Alaska

This publication documenting Argentine artist Matias Duville’s Alaska project is the first significant American publication devoted to Duville’s work. Duville’s project began in 2008 when he started to produce prolific drawings of the U.S. state—a place he had never visited. The aim of his project lay not in the accurate evocation of Alaska, but in the rendering of the place as it existed in his imagination—through fantastical and often nightmarish vistas and desolate landscapes inhabited only by remnants of human existence. In 2009 Duville expanded this initial project, traveling to Alaska and back, allowing the observable reality he found there—and later his memory of it—to infiltrate the fictional world he had created in his studio.

Befitting the tripartite structure of Duville’s project, this publication is divided into three volumes. Each book presents respectively the charcoal and crayon drawings Duville produced in the three stages comprising his visionary enterprise: before Alaska, during Alaska, and after Alaska. The volumes also feature texts by Mark Polizzotti, Wells Towers, and Robert Nelson.