With “Fortsetzung folgt” (To be continued), Marion Ritzmann presents as a first publication on her artistic work a set of three separate publications: a pad with monochrome colored pencil drawings, a booklet with photographs of chalk lines – the traces of an exhibition – and a newspaper with ten literary texts by Markus Stegmann on ten of the artist’s works. As the title of the series suggests, the publication is designed as an open sequence of individual publications, which are connected and contextualized via a website that was developed and realized as an integral part of this project.
Born in Schaffhausen in 1978, the artist lives and works in Zurich and Basel and says of herself that she thinks and works with and in systems. With “Fortsetzung folgt” she has a modular system at her disposal, which on the one hand allows her with the web site to continuously document her artistic work and to rhizomatically link individual works with each other. On the other hand, the link back to the website gives the individual print products more artistic freedom.
The booklet “Moving Objects in Rose Madder”, for example, shows on 16 pages details of photographs from the installation of the same name. On display are white chalk lines on the grey-black primed floor, the traces and drawings left by the objects moved around by the exhibition visitors. If we are holding the artist’s booklet in our hands, however, this fact remains hidden to us for the moment; the drawings are available without comment, leaving us free to view and interpret them. If we follow the bit-link on the title page, we reach the corresponding entry on the artist’s website, where we find documentary visual material on the installation and a description of the work.
Starting points for “80 colour pencils” are a box of eighty crayons in different colours and the idea of painting an A4 sheet of paper completely with each single one. Resulting in eighty monochrome drawings. For the publication, these were facsimiled and glued into a pad as a colour fan.
Finally, in the newspaper “An einem grauen Nachmittag flog ein roter Kran” (On a grey afternoon a red crane flew), Markus Stegmann takes us on a journey through ten associative texts - black on pink – to his very personal encounters with works by Marion Ritzmann.