Paula Cooper Gallery is especially pleased to announce a group exhibition on the subject of the book. The gathering of works will demonstrate the many ways in which contemporary artists have engaged with the book as surface, structure, found object, and philosophical guide.
Reading, collecting, and fabricating books informs a particular way of creative thinking, in which a double-page spread, a fabric-bound volume, or an illustrious typeface become crucial components of works of art. While artists have often made books, and many are involved in the design of books about their own works, this exhibition will focus on how books have infiltrated the very form, shape, and structure of contemporary art.
The exhibition will include works that memorialise the cover or internal pages of a book through photography or print. There will be books on shelves, indicating how intensely revelatory a library can be about its owner, and sculptures incorporating books as found objects will embrace the book as talisman, gesturing to the acute historical specificity of a volume that originated in a particular place and time.
Moving from an entire library to a single page, books will be taken apart––their pages, covers, or individual illustrations isolated from the whole and repurposed as readymades. Other works will demonstrate the appeal of the book as a rich surface for drawing and painting, or reimagine the familiar form of the book in unexpected materials.
Finally, works informed by specific writings––wherein a text becomes a tool for producing a series of works––will depart from the physicality of the book to engage with its contents.
Paula Cooper Gallery, the first art gallery in SoHo, opened in 1968 with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The show included works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, among others, as well as Sol LeWitt’s first wall drawing.
