Bettina is the first monograph to showcase the work of the previously unsung artist Bettina Grossman, whose wildly interdisciplinary practice spanned photography, sculpture, textile, cinema, drawing, and more. An eccentric personality fully dedicated to her art, Bettina lived in the famous Chelsea Hotel from 1968 until her death in late 2021. In her tiny studio, she produced and accumulated a considerable body of work, much of which has remained unseen and unpublished until now. Her interests ranged from geometric and abstract studies, drawn from observations of people on the street, to pieces that transformed language into graphic, abstract "verbal forms." Incorporating strategies of chance and the abstraction of everyday form through repetition and seriality, Bettina pushed the photographic medium to and beyond its limits. As Robert Blackburn, artist and founder of the Printmaking Workshop, astutely observed of Bettina's work: "The photography, film, sculpture are as one, for the photographic medium is employed not only for documentation but as an endless source of inspiration from which other disciplines emerge-and merge." Bettina was the winner of the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2020 and is copublished by Aperture and Editions Xavier Barral.

This book reveals the work of the artist and activist Yto Barrada. Her artistic practice draws upon the roles of activist, educator, architect, botanist and anthropologist to explore expressions of communality and individual being. The exhibition presented at Mathaf focuses on the threads of regeneration and growth moving between architecture, urban transformation, horticulture, experimental education and home economics. Weaving together these interdisciplinary methods of making and discovery, the exhibition articulates desires for equality, self-expression and exploration. The artist’s personal and collective experiences of Tangier are expressed through a multitude of mediums to investigate the structures and systems of life in that city. These work in parallel with similar investigations by the artist into systems in the US, to compose a critical and poetic reading of overlooked histories and realities. Barrada’s works in this exhibition offer an open dialogue on the possible restitution of basic democratic ideals such as shelter, sustenance and communality. Barrada’s work offers a mode of associative thinking and making, emphasising the right to exist, learn and shape the world around us. In the galleries, her works live together, presenting starting points for possible collective narratives, which recirculate within the spaces as a composition and as new stories in themselves. Text in English and Arabic.

Erro, Iceland s most prominent painter, receives long overdue critical attention for his contributions to international Pop, late Surrealism, and contemporary figurative painting in this sumptuous monograph. Since introducing exclusively source-image-based painted collage to the European Pop movement in 1959, Erro has produced an influential body of work mining cartoons and art history on canvases marked by political satire and his own cheerfully dystopian observations of human nature. Prescient and timely, Erro s paintings are marked by a voracious consumption of imagery synthesizing a hallucinatory vision of contemporary visual culture. Often compared to Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, Erro s multifigure narratives, refusal to commit to a singular style, and obsession with cartoons set his practice apart. An essay by Ruba Katrib connects Erro to today s figurative-painting practices, and a chronology by Danielle Kvaran traces his wild figurations of history and subjects, ranging from Winston Churchill to contemporary music icons. Newly photographed details and a concentration on Erro s canvases of the last ten years offer a fresh perspective to his European audience and a welcome introduction for his American one.