Four Seasons

Yuji Agematsu

March 2021
Sequence Press, Secession, Revolver Publishing
Text by Robin Mackay
Designed by Studio Claus Due, Copenhagen
Softcover w/ Swiss brochure binding
128pp (two 64pp sections)
175 x 246.5 mm (680 x 240 mm flat), 250 color images
ISBN 978-1-7336281-9-8

Yuji Agematsu, Four Seasons is a unique artist book presenting the artist’s renowned zips, miniature sculptures comprised of reanimated urban detritus collected by Agematsu on daily walks in New York City and encased within the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packs.

The publication accompanies an exhibition at the Secession, Vienna of 366—one per day—of these arrangements from 2020, that infamous calendar year. The book features images of a selected month from each of the four seasons.

Designed by Claus Due, this Swiss brochure-bound edition ingeniously contains two books in one, organizing the lusciously reproduced, enlarged views of individual selected days from the zip works on the left, and the corresponding pages of the artist’s meticulous, diary-like notebooks in which he records each day’s trove on the right.

The essay written by philosopher and Urbanomic publisher Robin Mackay incisively captures and theorizes the spirit of the artist’s daily assemblages, likening them to video game creator Keita Takahashi’s “clump spirit [katamari damashii, 塊魂]—a cosmic disposition which places great hope in the obsessional collecting of heterogeneous stuff.” With references to Plato, Philip K. Dick, Zoolander and Dante’s Paradiso, Mackay gathers inspiration from a wide swath of sources to pay homage to Agematsu’s work.

Yuji Agematsu: 2020
Secession, Vienna
March 26 – June 20, 2021

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