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Paris Koh Fine Arts (201 Bridge Plaza North, Suite 1, Fort Lee, NJ) proudly presents Verba volant, Scripta manent: Despo Magoni, Heejung Kim, Mark Bloch an exhibition of artist books running from April 2nd through 27th, 2024 and celebrated with an opening reception on Saturday April 6th from 5-7PM.

 

Despite the omnipresent dominance of Gutenbergian mass production, since the 18th century, many artists and poets like William Blake endeavored to reverse the industrial secularization of this printed medium, by designing and painting their hand-made books like medieval scribes. This artistic practice reached its zenith during the 20th century with the Russian avant-garde, as well as the Futurists in Italy or the Surrealists and the Dadaists in France, giving birth to the so-called artist books. After World War II, numerous conceptual artists and Fluxus members utilized the artbook form as a novel way of personal expression and artistic creation in the world of contemporary art.

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For example, Despo Magoni, in her mixed media series entitled A Thousand and One Nights, consciously uses the book format to narrate via her expressionist figures, the iconic story of Scheherazade and her personal struggle against a violent and patriarchic culture. Mark Bloch as a conceptual artist utilizes the written word (advertisements, postcards, correspondence letters etc.) to reflect on the constant reshaping and the eventual variation of script or the book medium in today’s electronic and digital world. Finally, Heejung Kim’s artist books push the imaginative production of the medium to its outmost limits of formal innovation wherein her artbooks reforge in a sculptural-haptic manner, everything we know about the book format.

Despo Magoni, Mark Bloch and Heejung Kim manage through their artist books to overcome the limiting boundaries of their art medium. They re-introduce to the viewer an imaginative play of all the senses, reverting to a primordial state of artistic creation, where each book constituted a unique work of art of a holistic quality (combining image, text, sculpture, calligraphy and design); something that had been missing in Western culture for almost 300 years.

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For More Information:

Curator: THalia Vrachopoulos,  tvrachopoulos@gmail.com     646 344 9009

 

Paris Koh Fine Arts, 201 Bridge Plaza North, Fort Lee, NJ 07024

Pariskohfinearts.com   201 724 7077   pariskohfinearts@gmail.com

 

Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat 11-6    Sun - Tue; by appointment only