Edited by Meredith Malone with essays by Ágnes Berecz, Magdalena Holzhey, and Meredith Malone and contributions by Sam Adams, Marina Isgro, Alexander Kauffman, and Molly Moog 

Multiplied: Edition MAT and the Transformable Work of Art, 1959–1965 examines the rise of multiples and the concurrent surge of interest in kinetic art in the post–World War II era through Edition MAT (multiplication d’art transformable), the pioneering publishing enterprise of the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri. In 1959 Spoerri launched a series of three “collections” of commissioned multiples, in editions of 100, from an international and cross-generational mix of artists, including Josef Albers, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Dieter Roth, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely, and Victor Vasarely, among others. He then marketed and sold these works through exhibitions across Europe. While artists have long created editioned works of art—from prints and handmade books to bronze casts—Spoerri’s project placed a radical focus on multiplication and movement, illuminating an array of experimental practices from Western Europe and the United States in the postwar period. By producing and distributing these small-scaled, reasonably priced multiples that could be manipulated, moved, and altered optically, electrically, or through physical interaction, Spoerri aimed to broaden the notion of art and its role in society, recalibrating the relationship between art, artist, and audience. 

Multiplied is the first in-depth English-language study of this seminal project and its role in the history of kinetic and the broader trajectory of the multiple across the 1960s. The catalog presents the entirety of Edition MAT’s three collections—from 1959, 1964, and 1965—with three scholarly essays and biographical entries on each of the participating artists that illuminate this unique constellation of practitioners, including those associated with of kinetic and Op art, as well as Nouveau Réalisme, Nouvelle Tendance, Fluxus, Pop art, and Zero. An appendix of historical documents, many translated here for the first time, includes artist interviews and manifestos, offering rare insight into the aesthetic agendas of this innovative program. 

Cloth 256 pp.
ISBN 978-0-936316-47-5 

Copublished with Hirmer Verlag; distributed in North America by University of Chicago Press