Color Inventory / Farbinventur is a 520-page NO-ISBN artist’s publication based on twelve years of intensive research into publications from the field of art.

The book brings together approximately 20,000 publications collected between 2007 and 2019 and arranges them according to the colors of their covers.

The publications appear both as autonomous works and as forms of documentation, research material, and objects of discussion. Many entered the collection through exhibitions, exchanges, collaborations, and encounters rather than through a systematic search. Together, they form a material archive of artistic production, publishing practices, design decisions, and changing cultural contexts.

The book does not present a selection of the “best” or “most beautiful” publications. Instead, it documents a specific field of interest shaped by artistic practice, collecting, exhibiting, cataloguing, and recontextualization. The publications have been used as research material, models for new works, exhibition objects, and components of the long-term project Salon für Kunstbuch.

By sorting the collection by color, the publication temporarily suspends conventional categories such as author, title, chronology, genre, or institutional origin. Color becomes an alternative system of order through which unexpected relations between publications become visible.

The publication is available in both a regular edition and a limited artist's edition. Currently, 184 copies of the regular edition and 38 copies of the artist's edition remain available.

Anyone who finds their own publication reproduced in the book receives a 10% discount on the purchase of a copy.