Salutory failures

This is the first comprehensive monograph on Swiss artist Raphael Hefti. The richly illustrated volume captures the artist’s complete body of work, in which he frequently collaborates with technicians and scientists to reveal unexpected beauty in ordinary materials. Hefti blurs boundaries between natural and industrial, abstract and representational. Upending and disrupting ordinary industrial and post-industrial processes, Hefti’s intimate encounters with materials take form in colossal sculptures, performances that flirt with the brink of disaster, and sprawling public interventions. The distribution of pigments on the book’s cover is the result of their manipulation during screen printing by the artist himself, so no two covers are alike