This book brings together the prints and multiples produced by Peter Saville between 2002 and 2019. For the last seventeen years Saville has collaborated with the Paul Stolper Gallery in London to produce a significant body of work including both works on paper and sculpture. Using a wide variety of techniques and materials including silkscreen printing, inkjet printing, tapestry, perspex, neon and resin, his work draws on much of his existing seminal graphic work to create variations on themes and works.
Small signs; you might never have noticed them; you might have walked past ten times, twenty times, on your way through the vast collections of the V&A, or the Met, or the Louvre, and not have seen them. Sometimes glassily translucent, sometimes tagged with a brightly coloured dot, declaring ‘object removed for photography’, or otherwise for restoration, or maybe research. Temporary interruptions in the logic and flow of the museological display, they make a double promise; that an object was there and that it will be returned.
Anna Blessmann began noticing and photographing these placeholders in museums and galleries across the world more than a decade ago. The series of photographs that she produced of these discreet and tucked-away missives provides a loose taxonomy of their varying forms and tones, but their interest lies less in the differences between individual examples and more in what, as a genre, these stand-ins stand for.
With this in mind Blessmann and Saville have produced an on-going series of these place holders, available for purchase as a limited edition, exploring ideas of possession and collection, potential and imagination, and the art object itself. These ‘Art Accessories’ have a transformative potential: any domestic setting can become a collection. As artworks in their own right, they allow the public to become collectors even as they explicitly disavow their own status as object.
