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MBP Presents: LE GUN 1,2,3
July 12, 2011
Contact: Kate Abbey-Lambertz
Telephone: 718 834 8000
New York, NY – March 10, 2011 – In the works for years, the greatly anticipated LE GUN 1,2,3– a stunning oversized volume of the cult magazine’s first three issues – will hit shelves in April. Called a “forum for experimentation” and compared to forerunners Raw, Bazooka, L’Assiette au beurre, and Archigram by Eye Magazine, this tome features a riotous range of artwork from the members of the LE GUN collective, an amazingly talented motley crew of international artists, designers, and writers.
With 400 pages of comics, collages, drawings, puns, paintings, journal entries, quotations, and illustrated stories that defy tidy categories the outsized LE GUN 1,2,3 is a collector’s dream. Every arresting page is filled with narrative-driven artwork that artist/designer Andrzej Klimowski calls “pictorial poems.” Flipping through it, readers move at breakneck speeds through scenes and fragments as varied as a cowboy’s diary found in the belly of an ancient alligator, a rumination on the best tits in Europe, the account of a man who gives up breathing only to find air coming in through his hair follicles, and many more stories that can’t be tied down with words.
Deftly combining low-brow humor and irreverence with arcane references and homages to the likes of Baudelaire and Max Ernst, the wildly imaginative work showcased in LE GUN 1,2,3 is sometimes shocking and subversive, sometimes haunting and moving, and always intricately detailed, personal, surreal, and honest. The members of the collective live and work by Andre Breton’s words that preface LE GUN 2: “The man who can’t visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”
LE GUN 1,2,3 is an art collective established by graduates from London’s Royal College of Art’s Department of Communication Art and Design. Since the 2004 inception of LE GUN, the group’s core – Neal Fox, Matthew Appleton, Bill Bragg, Chris Bianchi, Alex Wright, and Robert Greene – has produced five issues of the publication. They have initiated countless projects in Europe, including installations, shows, and design work, garnering attention from media outlets like Eye and i-D.
Mark Batty Publisher is an independent publisher dedicated to making distinctive books on the visual art of communicating, showcasing the visual power and innovation of contemporary culture in all of its varied poses. Today, the visual comes at us from more places than ever, and its dissemination is faster and more advanced every year. Books from Mark Batty Publisher capture this acceleration on the pages of every book. Affordable, well designed, thoughtfully created, and produced to last, MBP books are artful products that readers want to hold onto forever.
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LE GUN 1,2,3
LE GUN
Pub Date: April 2011
Page Count: 400
Size: 10 x 13.75 inches
Format: Casebound
Price: $120
ISBN: 978-0-9817805-0-4
For a review copy, more information, or to schedule an interview with the author, contact Kate Abbey-Lambertz at +1 718 834 8000 or media@markbattypublisher.com.
