Commerce

The project explores a fundamental aspect of Christopher Williams’s practice, in which the book functions not as documentation but as an autonomous space for the construction of the image. Catalogues, artist’s books, invitations, posters, and other printed materials trace his investigation into photographic devices, systems of reproduction, and modes of circulation. Sequence, layout, typography, pauses, and blank pages shape the meaning of the images rather than merely accompanying them. The exhibition highlights how the book form becomes central to his inquiry: a place where photography moves beyond the single print to operate as apparatus, montage, and critical structure.

General Idea was founded in Toronto in 1969 by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. Harnessing humour and parody, General Idea borrowed structures from mass media, such as television, advertising, and magazines, to probe the production, circulation and consumption of images, art and culture. In 1972 they launched the first issue of FILE Megazine, an obvious spoof of the popular American news magazine LIFE.

The exhibition presents a selection of the Megazine’s early issues, as well as the most experimental and avant-garde ones, and a collection of artist’s editions including books, multiples, and objects of various kind.

This is a book about white, but not the white of simplicity or erasure.
It is about white as a surface where other colors whisper, where pace slows down, and where light becomes a subject of its own.
I began this project as a photographer, but it quickly became something more tactile and more contemplative. In each image, white is not neutral. It is haunted by softness, by shadow, by warmth or cold that barely registers. It is a white that holds memory, a white that has been touched.
Across these pages, you will find quiet interventions: pastel dominants, pale pollutants, tones that seem almost imaginary. I was not interested in showing white as absence.
I wanted to show its tension, its skin, its breath.
To explore what surrounds it, shapes it, disturbs it.
A remainder. A resonance.
This book is both a study and a feeling. It is a way to slow down the gaze, a kind of resistance to spectacle that invites the viewer to lean closer and to notice what normally dissolves into the background.
It appears in fragments, as delay, as absence, as something that resists completion.
Philosophically, white exists as paradox. It is both full spectrum and no color.
It reveals and conceals. It is what remains after everything, and sometimes what comes before. This project leans into that paradox, where white is never neutral and always relational. It changes depending on proximity, on memory, on mood.
The subtle dominants, pastel tones and foggy pigments, are not impurities but suggestions.
They are interruptions, traces, hesitations.
Together, they question the idea of fixed meaning and invite a slower form of looking.

Urs Lüthi, Don’t ask me if you know that I’m too weak to say no, published by Plura Edizioni, is a complete portfolio with 16 photographs and each photograph is dated, numbered and hand signed by the artist.

Lüthi Urs (born September 10, 1947, in Kriens, Switzerland) is a Swiss conceptual artist and one of the pioneers of European body art. He attended the School of Applied Arts in Zurich (1963-1964) and initially worked as a graphic designer before turning to art. Lüthi gained international recognition in the early 1970s for his androgynous self-portraits and performance work, using his own body and alter ego as the primary subject of his art. His work explores themes of identity, sexuality, and the relationship between reality and fiction, often combining irony and self-irony with a controlled aesthetic quest.

Throughout his career, he has worked across multiple media including photography, sculpture, painting, video, performance, and installation. His artistic practice is characterized by constant formal innovation while maintaining thematic coherence around questions of selfhood and existence.

As Far as You Can See is the first comprehensive collection of all the books created by Erik Kessels from 1997 to today, culminating with the latest publication Incomplete Encyclopedia Of Touch. A visual journey through more than two decades of artistic, editorial, and photographic research. Erik Kessels is internationally recognized for his work in vernacular photography, visual appropriation, and storytelling through printed images. As Far as You Can See is much more than a simple catalog: it is a map of his vision, an overview of the human, the everyday, and the absurd, composed book by book.

As Far as You Can See is the first editorial off-set printed project curated by Commerce, characterized by a focus on bibliographic research, the study of the editorial practice of artists, photographers and protagonists of the contemporary visual panorama.

The volume includes an unpublished text by critic and curator Francesco Zanot, who analyzes the evolution of Erik Kessels’s visual language. Rather than a single essay, Zanot’s contribution mirrors the very structure of the collection: his commentary unfolds through as many brief reflections as there are books in the volume. Each point is a lens on a single title, shaping a fragmented yet coherent map of Erik Kessels’s practice.

The Art Direction and concept of the book are by Cabinet Milano, which created a modular layout system to accommodate the video frames, captured by Riccardo Ruffolo and Enrico Zanetti. A timeline of spreads from Kessel’s bibliography runs through over 200 color illustrated pages of the volume. The design is by Francesco Valtolina and Nicola Narbone.

As Far as You Can See is a new chapter of BIBLIOGRAPHY, a set of displays showcasing the work of all publishing players through the presentation of their editorial artefacts to date.

Focusing on Maurizio Nannucci’s interdisciplinary practice and his wide range of using printed, visual and phonetic media, Let’s Talk About Art offers a comprehensive overview of his extraordinary creativity as publisher and producer of editions and multiples, as well as artists’ books, prints, posters, records....for the international community / network of the artist’s friends and collegues. 1968 he started Exempla edizioni, later on Recorthings and Zona Archives Edizioni.

Significant for this practice is the poster Art as social environment which underlines the approach of Nannucci to make, to show and to share art as an open social project that he is pushing forward until today.

To name just a few names on the long exhibition list of friends and collegues, for whom he has published editions during the second half of the 20th century: John Armleder, Giuseppe Chiari, John Cage, Peter Downsbrough, Carsten Nicolai, Olaf Nicolai, Yoko Ono, Jonathan Monk, Heimo Zobernig, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Franco Vaccari, Lawrence Weiner.

The exhibition shows too how Nannucci’s field of art practice and research has been expanded since the 1960s, exploring the intersection of disciplines such as visual art, linguistics, literature, sound, philosophy, and architecture.

GINO DE DOMINICIS. A READER casts new light on the life and career of the eccentric Italian artist, philosopher and architect Gino De Dominicis (1947–98), a controversial figure in postwar Italy. The artist’s belief that artworks may provide a valuable model for achieving the immortality of the body inspired his entire life and oeuvre, which spanned many mediums from painting to drawing to largescale sculpture and installation. The volume, as a culmination of Gabriele Guercio’s extensive research, presents not only the reflections of De Dominicis but also a collection of essays and interviews penned by a wide range of artists, art historians, critics and curators such as Marina Abramovic, Jean-Christophe Ammann, Achille Bonito Oliva, Norman Bryson, Germano Celant, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Shiff and Italo Tomassoni. The volume also features a selection of archival materials and images.

Machiavelli 30 by Vincenzo Agnetti published by Axis Axis is an audio format of one of the most important oeuvres in the field of Italian art and experimental poetry.

Putting the last piece starting from the original work, conceived as a book and published by Guanda in 1978, Agnetti decided to recite the whole text in front of a portable tape recorder, and the 17’ audio in this vinyl is the output hitherto unpublished.
Vincenzo Agnetti was born in Milan in 1926 and began his artistic career by attending Brera Academy and Piccolo Teatro school in Milan. He is considered as one of the pivotal figures in conceptual art and poetry Italian neo avantgarde context, both in visual arts and literature.

The Third Hand is a unique collaboration between artist Marton Perlaki, OK-RM and InOtherWords imprint. Originally published in the fall of 2023, the project captures the evolution of Perlaki’s practice over a period of five years. The book, designed by OK-RM (Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath), who also lead InOtherWords, explores and articulates the challenge of giving tangible form to an ever-changing artistic practice.

The exhibition centers on the concept of the creative space as a nurturing incubator for developing ideas and intuitive work. It features Perlaki’s sketchbooks, unpublished collages, and two nearly identical photographs of his crowded studio, inviting viewers to explore his personal space. The collages merge his still lifes with newspaper clippings, linking his solitary process to global events and deepening the connection between his creative world and the broader context. Alongside there will be a showcase of the entire catalogue of InOtherWords titles, offering a comprehensive overview of their publishing history. A brief catalogue accompanies the exhibition, serving as an extension of The Third Hand and marking a new chapter in this dynamic collaboration.

The book Cell Grids by Mousse Publishing documents the eponymous exhibition the American artist Peter Halley held at Dallas Contemporary in 2021, curated by Peter Doroshenko. On that occasion, nineteen Cell Grid paintings executed between 2015 and 2021, each composed of several – at minimum, nine – monochrome rectangular panels abutted, where hung on five ten-by-ten-foot white closed cubes arranged in two rows within the exhibition space. The colors are all fluorescent or metallic acrylic to which has been added Roll-A-Tex, an additive that gives a distinctive crepelike texture. Deciphering these paintings, which hover between abstraction and representation, is almost like learning a new language.

Peter Halley (1953, New York) emerged as an artist, and primary as a writer, from the artistic landscape of New York in the 1980s and as an influential member of the Neo-Geo movement.

Halley is also the former publisher of Index Magazine, a New York City-based publication which aimed to cover the burgeoning indie culture of the 1990s. Launched in 1996 Index run until late 2005.

Since 1996, Index magazine has been spotlighting emergent and established figures in music, movies, fashion, art, writing and culture. It features interviews with stars and photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller and Terry Richardson.

On display a selection of back issues of INDEX MAGAZINE.

ENZO MARI: OFFSET & OBJECTS is an exhibition focused on the publishing practice by Enzo Mari. On display a generous selection of printed matter works, multiples and objects. The setting will include rare publications, exhibition catalogs, artist’s books, posters, and ephemera designed over fifty years of research.

Wolfgang Tillmans, The Big Issue is an exhibition on the publishing practice of Wolfgang Tillmans with approximately 80 publications (exhibition catalogs and artist’s books), posters, ephemera, and magazine contributions by the artist over the past thirty years. The display will be an opportunity to appreciate his multifaceted approach to photography. Very early he used press and printed matter objetcs as a means of disseminating his work, notably in periodicals such as i-D, Purple Prose, The Big Issue, Spex, or Zeit Magazin. The books and publications are a medium of creation and most of them are edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Through visual dynamic interactions, (portraits, still life, urban scenes) the whole structure of these issues and volumes works as a constellation of images.

Richard Prince is one of the pioneers of the art of appropriation. By (re)photographing advertising images or recycling elements of American popular culture - whether westerns, comics or pulp fiction - he questions the fundamentals and construction of American mythology and the hierarchy between “high” and “low” art.

His production of images also raises questions related to the authorship of the work, plagiarism and intellectual property, and the dissemination and circulation of imagery .

He is also a collector and obsessive producer of books, from War Pictures (1980) to The Entertainers: 1982–1983 (2023).

This exhibition allows one to discover his book practice, an aspect of the artist’s work which has rarely been displayed.

In addition to the publication Bibliothèque d’un Amateur. Richard Prince’s Publications, co-published by Viaindustriae Publishing, Christophe Daviet-Thery, Éditions Centre de la Photographie Genève, 2022, several vintage artist books by Richard Prince will also be available for purchase.

I’ve always felt that good art has to reflect somehow on its own process of coming to be.—Jeff Wall

From a Private Collection, curated together with Jeff Wall, is a new show at Commerce.

To celebrate this new eminent collaboration, a new poster edition of A Sunflower, 1995 will be available from May 11th.

Takashi Homma is a Japanese artist. In the 1990s he began to focus on territorial analysis, which he carried out first in Japan and then around the world.

After staging a major retrospective show at the 21st-Century Museum of Kanazawa and at the Tokyo City Opera Art Gallery, in 2014 he began the project The Narcissistic City, issued in April 2016 by the British publisher Mack Books, focusing on an analysis of the most representative and iconic buildings in various cities. The exhibition in Viasaterna La città narcisista. Milano e altre storie was his first solo show in Italy, and features the premier of a new series of works dedicated to the city of Milan, produced in January 2017.

In 2019 he published the work Symphony - mushrooms from the forest, with Case Publishing, Tokyo. In 2021, he held an exhibition at the CCA in Montreal entirely dedicated to the study of windows in Le Corbusier's architecture, accompanied by a publication published by Walther König with the title Looking Through Le Corbusier Windows. October 2023 will see the opening of a solo exhibition at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum