Tracey Emin & Ty Dolla $ign Explore the Meaning of Softness

November 22, 2015, 3:00pm

Amid the calcifying effect of existence-over-time, the most hardened heart’d be pressed to deny Andrei Tarkovsky’s advice: “Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.” It is within the furry book, Feelings: Soft Art, a new thematic publication from Rizzoli, that we may find a shoulder to lean on.

Feelings is a book about sensation, first and foremost. Its felt-bound pages contain soft colors, squishy materials, and foggy things. “A viewer takes in a piece through his or her senses, and first responds to the work from those perceptions,” Rizzoli writes. Artists include Tracey Emin, Ty Dolla $ign, soft focus spectre Petra Collins, ‘Serial Chiller’ Parker Ito, hair-raising writings from Karley Sciortino, a collaboration between Dev Hynes and soft portrait scribe Alice Lancaster, and the first-ever meeting between between contemporary fuzz painter Sterling Ruby and Storm King “soft” sculptor Lynda Benglis.

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“Soft Art suggests that these gut reactions are not only worth consideration, but may be the best gateway into deeper deliberations about a work,” Rizzoli continues. Sometimes, true power is in the ability to be gentle, and in the case of Rizzoli’s new book, no more makes itself true than a feeling.

The Creators Project has obtained exclusive images from Feelings: Soft Art, including a work (above) by Ito that otherwise exists solely within the book’s pages.

Berndnaut Smilde © Feelings: Soft Art, Skira Rizzoli, 2015. Read more about Berndnaut’s cloud creations here.

Follow @Feelingssoft on Instagram for more, and click here to order Feelings: Soft Art.

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Tagged:
Alex Olson, Art, Bernard Tschumi, Books, Creators, Dev hynes, Feelings: Soft Art, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Parker Ito, Petra Collins, Rizzoli, Ryan McGinley, sarah nicole prickett, Shayne Oliver, Skira Rizzoli, Sterling Ruby, Tracey Emin, Ty Dolla Sign

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