THE READYMADES
First published in 2011, The Readymades went out of print too quickly for many of us to get hold of a book often mentioned as one of the best Irish novels of recent years. Now, happily, it has been reprinted and it doesn’t take long to realise that it is indeed an ingenious work documenting, in every sense, the circumstances in which a group of artists - friends since they grew up together in Serbia - who participated in the appalling ethnic wars that started after the end of communism in Yugoslavia, live creative, if turbulent lives that can never be separated from the depravity of the violence in which they once took part and which both fuels their art and corrodes their unity of purpose.
– Declan O’Driscoll, December 2019, The Irish Times
The Readymades won universal acclaim by those who managed to acquire a copy, being dubbed one of 'the best Irish novels of the last decade.' It tells the story of a collection of friends who took part in the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s, before going on to become celebrated artists. Its republication sees a novel whose story and characters take on the very forces so pertinent today: the reemergence of nationalism, civil war, refugees and the need for art to challenge any and all prejudices and pre-conceived notions of what it means to be an individual.
Holten's novel is one of the greatest works of art to come out of Berlin in recent years...You could say that LGB are the Next Big Thing to come ouf of Berlin, the timely projection of an embattled nexus - East versus West, the Real World versus the Art World, Purity versus Commodification, Literature versus the Visual Arts, Fiction versus Truth.
— Travis Jeppesen, June/July 2012 issue of Art in America.
With artwork by Darko Dragičević
Book design by Form Und Konzept
127 x 184 mm 340 pages, 32 b&w ill.
ISBN: 978-3-943196-00-9
€15
About The LGB Group
The LGB Group is a group of (fictional) artists John Holten and Darko Dragičević assisted in bringing back into the public realm and helped re-align within the history of art. Its rough artistic outlook was one informed by a non-political engagement with the everyday, a neo-dada use of the readymade object and clear line of inspiration from the Nouveau Realistes of 1960s Paris. At its peak it had around 20 artists, some working as duos and one performance collective, Trupa Blokovi, with Imre Warmann acting as the chief curator and theorist of the group. It first started to exhibit in the Balkans in 1995 before moving across Europe, showing work in many venues. Its active agency as a group started to demise with the death of Warmann in 2006. The Readymades goes a way to telling how this process started, and indeed contains the definitive account of the group which is entitled ‘To Warmann’ and appears in full, annotated and with accompanying documentation in the book.
Exhibitions, Performances and Projects of The LGB Group post 2006
Oslo, August 20, 2011, Oslo Kunsthall
Berlin, September 28, 2011 at Motto
Berlin, October 6, 2011 at the Irish Embassy
Brussels, November, 2011 at Gallery D.O.R.
Berlin, Feb 2012 at Altes Finanzamt
New York, March 8-11 at The Armory Fair
Milan, September 2012, Otto Zoo Gallery
New York, July 2013 (with Aengus Woods) at David Zwirner Gallery
Berlin, New York, 2013-ongoing, e-flux Agency of Unrealised Projects
https://aup.e-flux.com/project/the-lgb-group-der-todeszug/
London, September 2019 at Burley Fisher, London
