Walter Price, 2024. Photo by Walter Price

“The paintings in Pearl Lines are a joyous combination of the carefree and the committed. Their sensibility is earnest, and their carnivalesque style engaging without looking labored.” – 

Everything starts with a line, says Georgia-born, Brooklyn-based artist Walter Price (born 1989). Indeed, this volume, published in conjunction with his first UK exhibition, celebrates drawing as the foundation of Price’s practice. Employing a highly developed sense of line and composition, Price expands the mark-making possibilities of colored pencil, graphite, marker and oil pastel in constantly varying gestures paired with collage and appropriated printmaking methods. Quotidien motifs such as bathtubs, sofas and automobiles float amid bright fields of color. Price’s work blurs the boundaries between collective history and individual memory, figuration and abstraction, depicting ambiguous urban and domestic landscapes populated by indefinite, almost spectral, figures and objects.

 compiles works made during Price's residency at the Camden Art Centre in 2020, as well as a selection of recent paintings and works on paper produced in New York.

Walter Price: Pearl Lines

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

“Wolfgang Tillmans is not only a great artist, he’s a joyous intellectual whose generosity, wit and good-natured skepticism is political, authentic and playfully profound.” – John Waters

This volume offers a panoramic collection of interviews and writings from an artist for whom language has always been a significant means of creative expression. Arranged chronologically, the assembled texts reflect Tillmans’ thinking on photography, music, politics, nightlife, astronomy, spirituality and activism. The sources are as varied as their content, with statements and conversations that originally appeared in exhibition catalogues rubbing up against social-media posts and song lyrics.

Whether discussing his own work as a photographer or drawing out the thoughts of others, Tillmans is a generous interlocutor with a refreshing clarity of thought. This visually rich and timely publication tracks Tillmans’ contributions to art and cultural criticism in tandem with the social and cultural shifts of the past 30 years.

Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader

Edited by Lærke Rydal Jørgensen and Marie Laurberg. Foreword by Poul Erik Tøjner and Marie Laurberg. Text by Barry Schwabsky, Karl Ove Knausgård, Magnus Florin. Conversation between Mamma Andersson and Marie Laurberg

Works from the past two decades and a new series from the Swedish master of the oneiric and the unsettling

Mamma Andersson (born 1962) ranks as one of the most important painters of her generation. The Swedish artist is an eminent interpreter of the unique language of painting. With a sharp sense of mood, color and materiality, she has developed a personal take on the classical genres of painting: still lifes, interiors and landscapes are at the crux of her work. Her signature aesthetic is the result of repeated applications and overpainting. Oil on canvas is covered in spray paint, paint is dragged in thin bands across the surface, producing a material fullness and variety.

This catalog accompanies the Louisiana’s exhibition 

, and contains contributions from the author Karl Ove Knausgård, the playwright Magnus Florin and the art writer and poet Barry Schwabsky, in addition to a conversation between Mamma Andersson and the exhibition’s curator, Marie Laurberg.

Mamma Andersson: Humdrum Days

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear book cover

Edited by Roxana Marcoci. With contributions by Quentin Bajac, Yve-Alain Bois, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Clément Chéroux, Durga Chew-Bose, Stuart Comer, Keller Easterling, Paul Flynn, Sophie Hackett, Michelle Kuo, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Phil Taylor, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Andrew Vielkind

Encompassing photography, installation, print media, video and more, this publication is the most comprehensive account of Tillmans's wide-ranging career to date

A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures and deepen the viewer's experience.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Tillmans's work at the Museum of Modern Art, this copiously illustrated volume surveys four decades of the artist's career. An outstanding group of writers offer diverse essays addressing key threads of his multifaceted practice, and a new text by Tillmans himself elucidates the distinctive methodology behind his system of presenting photographs. 

 fear grants readers new insight into the work of an artist who has not only changed the way photography is exhibited but pointed contemporary art in dynamic new directions.

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

This cahier is a visual sketchbook for an exhibition by Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, in dialogue with the museum's collection. Although the exhibition has been postponed towards 2025, this anticipatory publication already arose from Dumas' enthusiasm and affection for this combination. The enigmatic Cycladic antiquities, dating from 3000-2000 BC, speak to us in the same timeless language as Dumas' contemporary works.


Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues

Gwendolyn Owens

Philip Ursprung

By Gordon Matta-Clark. Edited by Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung

An essential reference that provides new understanding of the thought processes of one of the most radical artists of the late twentieth century

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) has never been an easy artist to categorize or to explain. Although trained as an architect, he has been described as a sculptor, a photographer, an organizer of performances, and a writer of manifestos, but he is best known for un-building abandoned structures. In the brief span of his career, from 1968 to his early death in 1978, he created an oeuvre that has made him an enduring cult figure.

In 2002, when Gordon Matta-Clark’s widow, Jane Crawford, put his archive on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, it revealed a new voice in the ongoing discussion of artist/architect Matta-Clark’s work: his own. Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung’s careful selection and ordering of letters, interviews, statements, and the now-famous art cards from the CCA as well as other sources deepens our understanding of one of the most original thinkers of his generation. 

Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook

 creates a multidimensional portrait that provides an opportunity for readers to explore and enjoy the complexity and contradiction that was Gordon Matta-Clark.

brings the world’s leading contemporary artists together with William Shakespeare. Featuring covers designed by each artist and illustrations throughout, these editions of Shakespeare’s plays are created with a whole new generation in mind, one of readers and art lovers alike.

 is an ideal subject for the artist Rose Wylie, whose work frequently references classic stories and well-known characters.

William Shakespeare x Marcel Dzama: A Midsummer Nights Dream

Set in an enchanted forest, Shakespeare’s 

is the ideal subject for artist Marcel Dzama, whose work frequently references dreams, fairy tales, and mythical worlds.

William Shakespeare x Chris Ofili: Othello

 remains one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlights the tragedy of 

’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has.

Shakespeare book series featuring three titles

The Seeing Shakespeare Collection

This collection celebrates Pettibon’s potent and dynamic artistic commentary, ranging from punchy and political to high literary and extremely poetic. His artworks take points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the do-it-yourself aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement.

Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves

“All this must be either surfed or painted”: This is the underlying sentiment behind Raymond Pettibon’s iconic works of surfers and waves in this quintessential volume dedicated to the motif.

This publication explores the intricate relationship between image and language that has long fascinated Pettibon.

Approaching high and low subject matter with equal appetite and comfort, Pettibon plumbs the depths of American sexuality, politics, subcultures, mores, and intellectual histories through themes including Shakespeare, Gumby, surfers, the Bible, baseball, and German Romanticism.

Raymond Pettibon Collection

The work of Donald Judd, one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, has come to define what has been referred to as minimalist art—a label to which the artist strongly objected on the grounds of its generality. This beautifully designed collection highlights the enduring influence and striking visuals in Judd's practice.

A sweeping selection of Donald Judd’s iconic and ambitious works alongside a diverse collection of newly commissioned writings.

With hundreds of pages of new and previously unpublished essays, notes, and letters,

 is the most comprehensive collection of the artist’s writings assembled to date.

presents sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and best-selling

Donald Judd Collection

By Charles Baudelaire. Illustrated by Marlene Dumas

After their successful collaboration in William Shakespeare's 

, Hafid Bouazza and Marlene Dumas decided to reunite. This time he would translate the fifty prose poems collected by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in 

 , and she would illustrate his translation.
Hafid Bouazza passed away on April 29, 2021. Marlene Dumas made paintings and drawings for the twenty prose poems of which he completed the translation. She was inspired by the atmosphere of the text and the specific timbre of Bouazza. The book thus became a posthumous ode to their friendship.

Charles Baudelaire is considered the poet of the spleen, a melancholy, an intense boredom that leads to weltschmerz. In 

 he paints portraits of grieving widows, rejected lovers, people who fight against the dark around them and within themselves. Anyone who reads this magnificent collection will realize that 

The French original has been recorded in its entirety in 

 , as has an English translation by Louise Varèse. The heart of the book is formed by the twenty translations of Hafid Bouazza, illustrated by Marlene Dumas.

Charles Baudelaire: Le Spleen de Paris

A gelatin silver print by Diane Arbus, titled Triplets in their bedroom, N.J. 1963, dated 1963.

Photographs by Diane Arbus. Texts by Doon Arbus, Sarah H. Meister, Sandra S. Phillips, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Neil Selkirk, and Elisabeth Sussman.

Aperture is proud to bring this best-selling and indispensable title back into print, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Diane Arbus’s groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 explores the origins, scope, and aspirations of this wholly original force in photography. Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and her faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Presenting many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images reveals a subtle yet persistent view of the world. The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career. It also includes a new contribution by Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture, alongside essays by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography, emeritus, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her photographs since her death. An extensive chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, is illustrated by more than three hundred additional images and composed primarily of excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, amounting to a kind of autobiography. An afterword by Doon Arbus precedes biographical entries on the photographer’s friends and colleagues, compiled by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

Diane Arbus: Revelations

Rachel Kushner

Robert Slifkin

Texts by Rachel Kushner and Robert Slifkin

A selection of nearly one hundred previously unseen images from the 1960s and 1970s by the pioneer of color photography, William Eggleston.

, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s lens: vibrant colors and a profound sense of nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images—a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home—

 is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.

Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.

William Eggleston: The Outlands, Selected Works

Romaine Brooks

Lauren O’Neill-Butler

ekphrasis

By Romaine Brooks. Introduction by Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Selections from Romaine Brooks’s unpublished memoir 

 expose the psyche and practice of this underrecognized queer, female artist.

Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubing their subjects—often women—Brooks gave personhood and power to the figures she painted. Her frank approach to her complicated relationship with her mother, faith, wealth, sexuality, and gender is complemented by a keen wit that echoes the gray tones of her work.

Though her paintings are held in major collections, Brooks’s influence in modernist circles of the early twentieth century is largely underexplored. This new publication, guided by Brooks’s own impressionistic musings, bridges an important gap between the art and the artist. An introduction by Lauren O’Neill-Butler explores Brooks’s role as an artist in the early twentieth century through the lens of gender and sexuality.

Strange Impressions

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Ruth Asawa with hanging wire sculpture, 1951. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Makeda Best

Taylor Davis

Ruth Erickson

Briony Fer

Helen Molesworth

Jennifer L. Roberts

John Yau

Text by Helen Molesworth. Contributions by Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau

Revealing rarely seen work alongside her iconic looped-wire sculptures, this catalogue celebrates Ruth Asawa’s unique vision and intimate subject matter.

Known for her intricate and distinct artistic language, Asawa produced numerous sculptures, drawings, and prints that are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Her works on paper and “continuous” looped-wire sculptures suggest a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms, a means of reshaping how we perceive the world. Personal motifs reappear throughout in the most comprehensive look at the artist’s oeuvre to date––ceramic casts of faces of her family, friends, and neighbors; the carved front door Asawa and her family made for their home; and drawings of her children, grandchildren, and husband sleeping––all providing an expansive look into the artist’s life.

A document of the breathtaking and surprising exhibition 

, organized by Helen Molesworth, this book records and expands upon the show, offering new insight from writers and curators with a selection of sixty-four works from Asawa’s spectacular oeuvre. With an essay by Molesworth, this book also features focused texts from Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau.

Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible

Alexandre Kojève

Boris Groys

By Alexandre Kojève. Introduction by Boris Groys

 explores Alexandre Kojève’s philosophical approach to the relationship between art and beauty.

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojève defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,” endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojève suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojève’s text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted question: What is beauty?

Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojève’s life and writings.

Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty

Trailer Video

Max Rosenberg

Texts by 55 authors, including Hilton Als, A. D. Coleman, Holland Cotter, Jacob Deschin, Germaine Greer, Hilton Kramer, Arthur Lubow, Janet Malcolm, Francine Prose, Sukhdev Sandhu, Peter Schjeldahl, Adrian Searle, Susan Sontag, Lynne Tillman, and Colm Tóibín

Edited by Max Rosenberg. Foreword by Jeffrey Fraenkel and Lucas Zwirner

Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, this groundbreaking publication charts the reception of the photographer’s work and offers comprehensive insight into the critical conversations, as well as misconceptions, around this highly influential artist.

Best known for her penetrating images exploring what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singularfigure in American postwar photography. Arbus’s black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach. Critics and writers have described her work as “sinister” and “appalling” as well as “revelatory,” “sincere,” and “compassionate.” Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, 

 charts the reception of the revolutionary photographer's work.

Illuminating fifty years of evolution in the field of art criticism, 

 provides a new template for understanding the work of any formidable artist. Organized in eleven sections that focus on major exhibitions and significant events emerging from Arbus’s work, as well as on her methods and intentions, the sixty-nine facsimiles of previously published articles and essays––an archive by all accounts––trace the discourse on Arbus, contextualizing her inimitable oeuvre. Supplemented by an annotated bibliography of more than six hundred entries and a comprehensive exhibition history, 

 serves as an important resource for photographers, researchers, art historians, and art critics, in addition to students of art criticism and the interested reader alike.

, Conversation Between Max Rosenberg & Jarrett Earnest, December 14, 2022

“This book is such a gift to future thinking and future writing, not just about Arbus or about photography, but about post-war American culture, the arts scene, and how to write.”
—Jarrett Earnest

“You could only assemble a book like this about a great artist. Only a great artist could sustain this level of discourse by some of the great writers and thinkers of our time.”
—Jarrett Earnest

Photograph of cover of book titled  Diane Arbus Documents, published by David Zwirner Books/Fraenkel Gallery in 2022

Diane Arbus Documents

Edited with text by Caroline Bourgeois. Text by Élisabeth Lebovici, Ulrich Loock

A concise and affordable overview of Dumas’s existential portraiture, with previously unseen works

An engrossing compendium of more than 100 works from 1984 to the present day by South African painter Marlene Dumas (born 1954), 

 offers a selective overview of her career to date, and a first look at pieces created over the course of the last few years.

Of her work, Dumas says: “I am an artist who uses second-hand images and first-hand emotions.” While in the early years of her career she was known for her collages and accompanying texts, today Dumas works chiefly in oil on canvas and ink on paper. The majority of her production is made up of portraits of people in states of suffering, ecstasy, fear and despair. A crucial moment in the development of Dumas’s style came with her use of images from newspapers and magazines, stills from films and Polaroids.

 brings together pieces from international museums and private collections to provide new insight into Dumas’ work and methods.

Marlene Dumas: Open-End

Text by Reid Shier with contributions by Erika Balsom, Ma’an Abu Taleb, George E. Lewis, and Samir Gandesha

Stan Douglas, one of the most compelling voices in Canadian contemporary art, has long explored critical, sociocultural, and political change. His exhibition for the 59th Biennale di Venezia, 

, reflects upon the language of protest, revolution, and the uprisings witnessed across the globe in 2011. Douglas’ four large-scale hybrid documentary photographs re-stage protests in Tunis, London, New York, and Vancouver, and his two-channel HD video, 

, presents Grime and Mahraganat rappers exchanging subversive lyrics between studios in London and Cairo.

This stunning 288-page illustrated catalogue, published in English, French, and Arabic, features some 100 full-colour detailed images that meticulously capture behind-the-scenes views of Douglas’ elaborate productions. Essays by leading international cultural thinkers examine the artist’s work in relation to music, political economy, contemporary media theory, and the rise of Grime and Mahraganat.

Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848

A still from a film by Francis Alys, titled Children’s Game #26: Kisolo, Tabacongo, DR Congo, dated 2021.

Edited by Nicole Schweizer. Texts by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Judith Rodenbeck

An art of play, pedestrianism, and participation: on Alys abiding beliefs

Published to accompany a major solo exhibition by Francis Alÿs (born 1959) at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in 2021, this monograph presents an overview of the Belgian-born artist’s work in video, painting and drawing, with special emphasis on a central theme of his practice, the act of walking. At the intersection of art, architecture and social practice, his artworks explore urban tensions and the geopolitical stakes of the spaces he explores. From urban strolls to exploring territories and their borders, Alÿs chronicles everyday rituals, habits and experiences through poetic films and works on paper. Among the many projects highlighted in this publication are Alÿs' works related to his Afghan experience and his 

 series in which the imaginary spaces of childhood join the artist's poetics of space. Edited and introduced by MCBA Lausanne curator Nicole Schweizer, the book features essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley; Luis Pérez-Oramas, independent curator and writer, New York; and Judith Rodenbeck, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside.

Francis Alÿs: As Long as I'm Walking

Texts by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn, Caroline Bourgeois, Elisabeth Lebovici, Elena Filipovic, and Julie Ault

In the continuity of their deep friendship and based on emblematic works conserved by the Pinault Collection, the exhibition brings together the works of both artists, as if their discussion continued to exist in the present.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres / Roni Horn

Edited by Manuel Fontán del Junco and María Toledo. Texts by Alex Bacon, Manuel Fontán del Junco, Pepe Karmel, Prudence Peiffer, Miguel Peña, Jordi Teixidor, María Toledo, José María Yturralde, and Lynn Zelevansky

The first retrospective in 30 years on the immensely influential abstractionist, theorist, art-world scourge and forefather of minimalism

The first monographic exhibition on the artist in Spain and one of the most complete surveys ever curated in Europe, 

Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else

 illustrates Ad Reinhardt’s tremendous influence on abstract expressionism as well as subsequent contemporary art styles. Reinhardt’s paintings are rarely representational and are instead composed of geometrics and eventually only color: canvases of all red, all blue, all black.

Organized with the institutional support of the Ad Reinhardt Foundation, this catalog includes a selection of approximately 50 paintings and works on paper, spanning Reinhardt’s career from early drawings, paintings and collages to later works characterized by a progressive reduction of color and form. Another focal point of the volume is Reinhardt’s passions and artistic pursuits beyond painting, including his slides, writings on art, illustrations in newspapers, books, magazines and pamphlets, and his comics satirizing the art world and politics.

Ad Reinhardt: Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else

Edited by Édouard Detaille and Willem van Roij

On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation publishes 

. This collection of essays by Foundation staff and collaborators reveals the broad scope of how the nonprofit has carried on the legacy of the Alberses over the years.

After an introduction exploring the Foundation's history, 

 features a wide range of essays by people from around the world who have contributed to the Foundation’s work, such as architects Manuel Herz and Toshiko Mori; designers Paul Smith and Christopher Farr; and curators, museum directors, and staff members. The book is richly illustrated with photos by Iwan Baan, Giovanni Hänninen, and Sofia Verzbolovskis, as well as archival material and art by the Alberses. The heart of the book is devoted to the Foundation’s many donations to international museums, including rarely shown works of art.

In 2005, the Foundation supported the creation of the humanitarian organization Le Korsa, which helps local communities in Senegal, through health services, education, agriculture, and culture programs. Essays about Le Korsa are sure to inspire the art world, public institutions, and philanthropists.

You can go anywhere: Josef & Anni Albers Foundation at 50

David Zwirner Books: Fall 2022

The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.

 is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck. 

Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the Game

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