Dublin art book fair — Peter Maybury

DUBLIN ART BOOK FAIR
Art and Architecture: Interwoven
Temple Bar Gallery & Studios
23 November – 26 November 2017

For the Dublin Art Book Fair I was invited to show a selection of books I have worked on and to nominate a book of particular interest or significance to me. I had planned to nominate one of a set of four books I own on the artist Victor Vasarely (xxx), however I at the last minute got cold feet for fear it should be stolen or damaged. In its place I nominated Ways of Seeing, a more disposable copy although a book that was equally formative. It sat upright on a shelf beside a copy of Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the visual arts, which I made in 2010.

This is an unpublished note I wrote about the Vasarely books:
‘This is one of a set of four books that I picked up in Paris in the late 90s (I’d seen them once before in London but I couldn’t afford them!) Apart from my interest in the artist’s work (which I knew first from the entrances of the Paris metro), what struck me as the achievement of these books was that they were no mere reproductions, but functioned as works in and of themselves. Their materiality is tactile and sensuous, and endlessly inventive; acetate overlays, translucent coloured pages, varied paper stock and multiple ‘specials’ – inks mixed for a specific page or effect all connecting both with the original artworks and with the process of their making. They present themselves as objects. It was very much these books that I had in mind when I worked with Shahzia Sikander on her book published the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This was to be an artist’s book but with a (relatively) large print run. I tried to make the same connections with process and production to connect with the subject and the material.

About Shahzia’s book I wrote the following in my own Make Ready:
16 holes are drilled through the cover in an arrangement that emulates a drawing from the series 51 ways of looking. The holes cut through and partially obscure the underlying work reproduced on the endpaper. This effacing also references SpiNN, a video work in which birds circle in increasing density, masking and eventually obliterating the painted image beneath. Shahzia gave me the files for the mechanical silk-screen separations of The illustrated page, a work on paper that was centrepiece to her exhibition. We arranged a sequence of pages on translucent and metallic papers which overlay as abstracts of the artwork. Sequenced either side of this is a progression of enlarged details from the surface of the work. A section printed on ultra-thin paper reproduces drawings in ink and pencil. The show-through (opacity) and strike-through (ink-penetration) properties of the paper cause the drawings to accumulate in consecutive layers. You can see through several leaves at once, and as a result, drawings of mother and sister printed recto-verso superimpose.—p.57 Make Ready Peter Maybury ISBN 978 0 9566293 3 3, Gall editions, 2015

photo: Draw down, Mall No. 2 Exhibition @ UMOCA, Fall 2015 — photo: *Dublin Art Book Fair*, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, 2017