Price: 162 lei

Gustav Metzger. Act or Perish! – A Retrospective is the catalogue of the first extensive overview of Gustav Metzger organized in 2015-2016 at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun and Kunsthall Oslo and Stiftelsen Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo and curated by Dobrila Denegri and Pontus Kyander. Divided into sections – each of which is accompanied by a critical text – corresponding to those presented in the exhibition, the catalogue provides systematic insight into an artistic oeuvre considered as one of the most important in the 20th century.

If the retrospective, which started at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Torun before travelling to Oslo, was presented in distinctively different formats – the former providing audiences with a wide overview of Metzger’s career and works, including attention to his early years of political activism and engagement and concomitant radicalization, and the latter focusing upon deeper researched aspects of the artist’s production, – the exhibition catalogue provides readers with a rich array of theoretical contributions, including a conversation between Dobrila Denegri and Yoko Ono and texts by Hermannn Nitsch and Jon Hendricks, as well as Metzger’s own writings.

The contributors Pontus Kyander, Andrew Wilson, Mathieu Copeland, Dobrila Denegri, Leanne Dmyterko, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Manuel Olveira take up different aspects of Metzger’s work, from the artist’s early political activism, to his experimentation with painting to his drafting of the manifestoes for Auto-Destructive Art, providing us with an invaluable and much awaited document for consultation in contemporary art.