JOSEPH BEUYS — Exhibition Essay, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1980

Exhibition pamphlet. 19.5 × 29.5 cm closed; 39 × 29.5 cm unfolded. Four pages. Single sheet folded once. Offset printing on uncoated paper. Text by Caroline Tisdall. Printed by The Curwen Press, London, for Anthony d’Offay Gallery, August 1980.

Issued on the occasion of a Joseph Beuys exhibition at Anthony d’Offay Gallery. The Guggenheim Foundation is acknowledged in the publication, reflecting Tisdall’s involvement with Beuys’s major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum the previous year.

The cover reproduces Beuys’s own description of sculpture as an open and transformative process — extending beyond physical objects into thought, language and collective social activity. The text is set in a spare, hierarchical layout: Thinking Forms, Spoken Forms, Social Sculpture. Inside, Tisdall’s densely printed essay connects his biography, childhood memories in Cleves, wartime mythology, shamanism, healing and political ideas. The pamphlet offers a compact introduction to the system of materials and symbols — fat, felt, animals, wounds and transformation — that shaped his work across performance, installation and teaching.

By 1980, Beuys had become one of the central figures of postwar European art. His expanded definition of artistic production proposed that society itself could be shaped through creative action. This modest publication carries those ideas in a deliberately economical form: one sheet, one fold, four pages.

Condition: good vintage condition. Light age toning, minor handling wear and slight softening to the edges and corners. Complete as issued.