192 Books & David Zwirner Books Presents Book Signing with Christopher Williams to Launch PRINTED IN GERMANY, 9/19

By: Sep. 16, 2014
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Join 192 Books & David Zwirner Books at a special book signing with Christopher Williams to launch Printed in Germany published by Walther König on Friday, September 19, 7 PM.

192 Books
192 10th Avenue at 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

Also available is The Production Line of Happiness (The Art Institute of Chicago/MoMA) published to coincide with the artist's retrospective now on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition began at The Art Institute of Chicago and will travel to Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2015. Read Roberta Smith's review in The New York Times.

Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany

Over the course of his thirty-five year career, Christopher Williams has produced photographs that engage the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery-often through a wry combination of parody and homage-and explore their sociopolitical contexts and implications. Using the process of reproduction as a point of entry, the artist questions the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality.

Printed in Germany is the second volume in an ambitious series of books developed by Williams in conjunction with his first major museum survey, The Production Line of Happiness, a critically acclaimed exhibition co-organized for 2014-2015 by The Art Institute of Chicago with The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Whitechapel Gallery, London.Following the first publication, an exhibition catalogue that relied more heavily on text than image, Printed in Germany was conceived to exist as a stand-alone visual object and extend the artist's conceptual and aesthetic concerns into book form. A perfect companion to the first publication, it reproduces a carefully curated selection of Williams's painstakingly constructed photographs and features striking graphic design in the near-complete absence of language, with no essay, captions, or even a title page. Through clever manipulations of cropping, ordering, and pagination, Printed in Germany offers readers an original aesthetic experience and comprehensive insight into the practice of one of today's most thought-provoking artists, while-through pure visual splendor-pushing the boundaries of the artist's book into new realms. As with all publications in the series, it has been produced in three colors-yellow, red, and green-each of which features subtle differences in layout.

A third publication in the series-slated for 2015-will include installation photographs from all three presentations of The Production Line of Happiness, essays related to exhibition symposiums, and full captions for all of the images included in Printed in Germany.

Born in Los Angeles in 1956, Christopher Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts under the first wave of West Coast conceptual artists, including John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, only to become one of his generation's leading conceptualists. Since joining David Zwirner in 2000, the artist has had seven solo exhibitions at the gallery, including recent presentations at the locations in London in 2013 and New York in 2014. Williams's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide, most recently at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (both 2011); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; and the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (both 2010). Other notable solo exhibitions include those held at the Kunsthalle Zürich (2007); Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2006); Secession, Vienna; and the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (both 2005). Major museum collections which hold works by the artist include The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in Cologne and Los Angeles.



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