Pressure by Christian Reister

PRESSURE is a hybrid of zine, artist’s book, and catalogue. The publication brings together manually crafted elements and various printing techniques into a visual narrative created in my studio between 2020 and 2025.

Its foundation lies in reproductions of silkscreen and gel plate prints, selected from a broad archive of motifs ranging from urban landscapes and portraits to other visual worlds. My aim was not to achieve perfect fidelity to the originals. Many of the prints use acrylic colors such as tin, copper, or silver – materials that create a shimmering surface only fully visible in the originals. The offset four-color printing process used for this publication cannot replicate that effect – nor was it intended to.

Just as the photographic source material was transformed through manual printmaking techniques, I wanted the prints themselves to undergo another transformation through the medium of the book. In PRESSURE, they appear in full-page format, cropped, enlarged, reduced, overlaid, or combined into new constellations – a visual remix that continues to explore and reinterpret the material.

18 x 24 cm
60 pages (including 12 reduced-size ones), featuring a total of 38 images

PRESSURE is published in a limited edition of 250 numbered, signed, and stamped copies. Editions no. 1–100 feature a cover with the image of a silkscreen print; numbers 101–250 are bound in a cover made of grass paper. Both versions are manually embossed and include typographic elements that have been hand-applied using silkscreen printing. The publication is bound with three hand-dyed staples along the spine.