Produced on the occasion of Michael Stevenson’s 2012 exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City.

A plane is lodged in the Portikus attic to be seen across the river. In keeping with Stevenson’s commitment to producing objects that animate historical narratives, often as replicas, facsimiles or architectural re-constructions, the object will be transformed into an image through the very fragile and the most minute effects of optical lenses and mirrors, so that it appears in the main exhibition space.

With texts from Roberto Bolaño, Giovanni Intra, José de Jesús Martínez, Marilyn Strathern, Michael Taussig, Laura Preston, Mark von Schlegell & Jan Verwoert

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.