KWY

The KWY magazine (1958-1964) was a singular editorial adventure led in Paris by 8 young foreign artists, newly arrived in the capital. Its founders were Portuguese artists Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Costa Pinheiro, Gonçalo Duarte, José Escada and João Vieira, soon joined by Bulgarian Christo and German Jan Voss. They were exiles, some fleeing a dictatorship, others a country ravaged by war and Nazism. They chose to settle in Paris, which then radiated the aura of a cosmopolitan cultural capital. 

The magazine is a rich, composite art object featuring original silkscreens, photomontages, collages, postcards, soft discs, poetry, theoretical texts, unpublished works and precious documents. Through its 12 issues, we follow the evolution of a group of artists from the informal, gestural or matierist abstraction on display in galleries at the end of the 1950s, to the new art trends in which the group’s members participated – New realism, New figuration, Pop art, gestural abstraction, Lettrism, Fluxus, kinetic art, concrete poetry, etc. In the background, we can make out their personal, dissimilar paths within the Parisian or international networks, which were then pursued independently in Paris, London, Lisbon, Munich or New York. […]

KWY was first and foremost a laboratory for experimentation, in the form of a quasi-collective work, displaying a joyful independence from the various aesthetic currents: the freedom for each to choose his or her own style. (source : Anne Bonnin)