The New Rare / Biblioteka Art Book Fair 2026
The presentation brings together publications, rare books, exhibition ephemera, damaged printed matter, artist editions, reproductions, and archival fragments produced and collected through The New Rare and The Academy of Realness.
The selection moves between contemporary publishing and historical material from the 1960s to the present, including works connected to Richard Prince, Hans Bellmer, Cindy Sherman, Philippe Thomas, and a wider field of conceptual, post-conceptual, and lesser-circulated artists' publications and exhibition documents.
Rather than treating books and ephemera as fixed historical artifacts, the collection approaches printed matter as something continuously altered through circulation, ownership, storage, reproduction, damage, framing, scanning, display, and reclassification. Invitations, posters, catalogues, photocopies, artist books, and exhibition supports appear not simply as documents but as objects whose status shifts through placement and context.
Publications produced through The Academy of Realness and The New Rare exist alongside found and historical material without strict separation between archive, artwork, shop, edition, and exhibition structure. Throughout the presentation, reproduction and authorship remain unstable. Original printed matter sits beside replicas, digital transfers, reconstructed supports, and contemporary reframings.
The project draws from conceptual art, mail art, institutional critique, underground publishing, artist-book culture, damaged archives, and secondary art-world circulation while resisting fixed categorization. A rare catalogue, a water-damaged poster, a photocopied pamphlet, or a reproduced PDF may operate under the same conditions: retained objects moving between systems of display, exchange, memory, and interpretation.
The collection is structured less as a historical survey than as a circulating inventory of printed material in transition.
— The New Rare, London, 2026
![East Village '85: A Guide. A Documentary, Pelham Press, 1985. Interior spread: essay opening. Left: full-page black-and-white portrait photograph — Knut Swane of Eastman-Wahmendorf, mouth open wide in an expression of anguish or ecstasy, gold teeth visible, head tilted back, wearing a dark jacket. Right: essay text column beginning 'When th[e]...' discussing the East Village art scene, media attention, and the conditions of downtown New York art life. Downtown New York, 1980s art scene.](http://thenewrare.com/cdn/shop/files/East_Village_85_A_guide._A_documentary_inside_4.jpg?v=1777822032&width=533)
