“Paper has established its position as an autonomous material in the visual arts and has long been more than a mere support. It was included by the Cubists as an element in their collages. Sculptures with a pervasive and dynamic spatial presence are produced from paper today. The current exhibition does not seek to display such unique works of art, nor does it deal with the delicate three-dimensional cut-out works that often appear in internet searches with the term ‘paper sculpture’ or the intricate and ingenuous pop-up books, created by paper engineers, that appear mostly in English-speaking countries. Its focus is on published works by visual artists.
In the medium of artists’publications, the traditional category of sculpture (to be understood here in its widest sense as embracing both constructed works and objects) has undergone an expansion in terms of materials and diffusion. Assembled from paper or cardboard, printed in multiple copies and available at reasonable prices, these works reveal themselves to be original editions. Inspired by historical precursors such as cardboard cut-out figures or books with movable elements, many autonomous works of visual art have been conceived for construction or mounting through the manual dexterity of the beholder.”
Published on the occasion of a traveling exhibition of published paper sculptures, with numerous examples of such structures by many artists (one also by the writer of these lines), with an introduction by Guy Schraenen and an essay by Bettina Brach, soft cover, 15 x 15 cm, 240 pages, Bremen Porto 2011
