NEW YORK, NY.- CLAMP will present “Four-Page Books,” a new exhibition of collages by Aaron Krach that transforms the structure of the book itself into a site of fantasy and desire. Fourteen works created between 2024-2025 are built from vintage book covers, each one remade into a hybrid of archive, scrapbook, and dream.
Aaron Krach has been collecting and cutting books for years, scavenging images from publications found from shelves, flea markets, and yard sales. In his studio pictures are pulled apart and reordered into small mountains of color and subject. Owls clipped from scientific journals echo the poses of bodybuilders. Ancient statues stand rigid beside men from Blueboy. A Campbell’s soup can (a Pop Art icon) clamors for attention as insistently as a kitten. These collisions spark with humor, camp, and longing.
Collages cover the front and back covers, as well as the interior spreads, forming four-page objects that are simultaneously sculptures, collages, and books. Krach foregrounds the covers themselves, relics of what he calls a golden age of book design between 1960-2000, when even mass-produced volumes were wrapped in cloth and built to last. Stripped of their contents, the covers remain book-like, stubbornly insisting on form. From this armature, Krach discovered that a book needs only four pages to hold its identity. On that foundation he builds collages that masquerade as complete volumes. Each becomes a fantasy publication: messy, abundant, yet straight forward in its means of construction.
A highlight of the show is “Playing (4PB Red),” a dense and colorful spread where wide-eyed kittens share space with nudes, cartoons, rainbows, and fragments of art history. The work is absurdly tender and sharply irreverent, collapsing innocence and eroticism into a single field. The kittens are not decorative background but equal players in Krach’s theater of images, their sweetness heightening the charge of the erotic. “Playing” crystallizes the spirit of the series: collage as both a scrapbook of cultural detritus and a parade of desire, humor, and contradiction.
Aaron Krach is an American artist, writer, and journalist based in New York City. He earned his BA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 1994, and his MFA from Purchase College in 2012. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he is a two-time recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Grant for Public Art.
