Exhibition
Permit yourself...
21 Apr 2016 – 3 Jul 2016
Address
- La Rambla, 7
- Barcelona
Catalunya - 08002
- Spain
The book Permit yourself to drift from what you are reading at this very moment into another situation...
About
Imagine a situation that, in all likelihood, you’ve never been in is one of the approximately 25 works and deals with the transition or mutation of artists’ books into sculptures, paintings, photographs, installations and even performances.
Through the work of 14 artists, the exhibition will show how printed matter can reflect and have a spatial and three dimensional quality. For this reason, they must establish specific dialogues between art books (artists’ books, catalogs, editions, etc.) and works of art. In these parallel juxtapositions it will be evident that works of art have become books and vice versa: that books have been transformed into objects.
Most of the works selected will be exhibited in pairs: books on shelves that can be inspected—and which, in most cases, can also be purchased by visitors—alongside other objects (by Yann Sérandour and Cerith Wyn Evans among others), large-scale installations (by Sandra Gamarra, Francesc Ruiz and Richard Venlet et al.) and performances (Dora Garcia). Through this interplay of correspondences, visitors will be confronted with a variety of links that connect some books to some works of art or sculpture books. The exhibition not only points to the difference between the state of the book and the work of art but also highlights the struggle to close the gap separating the world of books and the world of art. All in all, books and artworks will be presented in a different light that provides a new way to read and analyze books.
In addition to these pairs, the exhibition will also include historic books that are sculptures in themselves like the famous Magazine Sculpture by British duo Gilbert & George, who in 1970 were the first to make a two-page contribution to Studio International Magazine in the form of sculpture, 1 m 1 step by Dutch artist Stanley Brouwn (1976), which is 100 x 10 cm and can be used as a measuring instrument, and The Cube Book by American artist James Lee Byars (1983), which looks like a solid block of paper.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a 32-page guide that discusses all the works, designed by Oficina de Disseny (Barcelona).
