Artist Showcase Program

An extraordinary collection of beautifully interpretive handmade books by artist Alex Selenitsch are currently featured in APW's Gertrude Street windows.

A book is hardly a neutral or transparent vehicle – all books silently format thought, images and language. We submit to the book’s physicality without noticing how it assembles, unfolds and narrates, how it standardises and how it impacts our hands and eyes. - Alex Selenitsch

These artists books by Alex Selenitsch play with these normally disregarded aspects of ‘the book’. About half of them have been made of found and/or leftover papers, revealing the bookish beauty of abandoned materials. Some make use of modern office technology, which constitutes one of our print vernaculars.  

Alex Selenitsch is a Melbourne-based poet and architect known primarily for his concrete poems but also for his drawings, artists books, objects, furniture and architecture. He is the author of Australian Artists Books (NGA, 2008), the outcome of a Gordon Darling Fellowship at the NGA Canberra in 2000/2001. A survey of his work, LIFE/TEXT, was held at Heide MOMA, Melbourne, in 2015-2016. His most recent published books are LOOK! (Cordite Press, 2021), a collection of his concrete poems; and Purgatorio Re-placed (Gazebo Books, 2021), a re-write of Dante’s Purgatorio.

A selection of Alex's handmade books spanning the past few decades are on view 24/7 in APW’s windows until 29 April 2024.