Tom Friedman
This recent addition to the “Contemporary Artists” series, edited by London-based publishing house Phaidon, is dedicated to artist Tom Friedman. Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1965, Friedman was a finalist in the Hugo Boss Prize 2000. This book is the first, up-to-date monograph to fully document this young American’s artistic development and his highly personal take on sculpture, which sees him recycling everyday bits and pieces from his own home. Examples include sculptures made from black plastic garbage bags (1992); White Cloud (1989), created from toilet paper; and Dustball (1994), formed literally from a ball of dust. The book also contains an interview with the artist by writer Dennis Cooper and an essay by Bruce Hainley. For the section Artist’s Choice, Friedman chose the short story The Dinner Party, by Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), and the glossary from Info-Psychology (1975-1976) by the American Timothy Leary.

Tom Friedman, Phaidon Press (Regent’s Wharf, All Saints Street, London), 2001, 160 pages, 25 x 30 cm.

Ugo Rondinone. Hell, Yes!
Hell, Yes! by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, born in Brunnen in 1963, is presented in a striking all-white cover. Since 1992, Rondinone’s Diari, which contain writings and drawings in Indian ink, have played an important part in his artistic production. In Hell, Yes!, the writings and sketches from his 1998 Diario have been “translated” into carefully framed montages of photographic reproductions and short texts, printed on variously colored paper. This union of words, autobiographical thoughts, and images—taken from a single photographic work, In the Sweet Years Remaining—forms a sequence of images that have a clearly cinematic flavor. Concluding the volume is an appendix that furnishes, for the first time, the complete anthology of texts from Rondinone’s Diari in English.

Ugo Rondinone, Hell, Yes, INK·TREE Edition (Seestrasse 21, Küsnacht, www.inktree.ch), 2000, 180 pages, cm. 24,5 x 31 cm.

Per sommi libri. Gli artisti delle avanguardie e il libro
Per sommi libri is a book about art books, which presents a selection of the 4,300 volumes that make up the collection of Florentine Loriano Bertini, amassed over a forty-year period. Beginning with those published in the nineteenth century by the sophisticated Parisian merchant and publisher Ambroise Vollard, the book then moves onto the cubism of Picasso and Braque, the painters of Der Blaue Reiter, the expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Kirchner, to the Italian and Russian futurists. Continuing its journey through dadaism, surrealism, and ’60s abstraction, this book-cum-catalogue concludes with pop and conceptual art books. The result is a carefully chosen selection of books, which proceeds chronologically and examines, whenever possible, those books produced in the very first moments of the most important art movements. The art book gains the status of being an artwork in its own right, the result of developments between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Per sommi libri. Gli artisti delle avanguardie e il libro, Centro Di (Lungarno Serristori 35 Florence), 2001, 70 pages, 21 x 22 cm.

Mark Rothko
This comprehensive catalogue was published to coincide with the retrospective exhibition held at the Fondation Beyeler in Basle, entitled A consummated experience between picture and onlooker. A large number of the artist’s monochrome canvases, many of which had not been shown for several decades, were brought here from numerous private and public collections and displayed at the Beyeler. The catalogue presents these works in full-page photographic reproductions that remain faithful to the original colors of the paintings. Starting with works from the mid-’40s, such as Untitled (1946) from the collection of Christopher Rothko, the book moves through such works from the ’50s as those presented at the US Pavilion at the 1958 Venice Biennale. Following these are the four canvases created for the Sydney Janis Gallery Yellow Center, Red and Yellow, Dark over Light Earth/Violet and Yellow in Rose, and Yellow and Blue, the Harvard Murales of 1961-1962, concluding with the viola-hued models for the Tate Gallery, carried out in 1961. There are texts in English by Franz Meyer (Encounters with Rothko), Oliver Wick (Mark Rothko “A consummated experience between picture and onlooker), Jeffrey Weiss (Underworld), Eliza E. Rathbone (The Rothko Room at The Phillips Collection), Marjorie B. Cohn (The First Installation of the Harvard Murals), and Ben Heller (Reminiscences of a Passionate Collector).

Mark Rothko, A consummated experience between picture and onlooker, Fondation Beyeler (Baselstrasse, 77, Riehen/Basle, www.beyeler.com), 2001, 203 pages, 28 x 31, 5 cm.

Karen Kilimnik. Paintings
Elegantly bound in a black velvet cover with gilt edges, this volume brings to mind the prestige and wealth of publications from a past era. It even contains a bookmark ribbon so typical of those found private journals and dairies of times past. The book reproduces over seventy miniatures painted by Karen Kilimnik over the last five years. They seek to illustrate that fantastical dream world that fills the minds of young children: there are different breeds of cats and dogs, swans, birds, castles and stately homes, woods, and portraits of boys and girls. These romantic, melodramatic images whisk the reader away to distant times and far away places; that is tinged, however, with a sense of loneliness and melancholy. Karen Kilimnik’s first book was published in 1997 by Edition Patrick Frey.

Karen Kilimnik, Paintings, Edition Patrick Frey, c/o Scalo Verlag (Weinbergstrasse 22a, Zurich) 2001, 322 pages, 24,5 x 22 cm.