Sternthal Books
Odili Donald Odita is a hard cover comprehensive monograph of the artist’s work – spanning from his early mixed media collages from the early 1990’s – to his latest three dimensional painting installations and more. Odili’s vibrant abstract paintings blur the borderlines of American, African, and Western European traditions, which according to Rob Storr, has led him to “rejuvenate abstract painting 100 years after its invention – and in the process create a culturally syncretic idiom that is all his own.”
The book’s discreet black and white cover betrays a striking panoply of colors, papers, and formats that make up the book’s 400+ pages. Mixing and layering drawings, geometric studies, paintings, installations, and texts creates momentary connections between different images – echoing Odita’s thirty year artistic pursuit of fusing disparate and separate colors into spiritually unified spaces.
This body of work revisits a murder that took place in Berlin in January 1931, and made headlines throughout the Weimar Republic: Fritz Ulbrich, a local watchmaker, was murdered in his shop by a sixteen-year-old named Lieschen Neumann, her boyfriend, and another youth. The murder investigation and trial revealed that during the decade preceding the murder Ulbrich had turned the backroom office of his workshop into a pornographic photography studio, where he photographed hundreds of young girls, among them Neumann.
Porat’s artistic practice begins with extensive research in photo archives, collecting images from various sources, merging different taxonomies and periodical readymades with personal autobiographical references. She initially assembles the images in what she refers to as “index sheets,” which subsequently crystallize into the exhibited photographic collages and mural installations. More than recounting the factual elements of the historic case, through the period’s multitude of historic threads and photographic mechanisms, she seeks to trace and outline human behavioral patterns and the emotional passage from victim to perpetrator, in which the photographic gaze plays an imminent role.
‘How Do You Short Circuit Control (East wing, left lobe and middle of the road) is a new artist book by Lee Nevo that includes over four hundred photographs taken by Lee with her mobile, during four years spent between four countries – France, Germany, Belgium and Israel. The images are from everywhere – bringing together daily habits, screenshots, text messages, friends and lovers, as well as fragments from her artistic practice, discreetly embedded amongst other references, impressions, fascinations and obsessions. Each page was personally set and curated by the artist, creating a daring visual journey which rethinks our relationship both with the grid, and with control itself, carving out an ambiguous space that lies where life and art meet, perpetually in limbo.
Limited Edition of 210 Copies, 21 X 28 cm, Pages, Matte Art Paper, 130 Grams, Printed at Ayin Raish, Production by Nomi Geiger, Design by Lee Nevo.