The fourth edition of the best-selling monograph features a new cover colour and cover artwork. JB Blunk presents the breadth of the artist’s practice and includes never-before-seen archival and newly…

The fourth edition of the best-selling monograph features a new cover colour and cover artwork.

JB Blunk presents the breadth of the artist’s practice and includes never-before-seen archival and newly commissioned photographs of jewellery, ceramics, paintings, furniture, sculpture, and his hand-built house. The book features essays by Lucy Lippard, Glenn Adamson, Fariba Bogzaran, Louise Allison Cort, and René Bustamante.

These essays contextualise Blunk among his contemporaries, his materials, and his places. Lippard connects Blunk’s interdisciplinary practice with her own attempts at an archaeological, rather than linear, approach to art history and criticism. Cort and Bogzaran reconstruct the early relationships and experiences that influenced Blunk in Japan and in Northern California, respectively. An archival interview with Blunk from 1978 and a new interview with his longtime friend & studio assistant Rick Yoshimoto offer primary insight into Blunk’s work and process, forty years apart.

“Wood. Clay. Stone. Spirit. These are the elements from which JB Blunk created his work, and a more elemental artist of the postwar era would be hard to find. Blunk proceeded through sheer instinct and in deep conversation with nature; his art was the ultimate expression of a life lived off the grid.”

—Glenn Adamson