TheArtNewspaper

FRIDAY, 30.5.08

Books—but not as you know them

Meet the woman who publishes tomes
made out of steel, blood and fireworks
Cristina Carrillo de Alborno | 17.4.08 | Issue 190

Anthony Caro, Open Secret, 2004

These are not the type of books you find in your local
library—one of them explodes, one of them is made with
the artist’s own blood and one stands more than two
metres high. The woman behind these limited edition
publications by Cai Guo-Qiang, Ed Ruscha and Anselm
Kiefer respectively is Elena Ochoa, 46, wife of the leading
British architect Norman Foster. This month a range of the
works go on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum
(V&A) in London. The exhibition is co-curated by Lady
Foster of Thames Bank (her husband was awarded a life
peerage in 1999) and Rowan Watson, senior curator at the
museum’s National Art Library.

An academic psychologist and an expert on Alzheimer’s

disease, she founded Ivory Press publishing in 1996, the
same year she married Lord Foster. Today the company
publishes artists’ books in edition sizes ranging from three
to 45 copies. They sell for around £50,000 each. “People
always ask if they are books or works of art. An artist’s
book is a work of art itself, it is the result of a process of
creation and research, it conveys the understanding of the
artist about a topic, materials, shapes and colours. As
Lady Foster [Spanish sculptor] Eduardo Chillida told me, it is about
exploring the space,” she says.