Produced on the occasion of Jutta Koether’s exhibition Fantasia Colonia at the Kölnischer Kunsteverin, Köln 26 May–13 August, 2006 and Kunsthalle Bern, 19 January–11 March, 2007.

Texts by Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Martin Prinzhorn, Michael Kerkmann and a conversation with Jutta Koether, Sam Lewitt and Eileen Quinlan.

Bob Nickas’ review of the Kölnischer Kunsteverin exhibition can be found here.

Wols (1913–1951) was celebrated posthumously as one of the pioneering artists of the Art Informel movement. His distinctive early photographic work of the 1930s is however very little known. In an unusual travel across time and space his work is discussed in connection to that of contemporary American artist Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972). This book, a companion to the eponymous exhibition Always Starts with an Encounter, Wols-Eileen Quinlan, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens in 2016, further explores the relationship between the work of the two artists through an indexical structure, various textual forms and inflections, different registers of images and close-up textures that act like another text. Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual it reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of the photographic.

Texts by Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston, Helena Papadopoulos, Oliver Berggruen. Designed by O-R-G Inc., David Reinfurt.