This intensely visual book – with over 1900 illustrations – charts the creation of Adrián Villar Rojas’ commission, The End of Imagination, which opens the Tank space in the Art Gallery’s new building for the Sydney Modern Project in December 2022. Produced by Villar Rojas and his team in close collaboration with the Art Gallery, this numbered limited-edition artist-led book is unique and collectible.

I see this book as an index, a map, a thriller, an unearthing, a go-with-me, a fabulation, a science (fact)ion, a memoir of materials, a real-time record, a nest of speculations, a scrapbook, a manual, a witnessing of a moment in time, an underground tunnel between Rosario and Sydney, a thing we made while the temperatures soared, a brain, a charter, a storybook for adults, a primer in a language we don't speak yet ...
– Adrián Villar Rojas

When Villar Rojas first visited the tank space in 2018, he entered via a ladder into the dark and highly resonant space that had been built to store oil for the naval ships at Sydney’s Garden Island during World War II. Over the next four years, he embarked on a remarkable sculptural experiment. Developing a new software system dubbed the ‘Time Engine‘, Villar Rojas and his team created a series of intensely detailed and constantly evolving worlds and placed virtual sculptures within them. In a large workshop in his hometown of Rosario in Argentina, the team (re)constructed, with forensic intensity, these time-travelling sculptural bodies.

The end of imagination book combines the richness of an atlas with the intrigue of an ancient text and the momentum of a graphic novel to track this journey of creation. In the 400-plus pages of this artist-led book, viewers will be plunged into subterranean worlds, slung far into outer space, and introduced to alternative universes, encountering real and virtual landscapes, artist drawings, digital models, archival material, studio documentation and a unique information architecture developed by the artist and his collaborators. The book concludes with software-generated installation views of the completed sculptures in the Tank.

A numbered limited edition of 750 copies

Paperback with poster
416 pages
30 x 24cm