Since its launch in 1976, October has been the single most influential journal of art history and criticism. Yet in nearly 40 years of publication not a single image has been reproduced in color.

David Batchelor’s latest series of drawings (2012–13) disrupts October’s orderly monochromatic universe with circles, triangles and rectangles of brilliant transparent color and planes of opaque black. Drawn over every page of October No. 1 (Summer 1976), his varied abstract compositions interrupt the intended ‘textual clarity’ of the journal with a carnivalesque play of form and color.

Drawing upon Batchelor’s unique visual language and the colors found in the modern city, the works in this artist project are reprinted to actual size and collected in full for the first time in this volume. - Ridinghouse