Your first book

From the early 1970s Nikita Alexeev, one of the key artists of Moscow Conceptualism, created drawing series, artist’s books, and comic albums, investigating the interaction between text and image. His ABC Your first book, published on the initiative of printing studio Piranesi LAB, continues this tradition by combining intellectual play and artistic experiment.

The publication is a set of separate, screenprinted pages, on each of which are depicted two objects that begin with the same letter of the English alphabet. The preface by Nikita Alexeev and Irina Gorlova is included separately. Five books of the edition of 35 were hand colored by the artist. The other 30 books each contain two randomly selected colored pages that are not repeated in the others. Alexeev suggests that future owners color the rest of the letters.

Inspired by Alexandre Benois’ Alphabet in Pictures (1904), Alexeev creates his version of absurd, unexpected “surrealist pairs” that contrast in terms of scale and meaning. This is not simply an alphabet book but a hedonistic game of associations in which the sun that migrates from page to page is an immutable leitmotif.