Drawn, Cut & Layered
Werner Pfeiffer
Plastic box containing illustrated pop-ups.Acquired from Toledo Museum of Art, 5 Jun 2017.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Werner Pfeiffer’s playfulness finds its way into viewers’ hands with this offering from his Toledo Museum of Art exhibition in 2015. His archives are housed at Vassar College.
With its structures and photographic representation of Pfeiffer’s other works of paper engineering, Drawn, Cut & Layered demonstrates his breadth in that sub-domain of book art. Not detectable in the box, though, are Pfeiffer’s white altered book objects, which formed the 2010 exhibition at Cornell University, entitled censor, villain, provocateur, experimenter, and demonstrates his scope in the sub-domain of altered books.
In kind, they were preceded by Barton Lidicé Beneš‘ The Life of Gandhi and Beauty Book (both 1973), M.L. Van Nice‘s Swiss Army Book (1990) Irwin Susskind‘s Book Faced Down – Embedded in Plaster (1999). In kind and whiteness, they were followed by Jonathan Callan‘s Zurbarán’s Color Plates (2011), Michael Mandiberg‘s Print Wikipedia (2015), and Lorenzo Perrone‘s Kintsugi(2018).
Further Reading and Viewing
“Hedi Kyle’s The Art of the Fold: How to Make Innovative Books and Paper Structures (2018)“. 24 September 2018. Bookmarking Book Art.
“Movables Now and Then“. 31 August 2024. Bookmarking Book Art.
“Lorenzo Perrone“. 8 September 2019. Books On Books Collection.
“Werner Pfeiffer and Anselm Kiefer“. 17 January 2015. Bookmarking Book Art.
“Kevin M. Steele“. 18 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“A ‘white book report’ on ‘The White Heat’ at MARC STRAUS“. 5 June 2017. Bookmarking Book Art.
“drawn, cut & layered: The Art of Werner Pfeiffer”
6 February to 3 May 2015
Toledo Museum of Art
Books On Books 