Launch of the Artist’s Book ‘ilimit’

On Tuesday, 14 February 2012 at 6:30 p.m. Ivorypress launched the artist book ilimit, created by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, at Ivorypress Space. On the occasion of the presentation, the curator and art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist conversed with Isidoro Valcárcel Medina about his œuvre.

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, Spain, 1937) is one of the foremost representatives of Spanish conceptual art and the 2007 winner of Spain’s National Award for the Visual Arts. In this artist book, Valcárcel Medina explores the comparison between the limited and the unlimited while proposing a reflection on seriation and exclusivity, two recurring concepts in the art world. Each of the volumes of ilimit, created in an edition of nine, plus two artist proofs, is unique, signed and numbered by the artist and consisting of five hundred pages. The content of these pages is solely their numbering, correlative volume after volume, from page 1 up to page 6000. This page numbering is written using ordinal numbers in different languages, chosen randomly from a total selection of fifthy eight languages.

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina has worked on time and space since the beginnings of his artistic career. After an initial pictorial stage, in the seventies he began a period which started out with a large-scale intervention in urban space, after which he became interested in poetic intervention. He has been working with architecture since the eighties, becoming involved in specific projects in real situations, such as the creation of a reservoir, or the squatter movement. Valcárcel Medina has created films, sound pieces, architectural projects and artist books that operate as examples and records of situations. Both his past career and most recent works reveal a socially engaged attitude which maintains its distance from the dynamic of the art market.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (Zurich, 1968) has been co-director of exhibitions and programmes and the director of international projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London since 2006. From 2000 to 2006 he was curator of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and, from 1993 to 2000, curator of Museum in Progress in Vienna. Since 1991, Obrist has curated over a hundred fifty exhibitions worldwide. He also is a regular contributor to Abitare, Artforum and Paradis magazines, as well as editor of 032c magazine.