About:

Founded in 2024 by Johanna Himmelsbach and Kai Udema, Soft concern hard concern is dedicated to the design and publishing of visually driven experiments, bringing forth artist books and complementary objects in small editions.

Lauriergracht 116A
1016RR Amsterdam
The Netherlands

For orders, questions and contact:
hard-concern@soft-concern.com

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Distribution worldwide:
Idea Books, Amsterdam
www.ideabooks.nl
Distribution NL/BE:
Jesse Presse, Amsterdam
www.jessepresse.nl


 Upcoming events:

19.03.26
Launch: Graft 1–5, James Beckett, during the unveiling of the serial artwork Graft 1–5 on Cruquiuseiland, Cruquiusweg 89F, Amsterdam
29.03.26
It's a Book, Independent Publishing Fair, Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig

Previous events:

14.02.26
Launch: Driftwoods, Bart Lunenburg, The sound of night falling in the other room, Gallery Caroline Obreen, Amsterdam
19.12 – 21.12.25
Tokyo Art Book Fair 2025, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (JP)
14.07.25
The Books Are Bridges Art Book Fest, PrintRoom, Rotterdam (NL)
16.05 — 18.05.25
Offprint, London (EN)
03.05 — 04.05.25
Ghent Art Book Fair, Ghent (BE)
11.10 — 26.10.24
Fuel Your Ambition (exhibition), Glassbox Sud, Montpellier (FR)
01.08 — 31.08.24
Around Publishing: Reading Room, Kitchen, Garden, Shanghai (CN)
11.05 — 12.05.24
Ghent Art Book Fair, Ghent (BE)
24.04 — 26.04.24
Fuel Your Ambition (launch), CONFORT MENTAL, Paris (FR)

Published:

2026
2026
2025
2025
2025
2024
2024
2022


Graft 1–5
James Beckett

 112p, 10.5×16.8cm, softcover, offset, 2026
ISBN 9789083521145
This small, field-guide-like booklet accompanies a series of five public artworks by artist James Beckett, created for Cruquiuseiland in Amsterdam in 2026. Taking the form of hybrid plants, these 12 meter high sculptures emerge from extended research into the site’s material, ecological, colonial, and social histories. Conceived as a portrait of place, they reflect on what has unfolded on this terrain, what is taking place today, and how the area may continue to evolve when a former industrial harbour has turned into a residential neighbourhood. The book shares this research in a collection of short case-studies on 26 different references and objects that are visually integrated in the sculptures. The booklet is available in 4 different covers.

€12
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Driftwoods / Drijfwoud
Bart Lunenburg

 88p, 19×26cm, digital printing and riso, 2026
EN: ISBN 9789083521138, NL: ISBN 9789083521121
From the wooden foundations beneath Amsterdam, extending upstream to rural timber traditions in the German Rhineland, Driftwoods presents the artistic research of Bart Lunenburg, foregrounding the featured photographic series Nocturnes. Through a textual and visual essay that touches upon architectural excavation, medieval timber frames, colour archaeology, rural shadows, carpentry traditions and abandoned tools, Driftwoods reflects on the relations between local wooden architecture and the landscapes that supply their materials. Layering international with personal perspectives, Lunenburg introduces us to the seemingly disappearing knowledge and traditions that still shape the landscapes and houses we inhabit.

In an assemblage of various papers, inks and typography, the book embraces the notion of ‘driftwood’ as artistic framework, bundling washed-up historical references, personal observations and finished artworks that appear simultaneously adrift and fixated, decayed and restored, found and created. Available in English or Dutch.

€24
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How they met themselves (n°11)
Andrea Salerno

 8p, 45×31.5cm, offset, 2025
ISBN 978-9-08352-111-4
Appropriating the appropriated, Andrea Salerno weaves together two copies of Le Point d’Ironie n°11 (Hans-Peter Feldmann, 1999) as part of his series How They Met Themselves. This large unbound booklet is printed on 90 grams silk paper, showing the work in a 1:1 scale. Distributed folded in half and sealed in a plastic wrapping.

€14
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Bird shaped vinyl
Kai Udema

 208p, 28×19cm, offset, screenprinted dustjacket, 2025
ISBN 978-9-08-352110-7
Bird shaped vinyl is a book by Kai Udema based on a collection of shapes traced from the negative spaces of broken windows. Compiling nine exercises, each exercise visualizes a different mathematical principle, suggesting an ambivalent understanding of logic vs intuition, decision vs chance, chaos vs order. Shifting between object, print, image and page, the book attempts to visualize the metaphysical qualities of the hole through its own. Open spine binding, glued and stitched, with a silkscreened plastic dustjacket.

€34
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Sets
Johanna Himmelsbach

 6 sheets, 42x21cm, ComColor, 2024
Sets is a series of unbound images by Johanna Himmelsbach collected between 2021 and 2024 inside a house, among birch, rowan and winding pine trees along the Swedish coast, at the Bibliothek Andreas Züst in Switserland, and places in between. Leaving the order of images in each set open to its reader, the work explores the process of editing through free association and proposes understanding images as words. Each Set is distributed individually and comes in a durable plastic sleeve containing six one-sided prints. Printed with a ComColor on 60gr paper at Masereel, Belgium.

Set 1: House, Birch and Rowan
Set 2: Red currant tear
Set 3: The library as a hypnotist
Set 4: Sun burning summer
Set 5: Dropper cables
Set 6: Blue remote together

€18
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Dragons
Mijia Wang

 24p, 21.6×27.9cm, ComColor, 2024
A series of children’s drawings tells the short story of a girl who, through an act of metamorphosis, saves a village from a tyrannous monster. As the story abstractly concludes her transformation into the idea of authorship, the book itself simultaneously raises questions about its own authorship. The text was borrowed by artist Mijia Wang from subtitles from the film Erzählen (1975). In response to the work Bird shaped vinyl by Kai Udema — a series of shapes from broken windows — she invited a class of toddlers to draw dragons onto copies of his collected shapes.

€15
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Fuel your ambition
Johanna Himmelsbach, Célia Picard & Hannes Schreckensberger

 36p, 35.5×46cm, offset, unbound, 2024
ISBN 979-10-415-3139-4
An exploration on muscle regeneration and recovery, Fuel your ambition is a visual essay by Johanna Himmelsbach in dialogue with the artistic research of Célia Picard and Hannes Schreckensberger. Offering a mental space for rest and meditation combined with interviews with athletes, the publication proposes intense physical exercise as a contemporary method of self-exploration and deepening. Co-published with Revue DAS.

€35
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ircle crcle cicle cirle circe circl (mantra)
Kai Udema

 32p, 23×40cm, riso printed, 2022
Riso-printed on a 1:1 scale, the publication features 16 images of analogue distorted variations of a black circle on an A4. Like a visual meditation, the booklet documents an open-ended exercise in printing, abstraction and metamorphosis. Each copy is bound in a different order and contains a different cover image.

€30
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