Open Book

Ingo Gerken

Ingo Gerken’s BIBLIOSCULPTURES is a project that uses art publications, exhibition catalogues, and monographs to create direct, temporary dialogues with recent art history. Targeted object interventions into the relationship between book and image in art historical archives and contemporary magazines result in subtle shifts in meaning, augmentations, reinterpretations, and contradictions. In a mutual interplay operating on different levels – for instance between reality and representation, banality and depth, construction and chance – the works lay claim to a new perspective.

Poised at the intersection between an artist’s everyday life and research in art theory and cultural studies, selected books become an extended space for play and the viewer’s perception. The results are book sculptures and photographs of transient constellations in the fertile interstice between reference and resistance, image politics and object. They always regard the works of art depicted in the context of their multiple reproductions and understand the open book as a conceptually open field for poetic expansion or critical system commentary.