Marie Artaker

Artist’s book by Anna Schachinger, with a text by Margit Mössmer.

“In the first artist’s book of the painter Anna Schachinger, the beings she depicts share the experience of various adventures: they carry themselves through a pack of wild dogs; they have legs that are also hippopotamuses, and knees like watermelons. Schachinger’s drawings sometimes condense into busy scenes and picture puzzles or evaporate into mere contours, with a creeping, fragmented narrative in which bodies dissolve and merge. This gives rise here to a queer body language of mutual affinity.

In the accompanying short story “Air-Root Creatures” by the author Margit Mössmer, the pack of wild dogs and other motifs from Schachinger’s drawings reappear. We discover ourselves to be in a hotel, an elderly woman sits down at a breakfast table, and things are already underway.”

The format of the book is based on the original size of the A3 drawings, which are reproduced in the book full bleed. The size allows for an immersive viewing experience of the various scenes.

The rich, deep Pantone blue on the cover and endpapers contrasts with the sophisticated pastel tones of the coloured pencil drawings, while also referencing the recurring subject of the sky in Mössmer’s short story.
The large type size is a result of the book’s format on the one hand and refers to a familiar picture book or children’s book aesthetic on the other. The typeface, type size, line spacing, and text block size combine to create a type colour that is neither too dark nor too permeable. While paging through the book, the text area harmonises with Schachinger’s dense, delicate, drawings that are so rich in detail. Through their subtle hand-drawn character, the serifs of the contemporary font “Inferi” subtly hint at the book’s content.

The text blocks, including the running head and page number, do not use the entire format of the book. This results in a format of its own within the book. A book within a book.

Studio photography by Pascal Petignat

✷ One of The Most Beautiful Austrian Books 2022

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