The survey, commissioned by Art Basel, asked Marina Abramović, Andreas Angelidakis, John Gerrard, and Nancy Lupo to revisit the single book that shaped them most — and to name what sits on their summer reading lists. The answers span nearly a century of publishing, from a 1929 travel memoir to a 2000 experimental novel, and reveal that the books that changed artists often have little to do with art itself.
Marina Abramović and the Tibetan Journey
For Abramović, the pivotal book was Alexandra David-Neel’s With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, published in 1929. David-Neel, a Frenchwoman, left Paris for Tibet in the 1920s and spent more than 17 years there — learning the language, enduring extreme conditions, and studying directly with Tibetan mystics in complete seclusion.
Abramović calls David-Neel a major inspiration, but the lesson she took was specific: nobody changes simply by reading about someone else’s experience. Change demands the journey itself. That conviction pushed Abramović into her own expeditions — into Aboriginal culture in central Australia, into shamanism in Brazil, and into long stretches living in deserts. David-Neel died at 100 in France after completing her journey. Abramović is now reading Haruki Murakami’s forthcoming The Tale of KAHO, due in 2026.
Andreas Angelidakis and the Architecture Catalog
Angelidakis traces his creative origin to a MoMA exhibition catalog: Deconstructivist Architecture by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, published in 1988. His mother read about it in the International Herald Tribune, and tracking down a copy in 1980s Athens was no small feat. Inside, he saw Frank Gehry’s house and experienced what he calls a paradigm shift.
The book proved that architecture could make meaning rather than simply serve a building — that it could function as a monument to disaster, trauma, or accident. It led Angelidakis to study at SCI-Arc in California and shaped a career in which books as physical objects matter deeply. The catalog for his Venice Biennale Greek pavilion project mirrors the exact dimensions of the 1988 MoMA publication. He still owns his original copy. This summer he is reading Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (2022), a work about a clown school.
John Gerrard and the Philosophy of War
Gerrard arrived at the Ruskin art school in Oxford in 1994, a 20-year-old from Ireland. In his second year, he found Manuel DeLanda’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), a book that traces the history of warfare and technology in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War — a conflict Gerrard had watched on television from his boarding school common room.
DeLanda’s central argument — that power had become abstract, that cognitive structure was transferring from humans to machines — introduced Gerrard to criticality itself. He learned how a writer could examine society through a single prism, in this case computing and violence. The book has functioned as what he calls a “talisperson” ever since, reorienting his thinking and informing a practice that looks at contemporary conditions through the lens of technology. His original copy remains on his bookshelf. For summer, he returns to Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1986) in the studio and packs Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) for the beach.
Nancy Lupo and the Haunted Landscape
Lupo’s choice is the most recent discovery of the four: Joy Williams’s The Changeling, published in 1978 but read by Lupo only recently. The novel articulates something about latent energies in particular American regions — the Northeast, Florida — that Lupo connects to her own upbringing in Arizona. Williams lives in Tucson and is famously unreachable: no phone, no email.
Lupo describes the book as cinematic, comparing it to Lucrecia Martel’s film La Ciénaga in its drunk intermingling of children and creatures, and the reciprocal, haunted relationship between living things and landscapes. She calls it a fever dream — what happens when the desire to manifest the feeling of a situation produces a churning impossibility. Whether it has influenced her work is, she admits, harder to pin down. She hopes it still is. Her summer pick is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).
What Happens Next
The four artists all have work on view through late 2026, giving readers a chance to see how these literary influences manifest in practice. Abramović has exhibitions at Gropius Bau in Berlin (until August 30) and the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice (until October 19). Angelidakis’s Escape Room continues at the Greek pavilion of the Venice Biennale through November 22. Gerrard’s online exhibition SPIRITS runs at LACMA until December 21. Lupo’s Several Chickens Later is at Spike Island in Bristol until September 6.
The broader takeaway for anyone interested in how books that changed artists actually function: none of these four titles is an art book in the conventional sense. They are travel memoir, exhibition catalog, war philosophy, and literary fiction. The pattern suggests that the most consequential reading for visual artists happens outside their discipline — in texts that reframe how they see the world rather than how they make objects within it.
— Lucas Berg, culture desk, AXO News