Published in 1986 for the solo exhibition of the German artist Sigmar Polke in the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale — the year he was awarded the Golden Lion — Athanor gathers a large number of full-page reproductions of the artist's paintings and photo-collages, in black and white and in colour. Describing the whole of the Biennale installation in pictures, the volume is a long way from an exhibition catalogue and belongs among artists' books, with its vaporous printing and its woven pink and blue cover. Athanor, the alchemist's furnace, was the form through which Polke brought his painting together with the architecture of the pavilion and with natural and cultural-historical themes, in the months when the Chernobyl reactor exploded.