We are excited to announce the release of Faye Toogood: Assemblage 6, Unlearning, the first book in a three-part series by Apartamento Publishing that focuses on individual collections by international designer. Upcoming titles feature Misha Kahn and Najla El Zein.
This new book captures the raw moment of inception behind a designer’s collection: 448 pages of the original rough-edged maquettes and ensuing artworks that make up Assemblage 6: Unlearning, while it also features a short story by Man Booker–nominated author Sophie Mackintosh and an essay by curator and writer Glenn Adamson.
Faye Toogood’s newest collection started with almost 300 maquettes: chairs, lamps, stools, or daybeds made of wire, cardboard, tape, and canvas, or the everyday materials she keeps in her studio. But having lined up these rather crude, almost childlike maquettes, the collection, in essence, was decided. Seventeen were chosen to be scaled up to life-size works, and the next two years were dedicated to replicating, precisely, the primitive naïveté of the original pieces at full scale and with artisanal materials, pushing the theme of ‘unlearning’ to its rough-hewn but illusive conclusion.
This book provides an immersive journey through the original maquettes and their occasional passage into the real world of furniture/sculpture, playing with the sense of dissimulation evident in the final artworks, or the fact that some objects are not always what they seem at first glance. British author Sophie Mackintosh opens with this idea in her short story, while the book closes on an essay by independent writer and curator Glenn Adamson, who ultimately provides context for the body of work as a whole.
The object itself plays with this underlying theme, too, as an industrially produced paperback with artisanal finishes and cover artwork that reproduces an original composition by Faye Toogood. Made in collaboration with Friedman Benda, this is the first of three books in a new series by Apartamento Publishing; additional titles focused on designers represented by the gallery will debut later this year.
First edition, 448 pages, 361 photographs, 145 x 220mm, softcover with gilding binding
RRP: 30 euro (available here)
