Ghent: Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, 1977. Square quarto (30.5 x 30.5 cm). White cardstock portfolio-style wrappers with loose leaves, as issued; 16 screenprints on white cardstock plus title leaf and edition leaf, 18 leaves total. Near mint condition. Hand-numbered, monogrammed, and dated 1/60 RB 77 in pencil on last sheet.

Robert Barry (b. 1936) is an American conceptual artist known primarily for his non-visible and non-material installation and performance art. He has exhibited at international events such as the Paris Biennale and the Venice Biennale, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn, the Guggenheim, the Musée d'Orsay, the Whitney, the Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

According to a catalogue from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barry's work focuses on "escaping the previously known physical limits of the art object in order to express the unknown or unperceived." (Goldstein and Rorimer, 1995: Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-1975.) In one of Barry's works, "Carrier Wave", he used the carrier waves of a radio station for a certain length of time not to transmit information but as an object; and in Inert Gas Piece, he opened various containers of inert gases in different settings before groups of spectators.

This suite of prints each consists of a series of words printed in all capital letters. The first six have words printed only around the outside of each sheet, the next four have words in cross and x-shapes, the following four have words spaced out throughout the whole leaf, and the final two prints have the words running down the page in a centered vertical column.

Very scarce; this suite of prints was published only in an edition of 60, and as of March 2023 we can not find a single holding through OCLC.

Book ID: 52767

Price: $1,950.00