Artists and their books / books and their artists, hardcover/marcia reed

This stunning volume illuminates the current moment of artists engagement with books, revealing them as an essential medium in contemporary art.

Ever innovative and predictably diverse in their physical formats, artists books occupy a creative space between the familiar four-cornered object and challenging works of art that effectively question every preconception of what a book can be.

Many artists specialize in producing self-contained art projects in the form of books, like Ken Campbell and Susan King, or they establish small presses, like Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horns Coracle Press or Harry and Sandra Reeses Turkey Press.

Countless others who are primarily known as sculptors, painters, or performance artists carry on a parallel practice in artists books, including Anselm Kiefer, Annette Messager, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Tuttle.

Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artists includes over one hundred important examples selected from the Getty Research Institutes Special Collections of more than six thousand editions and unique artists books.

This volume also presents precursors to the artists book, such as Joris Hoefnagels sixteenth-century calligraphy masterpiece; single-sheet episodes from Albrecht D rers Life of Mary , designed to be either broadsides or a book; early illustrated scientific works; and avant-garde publications.

Twentieth-century works reveal the impact of artists books on Pop Art, Fluxus, Conceptualism, feminist art, and postmodernism.

The selection of books by an international range of artists who have chosen to work with texts and images on paper provokes new inquiry into the nature of art and books in contemporary culture.