Francesca Pola – författare

Little is known about Walter Leblanc (1932–1986), one of the key representatives of kinetic and optical art in the mid-20th century. This comprehensive monograph, the first on this artist for an international audience, includes unpublished materials, which provide insight not only into the art of LeBlanc, but also into the ZERO artist movement to which he was connected and with which he was in close dialogue beginning in the 1950s. Walter Leblanc is based on extensive studies of the artist’s work: with about 150 images of his paintings and sculptures, comparative works, historical photos and documents, it includes a selection of Leblanc’s writings, an iconographic mapping of selected works in museums around the world, and a bio-bibliographical appendix. Demonstrating the wealth of his creative output, the book reaffirms the enduring role Leblanc played in the development of modern and contemporary art on a global scale.Distributed for Mercatorfonds

The first monograph on Arthur Duff’s multifaceted installations featuring neon, lasers, volcanic rock and embroideryVicenza-based German artist Arthur Duff (born 1973) creates complex experiential spaces using laser projections, neon, pulsating images, knotted textile and natural materials. All, All at Once is the first book to showcase Duff’s oeuvre, from drawing and embroidery to volcanic rock sculptures and neon installations.

This monograph on Italian sculptor Pietro Consagra (1947 2005) focuses on early abstract works from 1947 to his frontal music projects in 1982. A founding member of Forma 1 group, Consagra challenged sculptural conventions by creating slender, almost two-dimensional frontal sculptures in bronze, iron, wood, steel and marble.

The book retraces the inventive richness of Pietro Consagra (Mazara del Vallo, 1920 – Milan, 2005), one of the most seminal figures on the international art scene of the 20th century. It proposes a comparison between different moments in the artist’s creative path, thus making it possible to emphasise both the elements of continuity in his work, but also and above all the specificities of the individual periods, offering a varied panorama of his continuous reinventions of forms and his experimentation with materials. Francesca Pola identifies Consagra’s path not in a purely chronological sense, but rather according to a reading key highlighting the importance of the relationship between sculpture, space and observer: a specific focus on the “location” of the plastic presence in relation to the observer, the fulcrum of the characteristic “frontal sculpture” codified by Consagra starting from his famous Colloqui of the early 1950s and contextually theorised as early as his book Necessità della scultura (1952).Text in English and Italian.