We are pleased to present a display of artists’ books by Kurt Johannessen, including titles from the artist’s Transparent Series and Untold Series alongside additional publications. Collectively, the presented works explore how themes of the compact and the transparent appear in Johannessen’s practice.

Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, November 7th from 6–8pm at Printed Matter Chelsea, where Johannessen will conduct his performance lecture, “About Chocolate Cake.”

Short stories of 1–4 sentences, present in the artist’s practice since 1985, appear at the core of Kurt Johannessen’s text work. Some of the artist’s texts are especially compact—take the two sentences that comprise Johannessen’s book, Everything (2006):

Everything is the same, it just looks different.
Everything is different, it just looks the same.

Between 2021-2024, Johannessen created two book series: The Transparent Series and The Untold Series, with 12 books comprising each. Both series celebrate qualities of the compact. Titles within The Transparent Series are printed on tracing paper, allowing some of the contents of the pages—featuring various presentations of natural elements such as water, straw, stone, and seeds—to slide together. The Untold Series contains the same poetic and compact titles with even more minimalistic content. Here there are only small color changes from side to side. The Untold Series is printed in risography, with its color presentation celebrating the organic qualities of this printing technique.

Together with these two series, several books and related works exploring themes of the compact and the transparent are also presented in the display, including Everything (2006), Second Shine (2016), The Transparent (2018) and As (2021) which have not previously been shown at Printed Matter.

In the same way as real thinking takes place when your head is empty,
the landscape inside you is larger than the landscape outside you.
From As (2021)

In the same way as owning is an illusion,
real wealth is hidden in the moment.
From As (2021)

Kurt Johannessen works with performance, books, video, drawing, graphics and installation. He has performed in Europe, Asia and America since the early 80’s. His performance often has a poetic and minimalist expression. He exhibited in several places in Norway, including the Bergen Art Museum and Kunstnernes Hus (2007) and Kunstnerforbundet (2016). He works with text and publishes his own artist books. The text works are often short visual, poetic, and sometimes contain humor.