Words for Portraits is a series of essays and short stories from English-language and Italian-language authors written on a portrait of their choice.
Each book is the result of an encounter and collaboration between the visual and the verbal, the temporal and the spatial, the silent and the spoken.
Un racconto ambientato tra l’Africa e l’Europa, dove i luoghi non si identificano mai fino in fondo. Ispirandosi a un’opera dell’artista keniana Wangechi Mutu, Ali Farah ci narra di un mondo dai forti connotati simbolici, fatto di guerre, zoo umani, marinai, animali e vedette. Un mondo che ruota attorno alla storia di Shaqlan, la guerriera, una donna segnata fin dalla nascita da un destino fatto di lotte e fughe, ma anche di fedeltà e coraggio.
2020
9788894497205
In questo libro Vincenzo Latronico parla di Albert Speer, l’architetto nazista, a cui l’artista belga Luc Tuymans ha dedicato vari ritratti. Analizzando le memorie di Speer e i romanzi di Ayn Rand, l’autore cerca di mettere a fuoco il mito modernista dell’artista-vate, incarnato da Speer. Il testo diviene così un tentativo di rispondere alla domanda: che cosa significa essere un uomo “speciale” e che cosa, invece, essere un uomo “qualsiasi”?
2020
9788894326444
Claire-Louise Bennett explores the surreal portraiture of Dorothea Tanning. A chance encounter with an exhibition of Tanning’s works in Madrid reawakens a kinship between the surrealist artist and the author. Falling in and out of the artist’s life and paintings, she recollects the rebellious internal worlds and nascent creativity that defined both their childhoods.
2020
978-88-943264-7-5
Will Ashon looks to David Hockney’s portrait “My Mother, Bolton Abbey”. The image in question is a joiner, a photo-collage, of Laura Hockney made in 1982. Ashon creates a collage of his own, interviewing ten women of different ages and rearranging their responses; the result is a celebratory chorus and homage to the thoughts and memories that flourish when we lend our attention to an artwork.
2020
978-88-943264-6-8
Home can be a space of conflict or a source of continuity; it can entail hospitality or xenophobia. Changing concepts of home, from the medieval practise of living with livestock to the feminine gentility of nineteenth century domesticity, are today altering notions of public and private.
Addressing the theme with prints, Juxta invites artists to consider how art may constitute one of the acts we perform to makes ourselves at Home. But it is also an idea that transcends the materials we use to bolster it. As Heraclitus said, shivering at his stove, “For here too the gods are present.”
Created for the film ‘Interventi pubblici per la città di Milano’ (1979), the slogan here printed on a metal encapsulates the artist’s varied practise.
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Gardamatt Ultra 70 gsm, 50 x 60 cm
2019
This dartboard and backgammon set can no longer differentiate between points or players. They are half-remembered, like archeological diagrams of tools for convivial group leisure.
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Silkscreen print with black varnish on Arjowiggins Conqueror CX22, 76.5 x 63.5 cm
2020
One of a series of collages which draw on an old family house in Hyderabad used to store belongings accumulated over the generations.
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Freelife Kendo 100 gsm, 50 x 70 cm
2020
Nine contemporary artists contribute to this series of prints devoted to the idea of Justice. Plato saw justice as the ultimate virtue of both individuals and societies. Still, after the thousands of years our species has been on the planet, we remain uncertain about whether justice comes to us naturally or must be acquired through ongoing introspection and communal experiences.
Each print here operates as a kind of manifesto, a word that in Italian means both a poster and a statement announcing a new world view. Instead of words alone, however, now the statement comprises visual as well as mental values.
Two figures wrestle on the ground and, because neither dominates or submits, remain locked in an embrace.
100
Offset print on Mohawk Superfine 150 gsm, silkscreen text in white, 58 x 43 cm
2019
Durham depicts justice side-lined by other mental states that hinder and threaten to erase its likelihood of becoming visible.
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Mohawk Superfine 175 gsm, 70 x 93.8 cm
2018
A plant’s hidden branches represent the Dutch concept of De Afweging, a word which means both to weigh and to consider.
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Mohawk Superfine 150 gsm, 30 x 41.6 cm
2019
The root formation of a tree overpowers a concrete sidewalk. The thriving organic network evokes nature’s resilience against injustice.
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Gardamatt Ultra 125 gsm, 58 x 40.2 cm
2018
The self-administered justice to which the artists refer is an Adlerian psychoanalytical technique of, figuratively, spitting in the client’s soup; a method which squashes a patient’s delusion by exposing its underlying motivations.
Edition of 100, signed and numbered by the artists
Offset print on Mohawk Superfine 175 gsm, 40.2 x 28.6 cm
2018
The artist has divided a €500 note into 50 equal parts, implying that currency is worthless if it cannot be distributed. However, as one kind of value is nullified, the artist creates another.
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Mohawk Superfine Smooth 150 gsm, 50 x 70 cm
2018
The image indicates, by referencing the movement’s strident black and red flag, that justice can only be envisioned from an anarchic standpoint.
Edition of 100, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Mohawk Superfine, double-hit, subsequent UV varnish on the black, 66 x 66 cm
2018
For Juxta‘s first series of artists’ books, we invite artists to consider the afterlife in its multifarious imaginings, such as extinction and nothingness, dislocation and resurrection. Throughout the millennia, every civilization and culture has developed a system of beliefs and rituals to address this universal conundrum.
The afterlife is an idea that evokes many questions but provides no assured answers. Is there anything ensuing the extinction of the body? Can human beings reconstitute themselves after death? Each artist explores such uncertainties, preserving their original viewpoint within a book.
mandarin contains a series of images shot by Burgin using a virtual camera inside a rendered videogame environment built by Mountain View Studios. A tropical landscape governed by dream-logic responds to the fragmented memories of organic life recalled by its digital inhabitant; paths appear from nowhere leading the speaker on journeys that always seem to take them back to the same place. Contemplating paradisal stasis, mandarin explores how we might reconstruct embodied memories in an immaterial and virtual world.
Limited edition of 80, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Gardamatt Ultra, 20.7 x 20.7 x 1.7 cm
2019
978-88-943264-2-0
This softcover book reproduces pencil drawings from Anselmo’s 1978 exhibition ‘Un particolare a sud, Trecento milioni di anni ad ovest nord-ovest, quattordici disegni intorno‘ at Sperone Westwater Fischer, New York. Each copy features a unique titular frottage by the artist. The drawings show a compass in sixteen different positions. As the needle rotates, the number of directions multiply. Anselmo’s afterlife hints to an immanent infinity that threatens to collapse our sense of measurement, space and orientation before the intimation of a void.
Limited edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print on Fedrigoni Century Cotton Wove 120 gsm, Fedrigoni Materica Gesso 250 gsm cover, 20 x 20 cm
2016
978‒88‒941560‒0‒3
This 64-page, softcover book is an intermedial mix of image and text. A black hole steadily expands on each page while, on the verso, Steinbach repeats a single line of text 33 times. Negation after negation, the black hole gradually engulfs the page. This occupation of space paradoxically voids it while obscuring the concept of the infinite itself.
Limited edition of 200, signed and numbered by the artist
Offset print, 11.5 x 15.9 cm
2018
978-88-943264-0-6
Each book contains a single fragile card which the artist has painted with layers of impasto on both sides. The card combines the flatness of painting and the three-dimensionality of sculpture. It is in the artist’s signature spectrum of colour, in shades of blue and pink, and operates almost as a relic. The whole object is bound in a hardcover book and held in a case. Arguably, for Spalletti, the afterlife pertains to the perennial presence of colour.
5 unique books, signed and numbered by the artist
Titled in gold leaf, 13 x 17.8 cm
2016
978-88-941560-2-7
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have produced five drawings for Afterlife. Each fabric portfolio-book consists of one original and a booklet containing four offset reproductions of the remaining drawings. This edition speculates on a blank beyond reach by depicting various figures in transit, from one edge to the other, from birth to death.
5 unique books, signed and numbered by the artists
Offset lithography on Mohawk Superfine 270 gsm, Tela Paradise Nera cover with silkscreen print title, acid-free envelope, 37.2 x 47 cm
2017
978-88-943264-1-3
This edition consists of two books and a vinyl disk. The first book contains emails about the vinyl’s arduous path to fruition and the second serves as an appendix – an accumulation of the emails’ attachments (diagrams, renderings, sound file references) and images of vinyl cutting tests, alongside archival material from the artist’s studio.
Limited edition of 12, signed and numbered by the artist
Digital and silk screen print on Curious Collection paper, Perspex box with graphite memory foam insert, 33.4 x 33.4 x 8.2 cm
May 2020
978-88-943264-5-1
Mariko Mori has been contemplating the theme of the afterlife for years. The collection of 46 drawings presented in this edition were created in Okinawa, Japan, over a period of fourteen years. The edition size has numerical significance for the artist, inspired by the 33 transformations undergone by Bodhisattvas to attain salvation. 13 special copies of The Soul Never Dies contain an original artwork by Mariko Mori.
Limited edition of 333, signed and numbered by the artist. 13 books will feature an original intervention by the artist
23 x 31.5 x 4 cm
October 2019
978-88-94326437
This book combines two kinds of imagery. It pairs together Beam of Light, Kiki Smith’s drawings from the Vision Hour collages, with Seton Smith’s photographs of Hangzhou and the Pedder Building in Hong Kong. Page after page, one is confronted by alternating moods, either shifting towards the marvel of nature or sliding into cloistered spaces. It suggests ancient dichotomies, like heaven and hell, body and soul, decomposition and growth.
Limited edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artists
34.2 x 22.8 cm
2018
978-88-943264-8-2
This series binds together the work of master calligraphists from all over the world; they are the heirs and reinventors of a millenary tradition. Each book contains original drawings that foreground basic rhythm and form, tying together words and images, emotions and thoughts, nature and human imagination.
There is no space for hesitation; calligraphy moves between description and depiction, capturing the flux of what it signifies. Such modulation leaps beyond the here and now, as if to become a link of ink traversing the cosmos.
Zhao Yizhou embraces the long tradition of Shufa calligraphy while using an alchemic ink of his own invention to add new textures to the ancient art. Here, he mixes works relating to philosophy, spirituality and literature. The books are hand-bound in metal, with a single internal work digitally printed onto the cover.
Five unique books each containing ten original works.
62 x 44.5 cm
January 2020
Working from a text by the great fourteenth-century Iranian poet Hafez, Makaremi continues his exploration into the writer’s oeuvre. Already the author and editor of a number of critical studies on the poet, Makaremi revisits his work as a calligrapher. The book is hand-bound in aged heavy cotton fabric and the title is foiled in bronze and gold.
Two unique books each containing 15 original works.
32 x 24.5 cm
January 2020
Koji Kakinuma’s large-scale book includes various inconography, lettering and abstract responses to Space, one of the Five Elements. Space is that which represents the things not of out world. Each page has been lined and strengthened using the urauchi technique.
Five unique books each containing 15 original works.
49 x 66 cm
January 2020
Golnaz Fathi repeats a line from the thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and mystic – Rumi. Although Fathi’s practise is also full of colourful and abstract works, the pages shown here are of elegantly restrained, almost geometrical, refrains which give Rumi’s language space to resonate. The book is handbound in silk, with a red calfskin spine in the Bradel-style.
Three unique books each containing 15 original works.
32 x 24.5 cm
January 2020
This book contains unique works of ink and stitched calligraphy which mark an encounter between the artist and the fragmented remaining writings of Sappho. Dengo uses expressive illegibility to engage with the loss of the poet’s work. The book is bound in wood, hand-painted and comes in a perspex case with an opaque spine.
Three unique books containing 15 original works.
22.5 x 31 x 2 cm
January 2020