Vittorio Brodmann
Really Small
This mini-format artist’s book is based on a topical idea systematically executed to create an object that is as inventive as it is coherent. More than 80 brightly coloured, casual sketches in landscape format that the Zurich painter Vittorio Brodmann created on the screen of his smartphone are each presented on a double page with an identical white margin at top and bottom. This gives a material form and an audience to an artistic practice that had previously been private and virtual. The switch of medium is a deliberate choice: while the book format and image layout refer back to the small screen on which you swipe from one picture to the next, two luminescent special colours complementing the four-colour printing attempt to imitate the bright appearance of the screen. The red cover with gold lettering bears the book’s purchase price on the back: ten units, irrespective of the currency. The joke is partly a reference to the seemingly random setting of prices on the same international art market on which Brodmann’s ‘real’ works – his paintings - have been circulating for some time. This is the smallest Most Beautiful Swiss Book of all time.
