Nick Mauss

With essays by Kirsty Bell and Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen.

Published by Walther König London and Serpentine Gallery.

 

This artist's book, designed in collaboration with Manuel Raeder assisted by Manuel Goller, re-imagines the plates of a catalogue as sheets of wrapping paper, meant to be torn out by the reader and used to wrap gifts. The various patterns, conceived by Nick Mauss specifically for this book, are derived and often derailed from various sources in the fine and decorative arts. The wrapping paper materializes those isolated elements on which the mind snags. As Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen writes in the essay included in this book: “The act, the affect, and the physical accoutrements of presentation have always been an intrinsic trope of Nick’s body of work, which tantalizes, ironizes, and sometimes rages against the hypertrophied distinction between the presentation of gifts and the presentation of textual or visual information.” And as Kirsty Bell writes: “Mauss’ work locates itself apart from bold traditions of sculpture or painting, away from theoretical certainties, or post-modern strategies of appropriation. Though thick with references, the referents are loosened from the ties of origin to allow for new, contingent, prismatic readings. The self-conscious embrace of the decorative arts, and of display as a methodology, becomes a position of resistance, insisting on the value of history and experience read beyond the usual edifices.”

 

ISBN 10: 3865607748  

ISBN 13: 9783865607744