Ideal Forms of Vanishing

Herbert Pföstl
2021

Ideal Forms of Vanishing comprises eleven color plates of paintings from Pföstl’s Departing Landscapes series—“banners dedicated to an unknown elsewhere and offered as icons sans salvation”—and Pföstl's essay ‘Farewell Below the Light of Broken Skies,’ a text on “remembered affinities and the spiritual properties of forefathers and foremothers: excavated relics, a secret history of art.”

The essay pays homage to the world-parting gestures of Hugo Ball and E.M. Cioran; touches upon the legend of the brilliant, ever misjudged Nina Simone; embraces the hieroglyphic impressions of the hereafter in the etchings of Hercules Segers; and locates emanations of the Sacred in Anton Webern's fawn-bone-pointed redemption miniatures, Gesualdo's severe madrigals, and Morton Feldman’s unfolding sounds in magical iteration. Utterances on the origin and labor of art—from Anita Albus to Unica Zürn—are woven in. The essay ends with a fragment by Ernst Herbeck—Austrian poet of totem animals and childhood epiphanies—which could serve as a banner for the book.

Ideal Forms of Vanishing is a synthesis of high quality offset printing of the artworks combined with letterpress printing from metal type for all text. The book was hand set in Stempel Sabon, cast by Rainer Gerstenberg in Germany. The book is printed on a matte coated sheet, imported from Italy. Sewn and bound by hand, and laid into a letterpress printed dust jacket, in an edition of 400 copies. Typesetting, letterpress printing and binding by Jon Beacham.
36 pages, 6.5 x 9.25 inches.

Edition of 400
$45

Purchase at The Brother in Elysium