Guy Laramée has been working with books as a sculptural medium for over twenty years. Carving directly into the bound pages of vintage volumes, the artist creates intricately detailed landscapes and architectures, often textured and painted to render complex topographies and surface vegetation. Laramée frequently works with old dictionaries and encyclopedias, bringing the geological timescale of mountain and desert landscapes into contact with the canons of knowledge represented by these beautiful yet often dated volumes; the artist has spoken of the tension he wishes to explore between static forms of knowledge and the wonder and immediacy of our relationship to the natural world.

In 2022, Laramée relocated to a new mountainside studio in Nova Friburgo, Brazil. Much of his work since then has been inspired by the dramatic peaks of the nearby Pico da Caledônia. In this new Livros series, the artist introduces novel techniques to his practice including carving the pages of his books with high-pressure water and stripping the books of their covers to reveal their sewn bindings—allowing Laramée to manipulate and distort their shapes as the books dry. The dramatic final works have a new abstraction and materiality to them as they transport us to the otherworldly remoteness of their mountainside landscapes.

Visit the exhibition online here.

Guy Laramée received an MA in Visual Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Quebéc, as well as an MA in Anthropology from Concordia University, Montréal, Quebéc. The artist’s work has been exhibited at the Paul Smith boutique, New York, NY; Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; Museum Sinclair-Haus, Bad Homburg, Germany; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; and Maisons de la culture de Montréal, Montréal, Québec. His work can be found in the collections of Bibliotéque Nationale du Québec, Montréal, Québec; Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC; City of Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV; Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing, MI; University of Michigan Special Libraries, Ann Arbor, MI; Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City, Québec, Canada. Laramée’s work has received extensive press coverage in publications including Designboom, Artnet News, COLOSSAL, The New York Times, Artforum, The Paris Review, Huffington Post, Wired, and Hyperallergic.