Helen Marten: Treatise of a Coat
Selected Works on Paper 2019–2025 Published by Walther König, Köln.
Edited by Taylor Walsh, Sam Agnew, Helen Marten, Matthew Stuart, Jeffrey Rowledge. Text by Felix Bernstein, Claire Gilman, Elfriede Jelinek, Eve Esfandiari-Denney. An idiosyncratically designed showcase of Marten's paper-based drawing and painting practice Featuring colored pencil, watercolor, ink, airbrush, acrylic and graphite, alongside other more unusual mediums like sand, silicone or olive oil, this book is a sumptuous visual document of the paper-based drawing and painting practice of British artist Helen Marten (born 1985). Designed as an "unruly" artist's book, Treatise of a Coat features multiple physical and linguistic folds. Its title conveys the homonymic similarities of the word "coat": the literal jacket that is unfurled to expose the naked and unruly shame of human forms; the fur or hair of an animal; the verb function of "to coat" that intentionally builds up visual desire—the acts of lacquering, spreading, enclosing, flooding, directing, or husking that line and color expedite when creating an image. In effect, the constituent materiality of this book is designed with the physicality of making a work on paper in mind.
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