Unexpected events in the present can in the long term affect our view of both the past and the future. Dealing with this fundamental uncertainty as an artist characterises the work of Silvie Defraoui, born 1935, and also determines her Archives du Futur, the platform for artistic reflection she initiated in 1975 together with her late partner Chérif (1932–94). This elegant book features some 40 works that Defraoui has created since 1994, using the media of video, painting, neon, and photography. Some of them have been newly created for her major solo exhibition at the MCBA in Lausanne in the spring 2023 and are published in this book for the first time. All of them bear witness to continuous change and impressively illustrate the metamorphosis of the Archives du Futur, which has now been in existence for almost five decades. Laurence Schmidlin’s essay offers a new approach to Defraoui’s artistic ideas and concepts. Text in English, French and German.

Enraptured by Color presents some 170 French colour prints from the 19th century. Using colour at that time was a major factor in the market success of lithography, more than a century after its invention, as well as of other techniques. This new book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Musee Jenisch Vevey, is a compendium of the art of colour printmaking, using the exhibits as examples for all aspects of the trade. Introductory and topical essays and a selection of rare documents alongside the featured works reveal the effects of polychromy and the technical processes behind it in artistic production in France around 1890. The book explains in detail how colour engravings are made and how they differ from a colour print. It investigates the aesthetic purpose of using colour and how it was exploited by important artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, Edouard Vuillard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.