A Rare Bird

LONDON / A rare copy of John James Audubon's "Birds of America," billed as the world's most expensive book, is up for sale alongside a first edition of Shakespeare's plays at auction on Dec. 7. One of only 100 or so remaining copies of "Birds of America" is valued at between $6.2 million and $9.2 million, while a Shakespeare First Folio from 1623 is expected to fetch at least $1.54 million. Sotheby's books expert David Goldthorpe said the two tomes are "the twin peaks of book collecting." It is one of the most significant — and beautiful — published works of natural history; only 119 copies remain, and all but a handful are in museums, libraries and universities. More

Jay Shinn

RIFF

Eileen Cubbage / Jay Shinn

Alice Gryphius Kunstraum • Gryphius Strasse 10 • Berlin

Eileen Cubbage and Jay Shinn are American artists participating in the Takt International Residency Program in Berlin . Their new works on paper make novel use of traditional themes and materials as a sublime aesthetic pervades both bodies.  Psychological and metaphysical space is explored with rigor and sensitivity as both artists develop their own specific language to investigate the perplexities of essential form and substance. Both artists subvert the perfect form, allowing elements of surprise to decreate the known. 

Cubbage juxtaposes fields of meticulous silverpoint drawing with geometric swatches of matte acrylic paint on mylar. Taking small cues from poetry, philosophy, history, biology, her drawings evolve into playful riffs of shifts in form and stand as metaphor for decoding subtleties of social relationships. The core of the work lies in its ambiguity— the depiction and deciphering of complex boundaries between similarity and difference, foreign and familiar, serious and absurd. Shinn also investigates abstract boundaries—his seemingly simple forms achieve an optical reality of both the visible and invisible. His pairing of sparse symmetrical geometric forms with the restricted materials of white spray paint and transparent paper creates apearances of illusion, depth, and shadow with an ethereal gravity. Shinn's luminous forms create a tenuous, inextricable balance between the physical world and the imagined.