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.
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.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Travis Jeppesen, Eileen Myles, Brian Dillon.
British artist Helen Marten (born 1985) combines disparate materials and painted images in elaborate sculptural tableaux composed of assembled materials that resonate with associative meaning. Frequently employing visual and linguistic ambiguity in order to explore the potential of misinterpretation and misunderstanding, Marten’s output includes sculpture, videos, text and screen-printed paintings. Conceived as an artist’s book-cum-catalog for an exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House focuses on key works produced by the artist in recent years, and offers detailed perspectives on Marten’s meticulous installations. With an essay by Brian Dillon that investigates Marten’s practice, as well as texts by Travis Jeppesen and Eileen Myles that take inspiration from the artist’s works, this volume presents a fittingly eclectic approach to one of today’s most restlessly innovative artists.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Tom Eccles, Beatrix Ruf, Polly Staple. Text by Michael Archer, Ed Atkins, Tom Eccles, Kit Grover, Flint Jamison, Richard Wentworth, Beatrix Ruf, Polly Staple.
British artist Helen Marten (born 1985) humorously explores questions of ownership and dishonesty in the relationship of object to artifact and package to product. Marten’s installations, sculptures and videos play upon our reference systems for things and a coding of the visual that establishes our most elemental relationships to the material world. Marten thus weaves conversations between counterfeit and camouflage in which image is continually sabotaged by language, by a deliberateness of error that presents itself with all the concrete certainty of cultural legitimacy. This publication is the first to fully document Marten’s output. It accompanies a year-long exhibition touring at the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Chisenhale Gallery in London and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. The book includes numerous installation and work views.
Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House
Helen Marten