Worry Thumb

New series of paintings by the Swiss artist, that examine the role of humankind in nature and within its social fabric on a philosophical-anthropological level.

"I asked Andriu Deplazes if he had always wished to be a painter. No, he said. For a time, he had trained to be a classical musician, but turned away from music because there was something repellent about the need to demonstrate virtuosity. To be a virtuoso, as the moral world depicted in these paintings clearly shows, is not the same as having virtue. And yet, at the same time, there are still traces of virtuosity in Deplazes' practice: in the idealised landscapes that he renders, and in the easy depiction of animal life. It is only humans that he will not denigrate with such perfection. Their overpainted faces do not allow them to be captured as things, but rather present them as subjects. They elude categorisation because they are responding, in real time, to what they see in us." Adam Jasper

Born 1993 in Zurich, Andriu Deplazes lives and works in Zurich, Brussels and Marseille. His paintings create a kind of parallel cosmos that questions the habitual ways of seeing and expectations of the beholder. Wide landscapes in colourfully powerful large format are the setting for curious characters who sometimes melt into the vegetation around them or appear strangely remote from it. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe since 2015.

Ingo Giezendanner's wild herbarium.

Density in the foliage, branching of the tree, structure in the bark: this book is entirely dedicated to organic, wild-growing greenery, mostly in black and white, but patterns emerge, the leaves become a frenzy, and grimaces from the thicket smile at us. The volume is deliberately overwhelming, making it impossible to get an overview. Rather this thick paperback serves as a reference for untamable, rampant, sprawling kraut.

Since 1998, Ingo Giezendanner, alias GRRRR, has been documenting the urban spaces in which he has travelled and lived. Apart from his native city of Zurich, his travels have taken him to diverse cities from New York and New Orleans to Cairo, Nairobi, Karachi and Colombo. Everywhere he travels, he captures his surroundings on location with pen on paper. His drawings have been presented in numerous magazines, books and animated films as well as in spacious installations and wallpaintings.

Caroline Bachmann's dawn paintings.

Caroline Bachmann's paintings owe as much to turn-of-last-century Symbolism—in their attempt to depict an infinite stillness, whose synthetic depiction of nature could be mistaken for that of eternity—as to plein air painting. The artist lives and works on the shore of Lake Geneva, where she spends hours contemplating the scenery, recording with a lead pencil on paper minute details of atmospheric events, making notes in the margins of subtle colour changes—not unlike comic book colourists of the pre-digital age, whose job it was to pass on to engravers written codes corresponding to the 64 possible combinations of percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black at their disposal. Back in the studio, the paintings are then built up over a lengthy period of time with translucent glazes of oil paint.

A previously unpublished collection of 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.

An early progenitor of the artist's book genre, Warja Honegger-Lavater was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1913. She worked as an illustrator for the magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958, and moved to New York shortly thereafter where she began a wonderful series of artist's books. 
These books were published between 1962 and 1971, an exceptionally ripe time for artists to turn to the bookform, a time when the most often cited "first" artist's book also appeared, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) by Ed Ruscha.

All of Honegger-Lavater's books are made using the accordion-fold binding. Her aesthetic has been aptly described as "very clean, very Swiss." Each book tells a story, sequentially, like traditional books, but varying from them by rarely using words. Instead she chooses a symbol to represent, for example, a character, as in the red dot standing in for Red Riding Hood in Little Red Riding Hood.

TOT ZINES collaborates with local artists in Antwerp, Belgium. Initiated by Sarah Stone in 2024, who invited digital creator Sarah Mayer to publish her set of paintings zing that she created in 2017. This is the first publication for TOT ZINES, RISO-printed by SO-RI in Antwerp.

This publication features a project by Leone Contini looking into the canned food available during the war of Caporetto in 1917 and especially its iconography. It brings together an essay by the artist along with reproductions of a selection of his drawings.

Leone Contini (born 1976 in Florence) studied philosophy and cultural anthropology at the University of Siena. His research unrolls at the intersection of anthropology, aesthetics and politics and his mediums include lecture-performances, collective interventions in public spaces, textual and visual narratives, drawings. His research is focused on intercultural frictions, conflict and power relations, displacement, migrations and diasporas, aiming to investigate, to question and to re-shape identity patterns and power relations.

Part documentation, part drawing tool, fa3 is a publication that contains the work done through full auto foundry, a workshop-based type foundry that explores how processes of automation and tool-assisted sketching can influence the design of typefaces.

Using analogue tools, participants of the workshops are encouraged to draw letterforms without thinking too much about what the letter should be. Absent-minded drawing and doodling replace thought-out design, leading to alphabets quickly (and sometimes slowly) emerging through the repetition of mark-making. The quality, in a traditional sense, of these letterforms becomes less important than the quantity of them and the marks that were drawn to produce them, this often leads to oddly inconsistent but exciting typefaces. Once the sketches that the participants produce are finished, they are scanned and go through a process of automated digitisation. Each typeface that is produced is available with an open-source license, free to download and free to manipulate.

fa3 is a publication that is both a collection of all the drawing tools that have been designed/used in workshops and a drawing tool itself. Using these pages as a traceable surface the reader/drawer can combine forms and patterns together with the goal of creating letters.

Edition of drawings, paintings and scans by Sophia Hamdouch, wrapped in a vinyl sleeve.