HILARY LLOYD
Kunstmuseum, Basel

This publication represents the first monograph on the work of the Turner Prize nominated British artist. Designed to accompany her solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, Basel and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

First published by Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, 2012; edited, and with a foreword by, Nikola Dietrich; texts by Kirsty Bell, Sabeth Buchmann and Pablo Lafuente; 260 x 200 mm; 216 pp; 138 color images; softcover with open binding, front flap incorporating a dual language booklet for texts (German and English).

After many discussions with the artist around how work such as hers may be adequately represented on the printed page, the opportunity arose to carry this out through the kind auspices of Nikola Dietrich at the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel.

The publication was to accompany the exhibition, but from the outset the motivation was to create a stand alone publication. Although any desire to provide an ‘equivalent’ to the work via the book would be clearly misguided, through the structuring and division of aesthetic content, distribution of the combination of differing papers, semi-wayward cropping of the images, concealing/intrusion of the captions, and finally the nearly-fragile collating, binding and finishing, the finished object might hopefully go some way to reflecting the spirit of the artist’s lightness of touch, conceptual rigour and approach to image making (or rather, lived experience and its representation through images).

Exhibition context (from the gallery press release): “The furtive eye of Lloyd’s camera records scenes of urban life, among other objects, illuminating the modern city as a site of voyeurism, fetishism, and sexual ambivalence. People engaged in everyday rituals and routine gestures of self-projection draw the artist’s interest, as do architecture, advertising, and the play of lighting effects on different surfaces. […]The selective gaze paints a picture of urban fascination permeated by a dynamic choreography of static and moving sequences. Such effects of perception fused in pictorial montages are most obviously achieved by virtue of mirror reflections, split screens, and rotation […]. In some instances, the viewer cannot infer the material reality of the surfaces. […] They are reduced to pure surface and materiality. Yet Lloyd’s practice is not limited to the filmed image; the installation, with monitors, flat screens, and projectors elegantly and meticulously set out in the room, also acquires a strong presence. The visitor is inevitably confronted not only with the pictures, but also with their manifestation”.