Christiana Soulou

The Book of Imaginary Beings after Jorge Luis Borges
Venetia Kapernekas and Donatien Grau, 2016
Paperback: 88 pages
Publisher: Sadie Coles HQ
ISBN: 978-0-9926556-3-1

Christiana Soulou’s 2016 exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ comprised a group of drawings after Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (1957) – a fantastic anthology of “strange creatures conceived down through history by the human imagination.” The project has since evolved and expanded over more than two years, originating in a presentation at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where Soulou’s drawings were presented as part of ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’. The current series, numbering almost fifty drawings, is not limited to what might immediately be suggested by the term ‘imaginary beings’, but embraces the original desire of Borges to include “the point, the line, the surface, n-dimensional hyperplanes and hypervolumes, of all generic terms, and perhaps of each one of us and of the godhead. In brief, the sum of all things – the universe.” This series is documented in the exhibition's book, 'The Book of Imaginary Beings after Jorge Luis Borges' which includes Soulou’s writings on Borges.

 

Executed in coloured pencil, Solou’s drawings are at once evanescent and insistent, elusive and precise. They appear to be timeless – emerging out of subtlety of tone and exacting line – and in their precision, they invoke the works of Renaissance draughtsmen such as Pisanello and Dürer.

Paperback:
Christiana Soulou: The Book of Imaginary Beings after Jorge Luis Borges
£ 45.00
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