THREE PINK ART BOOKS RELEASED IN 2025
Antena by Silvia Gurfein, Huir del mundo by Rosa Chancho, and Important Artifacts by Leanne Shapton are three art books published in Spanish during 2025. All three have pink covers. But contrary to the saying, it’s not all roses in these books. Or perhaps it is, but not in an obvious way: they narrate and engage with art through themes of isolation, fragmentation, rupture, and imagination.
The category of art books is, in part, clarified by its subject matter: books that narrate, document, dialogue with, exhibit—and many other verbs—art. At the same time, their focus on art opens up the possibility of generating unique combinations of images, archives, and words.
These three pink books think about art through fragmentation. Antena proposes a possible form of communication in the midst of confinement; Important Artifacts turns a break-up into a catalogue; Huir del mundo records a collective practice built through movement and drift. The book as a way of ordering—or disordering—an experience.
“Antena” (Antenna) by Silvia Gurfein
(Published by Espacio Fan in collaboration with Staicos Tolomei Ediciones)
Argentine artist Silvia Gurfein assembles works produced between 2020 and 2023 in this editorial project as a time, space, and mood capsule. Emerging from a period of confinement and disconnection from the outside world due to the pandemic, this book seeks to communicate outward through drawings and paintings that work with lines: perhaps the oldest procedure of all for connecting two points.
The only text in the book was written by the artist herself, with editorial accompaniment by Liliana Viola. It speaks of fears, of the pandemic, of the movements brought about by isolation. Rather than interrupting the work, the artist’s questions arise from the act of making.
“Artefactos importantes y propiedades personales de la colección de Lenore Doolan y Harold Morris, incluidos libros, ropa y joyas” (Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris. Originally published in English in 2009) by Leanne Shapton
(edited in Spanish in 2025 by Ediciones Comisura)
The story of a relationship told through objects. A couple decides to break-up and auction off all the objects they accumulated by being two. The author herself says: “I thought of telling someone’s life through their objects, but I didn’t want anyone to die, so I preferred that something die. And I decided it would be love.”
This is a performative book that presents an unusual exhibition catalogue, a fragmented curatorial text. The objects of a couple become a curated collection that must disintegrate. There are lots, prices, formal notes so buyers know what they can acquire. It includes all the implications of dividing an art collection, to auction it so that it loses its form, so that its components scatter among its buyers. Among its readers.
“Huir del mundo. Memorias de un colectivo artístico” (Escaping the World: Memories of an Artistic Collective) by Rosa Chancho
(Caja Negra)
It is the most book-like and the least art-book-like of the three. By this I mean that it mostly includes written records or documentation of the Rosa Chancho artistic collective. Events, lists, emails, reflections, itineraries, manifestos, and exercises that reveal the operational core of an irreverent, intuitive, and curious group.
The book exposes working mechanisms, decisions, trials, and doubts. There is no hierarchy. Reading progresses through accumulation rather than progression: it lays bare a practice that resists being fixed in a definitive form.
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“Huir del mundo. Memorias de un colectivo artístico” de Rosa Chancho. Cortesía Caja Negra.
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