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Enrique Vila-Matas
Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His works include Bartleby & Co, Montano, Never Any End to Paris, The Vertical Journey, winner of the Premio Romulo Gallegos, and Dublinesque, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. 'February 2008' is an excerpt from his novel Dietario Voluble, published by Anagrama in 2008.

Articles Available Online


Writers from the Old Days

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Issue No. 13

Enrique Vila-Matas

TR. J. S. Tennant

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Issue No. 13

Augusto Monterroso wrote that sooner or later the Latin American writer faces three possible fates: exile, imprisonment or burial.   I met Roberto Bolaño...

poetry

January 2015

Litanies of an Audacious Rosary

Enrique Vila-Matas

TR. Rosalind Harvey

poetry

January 2015

FEBRUARY 2008   * I’m outraged, but I’ve learned a way of reasoning that quickly defuses my exasperation. This...

It’s beside the point to consider any single painting by Kerstin Brätsch; her pieces accumulate in power like tomograms taken from a wider, ecstatic, outward-reaching project Her signature works – oil paintings on large sheets of transparent Mylar or paper – harness a heady amalgam of the lacy striations of agate, the swampy figuration of Jean Dubuffet, the twists of radiated entrails, the striding black gestures of Robert Motherwell, and Jersey Shore airbrushing But while her style is distinctive, Brätsch’s forms and methods are diverse The Hamburg-born, New York-based artist, who was the recipient of the Edvard Munch Art Award 2017, returns to the embryonic elements of painting – pigment, oil, and light; the artist’s hand and the movement required to constitute a gesture – subjecting each to various operations of distillation, chance, out-sourcing, and layering Her aim, it would seem, is to coax from painting what might still be unknown   For this reason, it’s not immediately apparent why Brätsch’s work should so often warrant inclusion in exhibitions that tackle the now old-chestnut dilemma of painting’s status in ‘the digital era’ She was, for example, included in Museum Brandhorst’s sweeping Painting 20: Expression in the information age (2015), MoMA’s The Forever Now (2014), and the Fridericianum’s Speculations on Anonymous Materials (2014) Her reckoning with the impact of the digital on visual culture – its networks and atemporality, its conduciveness to sampling and versioning and editing, and the ubiquitous frame of the screen – is explicitly material Though her paintings translate lusciously to a screen, they also double-down on every ineffable and substantial thing that evades reduction to a pixel Notwithstanding the modern techniques available to her, she turns continually to ancient technologies of marbling and glasswork She turns to the earth, and to spirits, and to the people surrounding her   A central tenet of her praxis is collaboration – the more hands on a project, the better She works with artists, artisans, and with psychics and shamans (her 2006-08 series Psychic consists of abstract portraits she painted after meeting with clairvoyants in New York) These partnerships

Contributor

August 2014

Enrique Vila-Matas

Contributor

August 2014

Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His works include Bartleby & Co, Montano, Never Any End to...

Leaving Theories Behind

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Issue No. 9

Enrique Vila-Matas

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Issue No. 9

I. I went to Lyon because an organisation called Villa Fondebrider invited me to give a talk on the relationship between fiction and reality as...

READ NEXT

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Issue No. 1

Ninety-Nine, One Hundred

Tess Little

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Issue No. 1

Sitting at a British Library desk in July 2006, a reader carefully consulted the fraying pages of A Relation...

Art

January 2017

New Communities

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty...

Interview

February 2011

Interview with David Vann

Marissa Cox

Interview

February 2011

I am a little apprehensive about meeting David Vann for the first time. His father committed suicide when David...

 

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