Published by Imagebeeld Edition, a year after TWO PIPES FOURTEEN LOCATIONS, the book DETAILS features an unrealized project conceived by Peter Downsbrough in 1975. 'Cartes Postales – Two Pipes – Postcards, 1975' was an edition of twelve postcards printed landscape format, each image is a close-up of a 'Two Pipes' piece. The book DETAILS includes the twelve photographs accompanied by an essay by Jo Melvin on the creation and evolution of the 'Two Pipes'. Eleven extra photographs document the 'Two Pipes' installed in mostly urban contexts. From time to time, passers-by, cyclists, and motorcyclists appear in the pictures.
“The Two Pipes have precision like a metronome with an infinitely variable rhythm”, writes Jo Melvin, “fixed in place, the appearance of their position constantly changes according to our proximity, backdrop, and angle [...] the view will always be different”. From one book to the next, from TWO PIPES FOURTEEN LOCATIONS to DETAILS, a shift occurs. The artist rotates his camera 90°, moving from “portrait” to “landscape” format. The sculptures no longer appear here in their entirety but truly make a cut in the frame itself. These “cut” images prefigure the photographic work that the artist would subsequently develop over several decades.
DETAILS
PETER DOWNSBROUGH
Photographs by Peter Downsbrough
Text by Jo Melvin
24 x18 cm, 68 pages, 23 ill. b&w
Design by Peter Downsbrough and Filippo Nostri
Image editing by Atelier KZG and Luca Nostri
Printed and bound in Italy
First edition: Imagebeeld Edition, March, 2025
© 2025 Jo Melvin for the text
© 2025 The estate of Peter Downsbrough & Imagebeeld Edition
ISBN 978-2-931308-00-4
Photos: Filipppo Nostri Studio
Peter Downsbrough (1940-2024) has had a major impact on the perception of art. Rejecting categorization, he has developed a distinct formal vocabulary composed of simple lines, geometric forms, and words, through which he interrogates our spatial perception. His sculptures 'Two Pipes', in their understated presence and interplay of distance and proximity, function as a conceptual gesture, an open invitation to reconsider over and over our position and sense of place.
After some back and forth between Europe and the USA, Peter Downsbrough decided in the late 1980s to live and work in Brussels. Although he initially studied architecture, he quickly immersed himself in the New York artistic scene of the 1960s. Rejecting all gestural expression and renouncing large-scale steel sculpture, he wrote his first NOTES ON LOCATIONS in 1968, composed of lines, arrows, and words. Questioning notions such as place, direction, interval, and temporality, these notes were published in 1973. At the same time, the artist began creating his TWO PIPES, TWO POLES, and TWO LINES. These works, along with the WALL PIECES or ROOM PIECES, would subsequently allow him to both energize and tension the exhibition space or the sheet of paper as well as the urban world through his photographic practice.
https://www.galeriezander.com/artists/66236/peter-downsbrough/works/