The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) is pleased to announce the publication of Ü, an artist's book by Olav Westphalen. Ü brings together for the first time Westphalen's satirical drawings and cartoons, which have appeared individually in art magazines for the last decade. The drawings, which are always printed within publications and never exhibited on their own, explore the distinctions between high and low culture, art and entertainment, and critical and commercial art. In addition to previously published cartoons, Ü includes a large number of drawings made specifically for it. The mixture of styles, and general interest with art-world topics, is the result of Westphalen's exploration of the overlap between the terms 'joke','cartoon' and 'art'.
In place of an introduction, Ü includes a conversation between Westphalen and Dan Graham on Westphalen's work and the role of humour in contemporary art.
The project originated from a residency Westphalen had in Oslo as part of OCA's International Studio Programme in 2006. Ü has been published by OCA with the support of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Goethe-Institut.
Olav Westphalen is a German-born artist who lives and works in Stockholm and New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Paris and Berlin, and was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2004. His latest exhibition, Waiting for the Barbarians, opened at Maccarone gallery in New York on 13 September, 2008. Westphalen is a Professor of Performative Art at the Royal Academy in Stockholm.
INDEX
Olav Westphalen as a ¨Lumpen-Conceptualist¨: A Conversation Between the Artist and Dan Graham
Ü by Olav Westphalen
