Karen Wirth's Book Art Inspired by Architectural Forms Goes on Show
Karen Wirth's work at Minnesota Center for Book Arts
Two exhibitions of work by artist Karen Wirth will open on April 12 at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Building/Books | Karen Wirth: A Retrospective Exhibition and Archabet: An Architectural Abecedarium.
This major retrospective and site-specific installation will offer multiple installations of book arts inspired by architectural forms through June 8, including tours with the artist on May 17 and 18. It highlights Wirth’s work across artists' books, sculpture, public art, and installation, all influenced by and in conversation with architectural form. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalog.
The former vice-president and interim president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), and the first artist to be a board member of MCBA, Karen Wirth has a 40-year relationship with books within her practice and an equally long relationship with MCBA as an artist, teacher, and 2024 McKnight Book Artist Fellow.
In MCBA’s Main Gallery, Wirth’s architectural book-related works read as poetic stanzas of architectural storytelling. New works such as The Grammar of Architecture dance along the wall at eight feet long, allowing the viewer to walk in partnership with the installation to create their own syntax. The exhibition also includes photo documentation of many of Wirth’s public art pieces, including a blue line light rail station she co-designed, and The Invention of Clouds, previously installed on the ceiling of MCBA.
“Building/Books celebrates one body of work developed over nearly 40 years," said Wirth. "It began when I salvaged used roofing slate as raw material when I lived in Washington D.C., and was further informed when I photographed rapidly-built postmodern timber-framed houses while living in San Diego. It took form when I moved into a compact bungalow in Minneapolis. I have explored this architecture-related body over the years, and no matter the subject matter or the final form, books have been the anchor. Books are, like my work, the embodiment of thought. Time, sequence, directionality and immersion are essential elements that move a reader through the book, and also through physical space.”
MCBA’s Outlook Gallery will also feature a new installation by Wirth, Archabet: An Architectural Abecedarium, a six-foot high drum leaf bound book that presents the cityscape as an alphabet book. It comprises hundreds of digital photographs of building façades taken over 20 years of travel, discovering details and structures that mimic letter forms. Occupying the window of the gallery, it is large enough to invite the viewer into the space of the book. Centered in each spread are Johann Steingruber’s letter-shaped plan drawings of buildings from Architectural Alphabet, published in 1773. The condensed plane of the city is flattened as a sheet of paper, the images and letters read across its surface.
