VON AMMON is happy to inaugurate vonammonbooks.com, a new address for our online bookshop. Our publishing house began in earnest as a means to best preserve the more ephemeral projects that we installed in the gallery. It's common that I will walk into a newly installed show and think I could keep this show installed forever; alas, there's always that agonizing moment, six to eight weeks later, when a show I love must come down to make way for the next. This feeling is sharpest when a project by Tony Hope must be dismantled, as so much of his shows are ephemeral, like a stage set. Unlike a simple display of flat artworks on the wall, so much of his extraordinary projects will never be seen again; thus, our first title was dedicated to his remarkable project, HOME SWEET HOME, which centered around an entirely handcrafted, —and slowly-revolving—ice cream truck, fully equipped with illuminated dashboard, real head and tail lights, and a fully-stocked vending machine on its side panel. Creating the book justified the show's dismantling, and crafting the book beautifully felt like a second, far more durable venue for this extraordinary installation.
We've published seven titles since HOME SWEET HOME, and have expanded the purview beyond exhibition catalogues—though Tony's exhibitions have all been made into books, due to their ephemeral nature. Our multi-edition book with Banks Violette documents the outdoor installation of his giant sculpture no title (gas station), and explores its environs—particularly the Seneca Army Depot, which houses a peculiar herd of ghost-white deer. Our book about Alex Bag and Jason Yates' chaotic COVID-era exhibition, Sorry You All Ended up Here, features many hundreds out of the many thousands of pictures taken during that show's three-week installation—and only briefly features images of the finished show. Our most recent project with Rob Pruitt is our most traditional art book, meant to encapsulate his large suite of paintings on paper, which were all titled by my then-three year old daughter Bea.
“Looking through the Other Eye, Left is Right and Right is Left: Drawings by Sculptors”
Galeria Mascota
Valladolid 33, Roma Nte.
Cuauhtémoc, 06700
Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico
July 3rd, 2025 - August 29th, 2025
“During my sophomore year of college I took a drawing class and a classmate who was mostly interested in sculpture came in with a music stand, a clamp, and large piece of plexiglass. He clamped the plexiglass upright to the music stand and started drawing with a sharpie on the plexiglass what he saw through it. He was tracing the classroom as someone would trace an image on paper through mylar. “I wanted to draw space as we really experience it, real space,” he declared. I think about that statement all the time: about how to recreate real space, instead of creating the illusion of space through perspective and sharpness. In particular, I think about how to use real space in a flat painting object.
I am curating an exhibition that focuses on different conceptions of space in drawing, and to do so I plan to include only drawings by sculptors.
In my research on the history of similar exhibitions, I discovered that, in March 1933, the first drawing show at the Museum of Modern Art was a show entitled “An Exhibition of Sculptor’s Drawings.” Yet ever since this complex relationship has been rarely explored, leaving a large portion of sculptors’ practices under appreciated and a large part of art under connected.” Wyatt Kahn
