David Batchelor’s latest series of drawings (2012–13) disrupts October’s orderly monochromatic universe with circles, triangles and rectangles of brilliant transparent colour 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 colour.

Drawing upon Batchelor’s unique visual language and the colours 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.

This series of works formed a major part of the exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 at Whitechapel Gallery, London (15 January–6 April 2015).