Roccasalva

Time after Time, Space after Space, realized in co-production with the Museo del Novecento in Milan, is the first edition of Furla Series, the project that from 2017 sees Fondazione Furla engaged in the realization of exhibitions and events dedicated to some of the most important national and international artists, in collaboration with major Italian art institutions. The partnership with the Museo del Novecento is a unique opportunity to meet past, present, and future that activates a dialogue between the masters of the twentieth century and the protagonists of the contemporary art scene. From this premise comes the idea of reflecting on performativity starting from a relationship with the work of Lucio Fontana, which marked a fundamental point in the recognition of the artistic value of the gesture, paving the way for subsequent spatial and performative research. The book contains an introductory text by the curator of the project and five essays dedicated to each artist that explore their approach to the practice of performance. For each artist is provided an extensive photographic documentation of the performance held in Sala Fontana.

Mousse Publishing

The Artist as Curator: An Anthology

20 August 2018 in Books Comment

The Artist as Curator: An Anthology

2017
English
416 pages
softcover, 21 x 28 cm
ISBN 9783960981787

Edited by Elena Filipovic

Texts by Alexander Alberro, Monica Amor and Carlos Basualdo, Biljana Ciric, Ekaterina Degot, Elena Filipovic, Claire Grace, Anthony Huberman, Dean Inkster, Alhena Katsof, William Krieger, Elisabeth Lebovici, Ana Longoni, James Meyer, Isabelle Moffat, Nina Möntmann, Natalie Musteata, Sandra Skurvida, Dirk Snauwaert, Lucy Steeds, Monika Szewczyk, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Afterword by Hans Ulrich Obrist

This is an anthology of essays that first appeared in The Artist as Curator, a series that occupied eleven issues of Mousse from no. 41 (December 2013/January 2014) to no. 51 (December 2015/January 2016). It set out to examine what was then a profoundly influential but still under-studied phenomenon, a history that had yet to be written: the fundamental role artists have played as curators. Taking that ontologically ambiguous thing we call “the exhibition” as a critical medium, artists have often radically rethought conventional forms of exhibition making. This anthology surveys seminal examples of such exhibitions from the postwar to the present, including rare documents and illustrations.

It includes an introduction and the twenty essays that first appeared in Mousse, a newly commissioned afterword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and two additional essays that appear here for the first time, discussing twenty-two exhibitions by the Avant-Garde Argentinian Visual Artists Group; Mel Bochner; Marcel Broodthaers; Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi; John Cage; Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and the CalArts Feminist Art Program; Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab); Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer; Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno; Group Material; Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore; David Hammons; Martin Kippenberger; Mark Leckey; Goshka Macuga; Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Ołowska; Hélio Oiticica; Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari; Martha Rosler; Avdey Ter-Oganyan; Philippe Thomas; and Andy Warhol.

Co-published with Koenig Books, London

Mousse Publishing

Gary Kuehn — Practitioner’s Delight

19 August 2018 in Books Comment

Gary Kuehn: Practitioner’s Delight

2018
English / Italian
156 pages
Softcover, 16 × 22 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 349 4

Texts by Alex Bacon, Lorenzo Giusti, David Komary, Gary Kuehn, Sara Fumagalli

“Practitioner’s Delight is one of the few evocative titles used by Gary Kuehn in over fifty years of work. It suggests the idea of deviation from current practice and the pleasure of divertissement. It implies skill but nods to amusement. The work is a white parallelepiped cut with precision on one end, out of which flows a pink substance spilling onto the ground. The rigor of the geometric figure dialogues with the indefinite semi-liquid matter, left free to collapse onto itself. Realized in 1966, the work reveals the artist’s perturbing intent, the impulse to ‘subvert the strength of pure form,’ to ‘humiliate it’ and elude ‘the absolute.’” —Lorenzo Giusti

Abundantly illustrated and collecting several essays and a long conversation with the artist the book Practitioner’s Delight has been published on the occasion of Gary Kuehn’s (Plainfield, New Jersey, 1939) first solo exhibition in Italy, at GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – Bergamo, which presents a significant core of about seventy works, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, and installations, among the most important in the artist’s corpus, dating from the early 1960s to the most recent pieces. Both the exhibition and the publication pay homage to the American artist, whose radical language developed from an initial reflection on the physicality of materials and played a significant role in the birth of a new conception of sculpture, equidistant from the subjectivism of Expressionist abstraction and the objectivity and geometric rigor of minimalism. Kuehn participated in watershed exhibitions like the famous 1966 Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard, and the 1969 When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeemann, and spent over five decades exploring the tension between change and deformation, his intent being to refute “the dogma of the cube,” as he has repeatedly declared, and “to subvert the force of pure forms.”

Mousse Publishing

Eric Fischl — If Art Could Talk

23 June 2018 in Books Comment

Eric Fischl: If Art Could Talk
Mousse Publishing

2018
English
128 pages
Hardcover, 20 × 25.5 cm
ISBN: 9788867493326

Texts by Peter Doroshenko, Eric Fischl

“I am one of the first generation artists who grew up in the suburbs. We grew up, post-WWII, in an ascendant America in which the suburbs was its utopian manifestation. We came into our art maturity painfully aware of the disconnection between what was promised and what was delivered.”
—Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl (New York, 1948) is one of only a handful of contemporary painters who regularly, though by no means exclusively, employs sourced images, culled from the internet, newspapers, and magazines, to inform his paintings. The artist then adds his own photographs and blends a final ensemble of information and storytelling. No kings or generals or momentous battles move across Fischl’s canvases, and most of his subjects are quotidian rather than grandiose—suburban bourgeois families, art world mongers and awkward social interactions. In his works, communication is nonexistent and boredom is pervasive. The book, published on the occasion of a solo show held at Dallas Contemporary museum, includes more than 120 painting reproductions and a conversation between Eric Fischl and Peter Doroshenko.

Mousse Publishing