Reexamining Books: Book Objects and Artist's Books by Werner Pfeiffer

To mark the 75th birthday year of Red Hook, NY resident and multi-media artist Werner Pfeiffer, the Loeb presented this exhibition which appeared across campus in three locations -- Thompson Memorial Library, Art Library in Taylor Hall, and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Pfeiffer has worked for half a century in a variety of media, including books, collages, drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures. He has become known especially as a creator of artist books and book-objects. Pfeiffer’s “book-objects” are books that take on new forms and meanings as sculpture. In the exhibition catalogue he writes, “They are not casts, nor are they sculpted imitations. Each piece has at its core bound, printed pages. Glued together and painstakingly covered with gesso, a plaster-like coating, they are silenced and sealed for good. I practice this destruction, this obvious censorship simply as metaphor. It is to visualize, to demonstrate, to provoke.”

In 1969 Pfeiffer was appointed Professor of Art at Pratt Institute in New York and became director of the Pratt Adlib Press. At this time he began to concentrate increasingly on his own work as sculptor, printmaker, and painter. To date, his books, collages, drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures have been shown internationally in more than 100 group exhibitions and in over 70 solo shows. His works are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute in Chicago, Badische Landesbibliothek, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Museum in Stockholm, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.