Thomas Hirschhorn PREPARATORY DRAWINGS FOR “CRYSTAL OF RESISTANCE”

Published Summer 2012

Concept and design: Thomas Hirschhorn

Edition of twenty-nine, each housed in a cardboard box containing eighty-eight facsimiles and three original drawings in variable sizes.
Offset printing on paper.
Box size: 35 x 51 cm
Box hand-labelled and numbered by the artist.

This publication of facsimiles reunited in a fitted box with three original sketches is a rare peek into the working process of Swiss artist, Thomas Hirschhorn. It is a follow-up to “Crystal of Resistance”, the artist’s large-scale work for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennial and one of the few artist’s notes which remain after the exhibition. This series of collages and preliminary sketches published by Three Star Books constitutes the preparatory drawings for the artist’s monumental sculptural work and shows his thoughts, logic and guidelines with the immediacy of the time of conception. These sketches, which Hirschhorn taped to the walls of his studio and used as reference while working on the set-up in Venice, reveal a fragment of his world vision, in the process of giving form and following the motif of the fractal-like nature of crystals. Through his collages, large and small issues are confronted in kaleidoscopic configurations, blurring the customary distinctions between architecture, drawing, sculpture, painting, and printed book-matter. Three Star Books has created a limited edition of facsimiles of eighty-eight drawings, printed in offset on both sides and assembled in a cardboard box. Each box is hand-labelled by the artist and contains three original preparatory drawings from the “Crystal of Resistance” work sketches. This exceptional project totalises through its eighty-eight folios the artist’s will to give form and his questioning of aesthetics, natural history, philosophy, love, politics, and above all, how to do art today.

As the artist writes: “Through my work Crystal of Resistance I want to question. First: Can my work create a new term of art? Second: Can my work develop a ‘Critical corpus’? Third: Can my work engage – beyond the art audience – a ‘Non-exclusive Public’? I want to answer each of these questions, these goals and these self-demanding ambitions – with my work and in my work. I believe that art is universal, I believe that art is autonomous, I believe that art can provoke a dialogue or a confrontation – one-to-one – and I believe that art can include every human being. When I write ‘believe’, I’m doing it not because I think or know it, not because I can prove it – but because – in art – it’s a matter of believing. With Crystal of Resistance I want to produce a work that is irresistible. This can only happen if I succeed in creating a work out of my innermost self, without confusing – as it is usually done – the inner self and ‘the personal’. I can only reach the universal if I risk conflict with my inner self. ‘The personal’ doesn’t interest me because it’s not resistant in itself, it is always an explanation – if not an excuse. My work can only have effect if it has the capacity of transgressing the boundaries of the ‘personal’, of the academic, of the imaginary, of the circumstantial, of the context and of the contemplation. With Crystal of Resistance I want to cut a window, a door, an opening or simply a hole, into reality. That is the breakthrough that leads and carries everything along.”
T. H., Aubervilliers, 2011 (Courtesy the artist, translated from German) 

SEE THE DRAWINGS HERE

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