Now in Print | HELEN MARTEN: Treatise of a Coat

Softcover
Color
392 Pages
8 3/4 x 10 3/4 in (22 x 28 cm)

Treatise of a Coat is the first monograph devoted to works on paper by the internationally acclaimed artist Helen Marten. Featuring colored pencil, watercolor, ink, airbrush, acrylic, and graphite—alongside other more unusual media like sand, silicone, or olive oil—this book is a sumptuous visual document of Marten’s paper-based drawing and painting practice. Designed as an unruly "artist's book," Treatise of a Coat has multiple physical and linguistic folds. The title is a forcing of the homonymic similarities of 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, with its intentional building up of visual desire—the acts of lacquering, spreading, enclosing, flooding, directing, or husking that line and color expedite when creating an image. The constituent materiality of this book is designed with the physicality of making a work on paper in mind.

Texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Claire Gilman, and Felix Bernstein.

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