William Anastasi

On the occasion of the publication of the monograph “William Anastasi. This Is Not My Signature”, published by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff and Mousse Publishing, this exhibition brings together exemplary works by the artist from the 1960s to the 2000s, which demonstrate the central ideas of the book.

A selection of historical works illustrating the major periods of Anastasi’s work will be on view in the exhibition, investigating his decades of conceptual and minimal experimentation from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as his later pictorial and performative developments.

This documented journey through the life of the recently deceased artist foreshadows an upcoming large retrospective exhibition in January 2025.

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff is pleased to present the monographic publication devoted to Anastasi’s work. Including several scientific contributions made by international specialists of minimal and conceptual art, the publication provides a contemporary point of view on historical and more recent artistic gestures specific to Anastasi’s oeuvre.

In addition to eight unpublished essays, specially commissioned by Julia Robinson, Valérie Mavridorakis, Robert Storr, Béatrice Gross, Chiara Costa, Sébastien Pluot, Dove Bradshaw and Erik Verhagen, the monograph is complemented by rare archival documentation, curated by the art historian Hélène Meisel.

“William Anastasi (born in Philadelphia in 1933) has produced a profuse body of work. A leading conceptualist artist, and in many respects one of its initiators, his career cannot be limited to this particular chapter of contemporary art history. Considered from the perspective of multiple observers, this book examines the different aspects of a practice that has been developed using complementary media. Drawing exists alongside photography, as well as ‘new’ technologies, objects, paintings and installations. In this corpus – to be discovered or rediscovered – sounds, images and language, artefacts, protocols and processes all express concerns related to space and time, representation and perception.”

—Erik Verhagen