RECTO VERSO

A comprehensive retrospective of the Spanish artist's work, covering his major exhibitions (Manifesta, Reina Sofia, MACBA, Raven Row, etc.) and including all of his texts published as fanzines over a period of twenty years, a new critical essay by Kim West, and a wide-ranging conversation.
Conceived as a compilation of works and writings of the last two decades, this book is structured as an alternating succession of four different registers: four recurrent modes. A long-form interview, a series of questions from different collaborators, documentation of a selection of projects, and a compilation of the facsimilia of the brochures published by the author since 2008. The aim of this concatenation of recurring sections is to delay the linear progression suggested by the narrative of a compilation, by the apparent causal string of decisions, ideas, references and works displayed as an accumulative "biography" of the artist's practice. However, this being a bound book, the suggestion of an interwoven relation between all the works, regardless of when, where or how they were made, must submit to the order locked by the sewn spine of its signatures, the folder of bound pages that forms each section of a book.
Designed by Filiep Tacq, the book includes an essay by Kim West and a long-form interview by Beatriz Herráez, punctuated by questions from Filiep Tacq, Lisa Tan, Jon Mikel Euba, Antonio Menchen, Alex Valijani, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Itziar Okariz, Olatz Otalora, Antonia Majaca, Pablo Lafuente and Koenraad Dedobbeleer.
Asier Mendizabal (born 1973 in Ordizia, lives and works in Bilbao and Stockholm) is an artist and is involved in several educational projects in addition to his current position as professor of sculpture at KKH, Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. His work developed from an early interest in the way in which the reconstruction of Basque culture in the 20th century adopted the language of abstraction through a singular translation into popular and political uses. The representation of the collective, the construction of identity and the role of technique in these phenomena have been recurring themes in his work, which has often been described as a critique of ideology. His practice confronts conventional narratives of history, archival or ethnographic objects, or political and subcultural representations, looking at the technical and material conditions of all of them. Writing is a regular resource in his practice, always in relation to sculpture.