Kaari Upson: Go Back the Way You Came (Notebook)

A facsimile of one of Kaari Upson's notebooks, offering a moving glimpse into the raw immediacy of her thinking and the layered intensity of her practice

Published with Kunsthalle Basel.

When Kaari Upson (1970–2021) died of cancer at the age of 51, she left behind an extensive body of unfinished work and a breadth of materials related to her practice, including dozens of notebooks. This facsimile re-creates the one she used to sketch and reflect in the months leading up to her exhibition Go Back the Way You Came at Kunsthalle Basel in 2019―the last to show new work before her death. Alongside a faithful reproduction of each page, the notebook also includes a booklet in which Elena Filipovic illuminates the practice of "doubling" in Upson's work and explains why Upson's notebooks are crucial to understanding her practice: "Upson was a tenacious notetaker; her drawings and notebooks, in which little was held back, act as capacious ledgers that trace the motley cosmos of what she thought, made, or longed yet to make."