1995, Exhibition at the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz

Review, Allgemeine Zeitung Frankfurt

The English book artist Ken Campbell

With Ken Campbell a group of English book artists is being introduced in the Gutenberg Museum, who draw an essential part of their inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement of a hundred years ago. You can see that in the synthesis of precisely worked typography and inspiration in this show. The Director of the Museum, Dr. Eva Hannebutt-Benz, was therefore quite right to point out that the art-book was an independent form of art that needed to be explored with new criteria.This becomes especially clear in the case of Campbell's books - not least because of the magnificent presentation which, in this instance, allowed for the opening of many sequential pages. On the one hand you encounter really fascinating techniques of setting and printing that can place a narrow column of poetry on one page in such a way that it appears to float as if elevated. And that takes us to the other element with which Campbell achieves unity out of text and image. It is the artistic quality which, completely removed from what we usually call 'illustration', that height- ens the expression of the intellectual concepts behind the work.

In the great book 'Ten Years of Uzbekistan', created in 1993, the basic idea is particularly visible. The content of the work is a requiem to those murdered at the time of Stalin. The co-author is the photographer David King, who had discovered Rodchenko's book in Russia. The text and visual power produce a unity that suggests painting, for, as in the fine arts today, the scriptural ele- ment has an aesthetic function. An opened up edition and several double-pages hanging on the walls like pictures reveal a book-art that goes far beyond conventional forms. Ken Campbell introduces an array of well known, but also newly developed printing processes in order to achieve optical effects of supreme quality. The visitor is well informed by the carefully pre- pared accompanying texts written by the artist and critics.

trans. Ted Bailey

1995, Gutenberg Museum, Mainz Allgemeine Zeitung Frankfurt