Pippa Garner:
ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME

edited by Maurin Dietrich (director Kunstverein
Munich) and Fiona Alison Duncan (author, curator)

with Kunstverein Munich, Kunsthalle Zürich, FRAC Lorraine, White Columns

texts by Pippa Garner, Shola von Reinhold, Dodie
Bellamy, and Fiona Alison Duncan
English with a french translation supplement

designed by Hit-Studio, Berlin

paperback with screenprinted cover, plus extra sticker
24 x 33 cm
ca 280 images
312 pages

ISBN 978-3-948546-11-3

US$50  CDN$68  €39  £35

The first comprehensive monograph of American artist Pippa Garner, ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME surveys fifty years of her transdisciplinary art practice, from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, through photography, illustration, ephemera, and original writings.

Encompassing Garner’s most iconic works, from the Backwards Car to the Half-Suit, alongside never-before-seen photographs and ephemera, ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME serves to introduce a highly-influential, under-recognized artist whose uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television, and art without ever becoming beholden to them.

Born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1942, the artist formerly known as Philip Garner has satirized American-style consumerism for decades, reifying the joys of everyday life and personal liberation along her way. With her prankish sense of humour and conceptual dedication to experimental engineering, she has altered materials of mass production—from Fordism through the pharmacopornographic era—subverting commercial binaries to reveal the transitory nature of material life and her own transpersonal identity.

ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME is the first critical survey of Pippa Garner’s radical practice, supplementing exclusive visuals and texts by Garner with archival press materials on the artist from such notable figures as Glenn O’Brien, Ralph Rugoff, and Hayden Dunham, in addition to three new original commissions from contemporary, award-winning authors Shola von Reinhold, Dodie Bellamy, and Fiona Alison Duncan.

ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME builds upon a touring exhibition of the same name—the first solo exhibition of Pippa Garner in Europe—launched at the Kunstverein Munich in the fall of 2022 with subsequent stops at the Kunsthalle Zürich (Zurich, Switzerland, 2023), FRAC Lorraine (Metz, France, 2023) and White Columns (New York, NY, 2023). Co-curated by Maurin Dietrich and Fiona Alison Duncan in collaboration with Daniel Baumann (Kunsthalle Zürich), Fanny Gonella (FRAC Lorraine), and Matthew Higgs (White Columns), this exhibition has garnered coverage in Vogue, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Elle, Mousse, Autre, Artnet, the New York Times, and Novembre, among other publications.