"'The Arrangement' is a group of images Ruth VAN BEEK made with a collection of books on flower arranging. She has been collecting books on this subject for years, mostly instructional books dating from the fifties to the seventies. They combine colorful still lifes of flower arrangements with the functional photography of a manual.
Ruth VAN BEEK is specially interested in the translation of the strict rules and symbols of Japanese Ikebana into instructional books for Dutch housewifes." (publisher's note, © RVB, 2013)
'The Arrangement' as 'a simple, clean book—a deceptively restrained, slight package for a disorienting and seductive body of work.' (© Lesley Martin)
The publication, 'The Arrangement', presents a series of the artist’s collages and images created from the pages of vintage botanical textbooks and gardening guides.
In 'The PhotoBook Review 005', artist and reviewer Penelope Umbrico wrote that these images 'become defiantly unbalanced hybrid objects that undergo extraordinary metamorphosis from one page to the next.'
There is a carefully controlled surrealism to the work; each element and image has been selected and placed with the thoughtfulness of an ikebana master. The book itself is suitably minimalist, the perfect, sunshine-yellow vehicle for a bouquet of Ruth VAN BEEK's images." (© Paris Photobook Award 2014)
Ruth VAN BEEK is specially interested in the translation of the strict rules and symbols of Japanese Ikebana into instructional books for Dutch housewifes." (publisher's note, © RVB, 2013)
'The Arrangement' as 'a simple, clean book—a deceptively restrained, slight package for a disorienting and seductive body of work.' (© Lesley Martin)
The publication, 'The Arrangement', presents a series of the artist’s collages and images created from the pages of vintage botanical textbooks and gardening guides.
In 'The PhotoBook Review 005', artist and reviewer Penelope Umbrico wrote that these images 'become defiantly unbalanced hybrid objects that undergo extraordinary metamorphosis from one page to the next.'
There is a carefully controlled surrealism to the work; each element and image has been selected and placed with the thoughtfulness of an ikebana master. The book itself is suitably minimalist, the perfect, sunshine-yellow vehicle for a bouquet of Ruth VAN BEEK's images." (© Paris Photobook Award 2014)
- Book design
- Xavier Fernández FUENTES
- Format
- Pb. with Buckram linnen jacket, 25 x 34 x 1 cm., 48 pp., 28 collages & 13 archive photographs in color, no text, 500 gr.