Luis Jacob

As a companion piece to Jacob's exhibition at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, this artist's book features two related projects: an exhibition of remade Rokthos from the Panza Collection—uncannily replicated and reconfigured four times—and a special re-hanging of works from the Museum's permanent collection, in the manner of works from Jacob's Album series.

Lima-born, Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob's installation "Habitat," detailed here, was realized in 2005 at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. The extensive work comprises six interconnecting rooms for meeting, yoga, DJing, reading, sleep and one devoted to the contrast between hard and soft, which feature ceramic objects presented under museum vitrines.

Album III is the book version of Luis Jacob’s installation for 2007’s Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. The project consists of hundreds of images found and copied from various books, magazines and other publications, as well as the Internet. This exhaustive volume is 160 pages long and minimally designed, with only two to five images on a page--no text, no descriptions. The images speak for themselves. Coming from public sources, the pictures are grouped on each page formally, conceptually and intuitively, so that, for example, on a given page one might find a grainy black-and-white photograph of a pile of sausages in a butcher’s window next to a saturated color image of a boxer’s punching bag. The reader is invited to make his or her own associations and invent narratives through these visual puns. Sometimes humorous, sometimes bland and even sometimes devastating, this museum of found photography incorporates images that span from the early twentieth century to today.

Luis Jacob was born in 1970 in Peru. Currently, he lives and works as an artist, writer, curator and educator in Toronto.