Object Record: Leopoldo Maler — Mortal Issues: A Sanctuary with Flames & Figures, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1976

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1976. 12 pages. Stapled wraps. Black-and-white offset print. 30 × 21 cm.

This booklet was issued for Leopoldo Maler's exhibition Mortal Issues: A Sanctuary with Flames & Figures, held at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 26 February–4 April 1976. It no longer reads only as exhibition support material.

What remains is a compressed exhibition form: image, statement, bibliography, notes, documentation. A show reduced to pages. A public event retained as a portable object. The typewritten pages, bibliography, and black-and-white performance documentation do not stabilize the work so much as leave it in circulation under another form.

This copy bears the stamp: Valerie Beston Library / Gift of the Estate of John Edwards. That mark shifts the publication away from simple reference and toward association copy, custody trace, and art-world remainder. Not only a document of Maler's Whitechapel exhibition, but a document of its later passage through another system of storage, attention, and inheritance.

Maler's practice in the years leading up to this exhibition moved between performance, choreography, film, installation, text, and image — a range documented in a 2022 lecture at Princeton University in which he spoke about his theatre and performance work of the 60s and 70s. That instability is registered here. The booklet does not summarize the practice cleanly; it preserves its dispersion.

For The New Rare, the interest lies there. The publication is not presented as neutral catalogue matter, but as a minor object of retention: part guide, part dossier, part residue.

Condition: good vintage condition with visible handling wear, light creasing, rubbing to covers, minor edge wear, gentle toning, and slight waviness to some interior pages. Staples intact. Provenance stamp present.

This object is available in the shop — £150, shipping included.

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