148 Oblique Drawings lures readers into Serban Ionescu’s sketchbook, where the artist’s vibrant creations, with their playful, architectural spirit, live alongside a poem made with the help of friends and family.
The art book compiles a series of images made throughout Serban’s daily drawing practice from 2020–2023, which relied on "the same ruler, the same size paper . . . and the flow of watercolor." Fellow artists and creatives—including Katie Stout, Minjae Kim, Todd Selby, Dodie Bellamy, KAWS, Swizz Beatz, and Stefan Marx, among others—lent titles to each work, which have been tamped together into what Ionescu calls "some kind of exquisite corpse/Frankenstein found poem," the driving force of the book, a.k.a. a large machine made of words.
148 Oblique Drawings is an exercise in imagination, drawing readers into the machinery of chance and innovation. It’s a natural evolution of the long-standing relationship between the Romanian-born, typically New York (although currently Brussels-based) artist and Apartamento, which started with a feature in issue #24 of the magazine and has been cemented with a number of collaborations, including the publication of A Thing on a Table in a House, Serban’s first book, in 2021.