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.

The unique convergence of architecture and landscape found on the Bernina Pass inspired Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia to create a visual epic. The result is a one-of-a-kind presentation of the new road maintenance base near Bernina Pass, designed by renowned Swiss firm Bearth & Deplazes Architekten, in a seemingly arctic winter landscape. Baselgia explored the territory along the road and railway line with his analog camera. His images also draw a connection between the existing infrastructures for traffic and energy production—built over the course of the landscape’s industrialization and continued development since the late nineteenth century—and the architecture of the new maintenance base. A concavely curved shield wall topped by a round tower is all that is visible of this vast, purely functional, and largely underground space. The shield wall cuts a segment from the existing topography and thereby encloses a courtyard along with an area of the surrounding landscape. The tower refuses direct encoding—until entering the camera obscura at its very top, which connects photography, architecture, and landscape to reveal that this place is about insights and not outlooks. This book features a selection of Guido Baselgia’s striking photographs and reproductions of camera obscura images from the tower in outstanding duotone as well as documents Bearth & Deplazes’ architecture through concise texts, images, and selected plans.

This innovative study of two of the most important artists of the twentieth century links the art practices of Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in their attempts to test the limits of art–both what it is and where it is. Ursprung provides a sophisticated yet accessible analysis, placing the two artists firmly in the art world of the 1960s as well as in the art historical discourse of the following decades. Although their practices were quite different, they both extended the studio and gallery into desert landscapes, abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, train stations, and other spaces. Ursprung bolsters his argument with substantial archival research and sociological and economic models of expansion and limits.

With his astounding building cuts and intersects, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) opened up elegant geometries in the very structures that seem most substantial and most authoritative in urban existence, revealing the alienations of the urban fabric as convenient fictions and allowing life to flow into the most inhospitable and self-contained of buildings. One of his favorite responses to a work came from a Parisian concierge: “I see the purpose for that hole–it is an experiment in bringing light and air into spaces that never had enough of either.” Throughout his all-too-brief career, Matta-Clark undertook civic aeration on many fronts, cofounding the now legendary Food Restaurant in 1971, buying up empty lots in Queens and evolving his theory of “anarchitecture” in films, photomontages and numerous writings and drawings. Anarchitecture redefined negative space in art as a political act, distinguishing itself from architecture by imagining a cure for its most pernicious effects. Gordon Matta-Clark: Moment to Moment offers a comprehensive overview of this courageous and liberating artist with a wealth of documentation and reproductions from across Matta-Clark’s oeuvre, as well as critical commentary from Philip Ursprung, Angela Lammert, Hubertus von Amelunxen, Dan Graham and others.

This exciting volume presents the work of three leading figures of the New York art scene of the 1970s, focusing on the intersections between their practices and exploring their shared concerns. Collaborators and friends, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown and Gordon Matta-Clark were at the cutting edge of Manhattan’s burgeoning downtown art scene during the 1970s. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery in London, which examines the crossover of these artists’ practices and the influence of their work on each other. Focusing on their mutual themes of performance, the body, the urban environment and found spaces, the book is divided into four sections: Downtown New York; Drawing and Performing; Urban Inventions; and Performance and Interaction. The city of New York in the 1970s, faced with bankruptcy, rising crime rates and unemployment, plays its own starring role in the book, as these artists worked in derelict city buildings for their large-scale projects and engaged directly with the public out of doors. A fascinating portrait of three ground-breaking artists, this beautiful volume documents an exciting period in the history of contemporary art, and reveals the lasting value of open exchange between artists and genres.

Photographs, newspaper cuttings, postcards, drawings, and slides: on entering the studio of Eduardo Souto de Moura, winner of the Pritzker Prize 2011, one is confronted with a variety of images on the walls that engage in a dialogue. How do these photos, drawings, and illustrations impact his design practice? What is the relationship between the image and the completed building? Floating Images: Eduardo Souto de Moura’s Wall Atlas uses this question as an opportunity to examine the architect’s visual universe. He has added images from his extensive collection of drawings and project sketches and reorganized them in this atlas. Complex relationships are formed between the individual illustrations and projects. Essays by Pedro Bandeira, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Diogo Seixas Lopes, and Philip Ursprung round off the publication and provide a contextualization in terms of the history of art and images.

An anthology “Art and the City” is published on the occasion of the international festival of the same name held in Zurich in summer 2012. Inviting more than 40 artists to present works in the public space, the manifestation takes as a point of departure the transformation of the west area of Zurich from an industrial zone to a trendy residential neighborhood. Gathering together contributions by artists such as Doug Aitken, Ai Weiwei, Lara Almarcegui, Los Carpinteros, Valentin Carron, Martin Creed, Roe Ethridge, Matias Faldbakken, Yona Friedman, Hamish Fulton, Christian Jankowski, San Keller, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, Taiyo Onorato/Nico Krebs, Manfred Pernice, Charlotte Posenenske, Bettina Pousttchi, Fred Sandback, Frank Stella, and Oscar Tuazon, the book explores the condition of cities in the 21st century through the history of art interventions and discussions in the public realm. The publication includes contributions by Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna, Barbara Basting, Nikolaus Bischoff, Burkhard Brunn, Christoph Bruckner, Selma Dubach, Julien Fronsacq, Ines Goldbach, Elisabeth Grossmann, Erik Herkrath, Helen Hirsch, Angelika Hunziker, Eva Huttenlauch, Claudia Jolles, Hester Keijser, Kristina Krüger, Daniel Morgenthaler, Jutta Nixdorf, Adrian Notz, Marco Obrist, Judith Platte, Anne Pontégnie, Christiane Rekade, Friederike Schmid, Katja Szymczak, Raimar Stange, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, Katerina Valdivia Bruch, Gianfranco Verna, and Jochen Volz.

Studio Olafur Eliasson is an experimental laboratory located in Berlin. Led by renowned Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, it functions as an interdisciplinary space, generating fresh dialogues between art and its surroundings. This rich sourcebook enables the reader to delve into the corners and crevices of the Studio’s diverse projects. The key concepts behind the works are presented alphabetically, and unfold in the course of short conversations with the artist. The majority of Eliasson’s thought-provoking installations, photographs, sculptures, and architectural projects to date is included, with additional material focusing on the research processes at Studio Olafur Eliasson. The introduction is provided by the noted art historian Philip Ursprung, who also participates in the conversations.

Swiss curator, art historian, editor and author Bice Curiger (born 1948) is primarily known for cofounding and editing the contemporary art magazine Parkett in 1984. Curiger has been a central protagonist of the international art world, holding coveted curatorial positions at the Kunsthaus Zürich (1993–2013), Venice Biennale (2011) and the Foundation Vincent van Gogh (2013–present). She has also written on numerous artists, including Meret Oppenheim, Rebecca Warren, Sigmar Polke, Niko Pirosmani and Nicole Eisenman. C Is for Curator provides an overview of her career with documentation and commentary on the many exhibitions she has curated, from Frauen sehen Frauen (Zurich, 1975) to the 2011 Venice Biennale to her current work at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles. The book includes appreciations from artists and curators such as Katharina Fritsch, Kathy Halbreich, Thomas Hirschhorn, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicholas Serota and Philip Ursprung.

When the young minimalist painter Olivier Mosset (b. 1944) bought his first motorcycle, a USArmy issued Harley-Davidson, in Paris in the late 1960s, he helped start up a subculture still wholly unknown in europe: the motorcycle club. The young painters Paris studio doubled as a hub of radical paintingconceptually reduced black circles on a white canvasand a hangout for the first Marxist-influenced motorcycle club. WHEELS is an in-depth survey that retraces Mossets career from his involvement with the minimalist art group BMPT to his interplay between motor vehicles and painting. In the mid 1970s, Mosset worked and lived in new York, where he became the founding member of the nY Radical Painting Group before eventually moving to Arizona. Art critic elisabeth Wetterwald interviews Mosset and American artist vincent Szarek, who often collaborates with Mosset, discussing the interface between art and motorcycles. Art historian Philip Ursprung analyzes the importance of technology, culture, and nature. Mosset is represented by Gagosian Gallery, and his work appears in the collections of MoMA, new York, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others.

The origins of the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst date from the late 1950s, it initiated by the migros founder Gottlieb Duttweiler; and, in the late 1970s, began concentrating on collecting international contemporary art. This publication offers a wide overview focusing on the core pieces of the collection, which consists of around 400 artworks by international and Swiss contemporary artists such as Art & Language, Maurizio Cattelan, Christopher Wool, Katharina Sieverding, Rachel Harrison, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Christoph Büchel, Paul Thek, and Douglas Gordon. The large-scale illustrations are accompanied with texts by writers such as Tom Holert, Tirdad Zolghadr, and Jan Verwoert, reflecting different museums and collection strategies, and referring in particular to the history of the museum which was founded in 1996. Further texts by Philip Ursprung, Heike Munder, and others, outline the main thematic focuses of the collection as political art, participation strategies of the 1990s, glamour and Pop, and the psychological meaning of space and architecture in contemporary art. Short texts by Raphael Gygax, Judith Welter, and Bettina Steinbrügge highlight a selection of specific works and artists in the collection.

In this artist-curated look at industrial demolition images, German artist Alina
Schmuch appropriates copious drawings, 8mm film and digital photography from
60 years of the F inch demolition company archives to show how visual media is
used as part of the demolition process. With only seconds between the ignition of
a charge and the collapse of a building, demolition planning takes weeks and in
the profession is studied through the medium of the image. The dramatic
photographs in this publication include movement sequences of collapsing
chimneys, TV towers and buildings following explicitly nonaesthetic criteria.
Before destroying a building, the blaster makes complex technical drawings of
the progression; the detonation itself is then recorded by cameras at different
viewpoints. Afterwards, the drawings are superimposed over the photographs,
producing a record of the calibration of idea and reality. Interview by Anne King
and essays by Philip Ursprung, Heike Schuppelius and Armin Linke.