For almost twenty years Fausto Bertasa has been studying the linguistic, visual and gestural signs of our age. As a profound expert on America Pop Art, from this area of enquiry he has learned to decode the mechanisms of mass communication. He analyses, selects, enlarges bar codes, displays, keyboards – typical symbols of post-industrial society, a visual code of modernity, of cable communications, the new literacy of our times. The artist uses different materials and media – from painting to photography, video to drawing, neon to installation – to reflect on the codes and means of communication: the world of the media (international dailies), verbal communication (from phone cards to the rediscovered verbalisation of text messaging), the world of the Internet (keyboards and mouse pads), the alternative paths of the communication of fair trade. In his works, Bertasa records pages from newspapers, events, microstories and digital literacy, in which logos and the symbols of the alphabet of our era are reproduced, overlaid, blended and rewritten to create a new system of signs and poetry. By creating multiple cultural assonances and reinterpreting signs, stimuli and images, Bertasa’s visual discourse is a rebus that arouses the observer’s irresistible urge to decipher and, in turn, devise his own creative defensive strategies to stem the deluge of information of contemporary society.

Fausto Bertasa (Bergamo, Italy, 1953)

Lida Abdul uses videos, installations and photographs to express her condition as a refugee and her constant feeling of precariousness. Her work shows us the devastating effects of the war on the Afghan people. In her works (videos, photographs, installations and performances), the artist highlights her indigenous cultural background both aesthetically and intellectually, comparing it with expressions of Western culture and art history. Using a language that is both realistic and symbolic, the artist depicts an Afghanistan tormented and destroyed by violent invasions and totalitarian regimes.

The book is published with the contribution of the Prince Claus Fund, the Campania Region and Galleria Giorgio Persano (Turin). It is the first comprehensive monograph on Lida Abdul, with a wide-ranging and detailed iconographic apparatus that illustrates the artist’s complete production.

Lida Abdul (Kabul, 1973) lived in Germany and India as a refugee before moving to the United States where she still lives. Awarded best foreign artist in the Afghanistan pavilion (first shown at the LI Venice Biennale in 2005), and the prestigious Prince Claus Award in 2006, she has exhibited her work at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, the Netherlands, Central in Miami, the CAC Centre d’art Contemporain in Brétigny, the Frac Lorraine in Metz, France, and MoMA in New York. She has also participated in festivals in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. In 2006 and 2007 she participated in the Singapore, Gwanju, São Paulo, Gothenburg, Sharjah and Moscow Biennales.

The series of catalogues published by hopefulmonster for GAM, continues with a monograph dedicated to the Italian artist Elisa Sighicelli for the exhibition held at GAM from March 15 to June 10 2007.
The catalogue, that tells deeply about the artistic personality of the artist through her works, opens with the photographic documentation of the exhibition to tell then through the images the art of Sighicelli from 1990’s up to today, showing light boxes and video projections.
Following a period of substantial observation of many of the variegated and composite effects that light can generate, the artist has recently chosen to investigate, in depth, the perceptive processes triggered by visual and luminous devices, both through moving images and photographic research. The scenarios are normally domestic situations, with an ordinary light. They tell of human presence through interior views, daily and earthy spaces. The attention placed on the possibilities, not only representative but rather experiential, offered by light and darkness, has led Sighicelli to direct her practice to scenarios that are increasingly aimed towards a more active role of the onlooker. 

Fondazione Merz in Turin from April 27th to July 29th, 2007. This book presents works since 1954, illustrating 300 drawings by Mario Merz. The majority of the artist’s sketches have never before been published and there has been little theoretical attempt to understand this crucial aspect of his career. For him, with the exception of writing, drawing was the only medium to accompany life, at home and on one’s travels, not only because it requires little in the way of materials and can be done anywhere and everywhere, but because drawing can match our mental and physical movements.

This book illustrates from the series of drawings on Objet cache-toi (Object, hide yourself) to the themes of the tables, cups and groups dedicated to the Giardino dei gufi (Garden of the owls), Semi floreali volanti (Flying flower seeds) and the Disegni di Sidney (Sydney drawings), as well as the large works depicting the prehistoric “terrible animals”.

The book includes an essay by Dieter Schwarz (Director of Kunstmuseum in Winterthur), Claire Gilman and a selected chronology by Lara Conte.

Giovanni Anselmo is one of the most radical artists of Arte Povera. The capacity of communicating complex themes such as Everything, Particular and Infinite through simple and extremly synthetic immages caracterize his creative art. His artworks are capable of provoking primary energies in the moment materials such as stone, water, steel are transformed into pure tension. Made from organic and inorganic materials such as stone, earth, metal, water and cotton, Anselmo’s works are installed and dotted around in the main exhibition spaces of the gallery. Rather than acting as separate metaphors or simulacra, they embody and translate into perceptible experience basic but generally unnoticed phenomena of knowledge: gravity, energy, the relation between general and particular, finite and infinite, culture and nature, the flow of historic time and the hypothesis of the eternity of universal physical laws, the realist, almost scientific method of experiencing and the abstraction of philosophical principles.

The catalogue is pubblished in occasion of the exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna and offers a complete documentation of the artist's research through his artworks: it also contains a comprehensive biographic profile and bibliography and new critical essays by Tacita Dean, Rosalind Krauss, Susan van de Ven and Gianfranco Maraniello and an interview with the artist curatedd by Andrea Viliani.

Giovanni Anselmo was born in Borgofranco d’Ivrea in 1934. He lives and works in Turin. In 1990 he was awarded the Golden Lion for painting at the 44th Venice Biennale.

The series of catalogues published by hopefulmonster for GAM, Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Torino, reserved for artists of the new generation, continues with a monography dedicated to the Italian artist Sabrina Mezzaqui for the exhibition held at GAM from November 9th 2006 to January 28th, 2007.

The catalogue, that tells deeply about the artistic personality of the artist through his works, opens with the photographic documentation of the exhibition to tell then through the images the art of Mezzaqui from 1990’s up to today, showing installations made by large found objects and paint. She assembles these objects to create new spaces and sculptures. Sabrina Mezzaqui focusses her attention on the most minute things in life. Hers is a really reserved and solitary work, made of repeated gestures, of times dilated up to the point that they become a sort of reflective and auto-imposed discipline, of manual skill and exercise dropped into the temporal suspension of a ritual. Mezzaqui uses ordinary materials: pencil or felt-pen drawing, paper, cut-outs. Also writing is often part of the work, recovered or transformed, or even only imagined or again denied in the chequering of a partially cut sheet whose cut off pieces fall to the floor, suspended between persistence and instability. In her installations, projections of shadow or light or again images of reallife filming with fixed camera, achieve strong suggestions.

The book includes one essay by Elena Volpato, a poem by Mariangela Gualtieri and some writings of the artist.