Larissa Kikol
Neue abstrakte Malerei
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Larissa Kikol |
| Design | Niklas Sagebiel |
| Size | 17 x 24 cm |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Pages | 288 |
| Illustrations | 80 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-223-5 | Release June 2025 |
Abstract painting has reinvented itself: rid of political and ideological burdens, it now stands for pure creative autonomy. From the Abstract Expressionism of the postwar era to today’s expansive ease—in essays and conversations, Larissa Kikol sheds light on how this art form broke free of the narratives that attended its emergence and performed a “great reset.” From the seminal innovations of Katharina Grosse or Albert Oehlen and radically subjectivist approaches in Cecily Brown or André Butzer to cutting-edge tendencies like Dirty Minimalism and Post Vandalism, the book presents thrilling insights into a painting that puts emotion, color, and shapes center stage. An inspiring look at the renaissance of abstract art in the 21st century and a must-have reference work for all art lovers.
Artists: Frederic Anderson, Karla Black, Frank Bowling, Jenny Brosinski, André Butzer, Cecily Brown, Andreas Breunig, Jadé Fadojutimi, Katharina Grosse, Antwan Horfee, Aneta Kajzer, Michael Müller, Oscar Murillo, NUG, Albert Oehlen, David Ostrowski, Daisy Parris, Marco Pariani, Christopher Wool
Release June 2025
More books
-
Călin Dan
POLLIO34€ Add to cartThe oeuvre of the Romanian artist Călin Dan (b. Arad, Romania, 1955; lives and works in Bucharest) shows the influences of conceptual and minimal art. His book Pollio surveys his creative practice of the past decade, which straddles the media of installation and performance art, film, photography, and sculpture and is enriched by his work as an art historian, writer, and curator. In addition to the titular body of work, which wrestles with the Roman historian Gaius Asinius Pollio, the volume also documents the exhibition Alzheimer (2017). Călin Dan is a founding member of the artists’ group subREAL. His work was showcased at the Istanbul (1993), Venice (1993, 1999, 2001), São Paulo (1994), and Sydney Biennales (2006). He has been director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest since 2014.
-
Digitale Skulptur
Follow the unknown19,80€ Add to cartCrossing the BNorders of the Tangible
For the first time in art history a competition for the Digital Sculpture Award was announced. What is a digital sculpture anyway? Where are the boundaries between real and virtual worlds? With the advent of digitally generated images, the conditions for our perception and the parameters of our viewing habits are changed. Through the interactive involvement of the viewer, software-controlled image phenomena such as virtual environments lead to an exploring vision. The book presents and documents innovative works, which were conceived for the international competition, initiated by the Museum Ulm.
With works by Morehshin Allahyari, Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz, Jörg Brinkmann, George Crîngaşu, Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez, Marcel Karnapke, Leonard Kern, Nicolò Krättli + Jann Erhard, Martina Menegona and Marjan Moghaddam.
-
James Francis Gill
Catalogue Raisonné of Original Prints, Vol. 239€ Add to cartThe Catalogue Raisonné of the Co-Founder of American Pop Art
James Francis Gill (b. 1935, Tahoka; lives and works in Texas) is one of the most important artists of American Pop Art. His paintings, often based on photographs, provide an unusually personal approach to the icons of the 1950s and 60s. Gill suddenly became Hollywood’s most celebrated artist when his Marilyn Triptych was added to the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962 – even before the works of Andy Warhol. Through friendships with celebrities such as John Wayne, Martin Luther King, and Marlon Brando, Gill became the contemporary artist-witness of an entire generation. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the exuberant Hollywood of the time and surprisingly withdrew in 1972, only to reappear on the art market thirty years later. This catalogue raisonné in two volumes impressively documents his work from the early political motifs to the Pop Art icons of his late work.
-
Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte27,50€ Add to cartErinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
- temporarily not available
Shara Hughes
Day by Day by DayRead moreGraphic Manifestations of the Unconscious
The painter Shara Hughes (b. Atlanta, GA, 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA) is one of the rising stars of the American arts scene. Her colorful imaginary landscapes, executed in a radiant palette and with an expressive gesture, pay homage to the Symbolists, the Fauves, and the Expressionists, whose artful handling of lighting and depth she deftly emulates. In an intuitive approach, Hughes applies paints to the canvas that match her present state of mind. She calls her pictures “emotional landscapes” and notes that she does not know what will happen next; her work on them touches on a vulnerable boundary. The lavish book presents numerous works on paper, most of them in large formats, and contains an essay by the New York-based art critic Andrew Russeth.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Newport Art Museum, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
-
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt – Wie eine Spinne im Netz
38€ Add to cartRuth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. Wurzen, Germany, 1932; lives in Berlin) is one the few East German female artists who devoted themselves to graphic art produced on the typewriter. Working on her trusty “Erika,” she arranged letters, digits, commas, and plus signs to compose imaginative visual creations. Under her hands, the black and red characters were transformed into poetic verbal images, gently undulating waves, serial patterns, and architectonic or figurative formations. Sometimes verging on concrete poetry, these typewritings also evince unmistakable affinities with conceptual and minimalist art. In the 1980s, the artist expanded on them in collages that recall Hannah Höch’s Dadaist visual montages. With her graphic work, Wolf-Rehfeldt was also an active participant in the GDR’s mail-art program: she sent the typewritings to artists beyond the impassable borders of her country, building an extensive network of correspondences that spanned the globe.
The richly illustrated monograph underscores the diversity and contemporary relevance of Wolf-Rehfeldt’s works, which were created in the shadow of the Cold War and address the fragility of peace as well as early manifestations of the environmental devastation wrought by the industrial age.
-
Ann Wolff
Observations and Reflections44€ Add to cart“Art is coming from my inside. I am working as its servant.—I let it out not thinking too much—using my hands and gesture—choosing a material to put it on place. I do not use the art. It is using me.“
Ann Wolff (b. Lübeck, 1937; lives and works in Visby and Kyllaj, Sweden) has ranked among the most significant and most influential glass artists on the international scene for over five decades. Yet she has also worked in bronze, aluminum, nickel silver, and concrete, creating abstract as well as figurative sculptures, and produced a sizable oeuvre on paper: pastels, drawings, and fine art prints. Ann Wolff enrolled at the legendary Ulm School of Design in the 1950s to study visual communication with Otl Aicher. From 1993 until 1998, she was professor of “materials-related design” at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg. Her works, which have garnered an array of prizes, have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and are held by renowned public and private collections all over the world.
-
Jörg Heieck
CRUX29€ Add to cartTwo Fascinating Series of Works by the Photographer and Physicist
Expertly wielding the vintage photographic technique of the cyanotype, Jörg Heieck (b. 1964, Münster; lives and works in Kaiserslautern) transmutes nature into a fascinating play of shades of blue and defamiliarized shapes. Desolate sceneries, barren landscapes—the first series gathered in the book was created in the Sahara, Iceland, and Spitsbergen. Humanity has reached a crossroads: can we avert the destruction of the planet? Contrasting this symbolic crux, the second section presents populated intersections replete with signage from China, Japan, Russia, Israel, India, Greece, and Georgia. With these panoramas of urban life standing as a counterpoint to the abstraction in the photographs in the first section, the book offers insight into the artist’s extraordinary oeuvre.
Jörg Heieck has a PhD in physics and worked for many years as a researcher at Agfa, Kodak, and the ITER nuclear fusion reactor project. His art has been shown in numerous countries, including at the Goethe-Institutes in Damascus and Beirut, the Aleppo International Photo Festival, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, and Kunsthalle Mannheim.
-
GOTT&GILZ
Supernatural Beings54€ Add to cartGOTT&GILZ clothe provocative nudity into the guise of art-historical classics
The female nude is a constant of art history whose vicissitudes illustrate changing forms of representation and the wild swings of public morality. Many a nude was initially condemned as smut only to be reclassified a few years later as beautiful and becoming and inducted into the hallowed halls (the opposite has also happened). GOTT&GILZ’s photographic paintings build on this long tradition of depictions of naked women by men—theirs is the proverbial “male gaze.” It is a debt they are quick to acknowledge, with nods to Klimt, Schiele, Pollock, et al. No wonder some have responded to their work with kneejerk indignation. Unlike in those art-historical references, then, the impudence lies not in the shattering of traditional norms of representation but in quoting them: the past as affront. The women in the pictures as well as the artists themselves flaunt their desires, shamelessly and relentlessly confronting us with the historic roots of our social and psychological realities.
Freedom is the key idea in the two artists’ oeuvre: the freedom to be authentic and express oneself without shame. Their subtly provocative play with aesthetic conventions and taboos has not only made a splash on the arts scene, it has also prompted vital discussions about gender roles, body images, and the right to sexual self-determination.
By letting it all hang out, they allow us to see ourselves as we are instead of presenting a picture of what we (supposedly) should be like. The insolence of it!
-
Martin Noël
paintprintpaint35€ Add to cartA Comprehensive Overview on the tenth Anniversary of the Death of Martin Noël
Martin Noël (b. 1956, Berlin; d. 2010, Bonn) was a German painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He was one of the formative innovators of the long-neglected techniques of linocut and woodcut. With his large-format works on paper, he created a position for himself in contemporary art that is as much respected as it is independent. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the artist’s death, this volume presents a comprehensive overview of his work from the mid-1980s to the last year of his life in 2010. Thirty-five exceptional works document Noël’s path from his early years as a painter, via the middle phase marked by printing blocks, linocuts and woodcuts, up to his late paintings.
Martin Noël studied Graphics and Painting at the Rheinische Fachhochschule Köln, Cologne. His works are included in, among others, the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, and the collection of the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
- out of print
Shara Hughes
58€ Read moreBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
-
Zwischen Freiheit und Moderne
Die Bildhauerin Renée Sintenis29€ Read moreThe Successful Sculptor and Symbol of the “Neue Frau”
Renée Sintenis (b. 1888, Glatz; d. 1965, Berlin) belongs to the first generation of professional female sculptors at the beginning of the twentieth century. She made skillful use of her business relations with her gallerist Alfred Flechtheim, who introduced her to collectors in Paris, London, and New York. The market for, in particular, her lively, small animal sculptures was quite lucrative. These experienced renewed popularity in the 1950s through her Berlin Bear statuette, which has been presented in a small version at the Berlin International Film Festival since 1960. The catalog sheds light on the sculptor’s diverse oeuvre and provides insight into the self-image of one of the most successful women artists of the Weimar Republic, who embodied the type “Neue Frau” (new woman) due to her dazzling appearance.
-
Maximilian Rödel
Celestial Artefacts50€ Add to cart“One must break free from wanting something and confine oneself instead to being something.” — Maximilian Rödel
Inky black, apricot, magenta, and a pastel purple: apparent monochromes, the paintings of Maximilian Rödel (b. Braunschweig, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) actually do not just traverse color spectrums; in a sense, they chart horizons of experience. To contemplate them is to embark on a voyage through space and time. Foreground and background are one, depth and surface at once; an undertow makes itself felt in which the nuances of color interweave, blur into one another, shimmer, flare up. The artist describes his pictures as an unfocused energy that already exists; he merely uncovers it.
The first publication on Rödel’s work presents the exhibition Celestial Artefacts at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, with an emphasis on the Prehistoric Sunsets series (2018–2021). It is complemented by reproductions of selected works and an extensive index that also includes details from earlier series that are relevant in the context. Aperçus contributed by Rafael Horzon and Leif Randt and writings on art by Domenico de Chirico, Lena Fließbach, Stefanie Gerke, Philipp Hindahl, and Maurice Funken add another dimension to the paintings.
-
Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
with free download link on the inside
You’ve read right, and you’re going to hear it: a bureaucratic document—we’re all familiar with it, for a new one arrives every year—is the subject of this inspired collaboration between the graphic artist Philip Loersch and the virtuoso vocalist Johannes Steck.
The “Renteninformation”—an official letter on cheap paper informing the recipient about their expected future retirement benefits—makes many cultural workers, and others, crack up or break out in tears: arriving unexpectedly, it launches us on an emotional roller coaster between excitement, fascination, resignation, and sheer madness.
The manuscript for this audiobook is Loersch’s actual Renteninformation for 2022. Its intonation is the culmination of a series of works the artist has pursued since 2016. Every year, he has produced a naturalist colored-pencil drawing of his Renteninformation, embedding it in idyllic scenes—in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid autumn foliage, or on a frozen lake, delicately and accurately executed down to the smallest leaf of grass and the tiniest letter.
“Renteninformation 2022” is the ideal gift for all vinyl lovers who need to close a “pension gap” in their collections and a stunning audio experience that redefines what the satire of reality itself and conceptual art can do.
Philip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980) is best known for his unconventional drawings. His works combine painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst, and helped initiate the exhibition series “Drawing Wow.”
Johannes Steck (b. Würzburg, 1966) is one of Germany’s best-known audiobook narrators, having sold over four million copies, including of books by Simon Beckett and Ken Follett, in a three-decade career. Television viewers also know his voice from trailers on Kabel 1 and DMAX and documentaries on ZDF, BR, and Sky. His work has garnered awards including the 2012 HörKules.
-
Taube
18€ Add to cartHuman, City, Pigeon
Public perceptions of the pigeon have shifted drastically over the past centuries. In the 1700s, it was welcomed as a guest who commanded humans’ unfailing solicitude; today, by contrast, it is often perceived as a nuisance. It has become an animal that defaces squares and buildings. Why does the pigeon in the settings of our daily lives prompt feelings of loathing and fascination, but also indifference? Jens Gerber’s photographs undertake an expedition into the city of the pigeons. Rounded out by essays by Marina Rüdiger and Laurens Schlicht, the book illuminates the subject of the city pigeon from the perspectives of photography, science, and literature, and explores the question of how pigeons shape the built environment and how the latter informs their behavior in turn.
-
Philip Loersch
POW – PORTRAITIST OF WRITING34€ Add to cartPhilip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980; lives and works near Munich) combines painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His works reveal the fragility of truth and authenticity while commenting with subversive irony on the postmodern disintegration of the idea of originality. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions like Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst. This monograph gathers his works created between 2016 and today.
-
Petra Arnold
Beyond Starlight39,90€ Read moreThe Fischer Family of Circus Artists: A Photographic Long-term Observation
For more than a decade, the photographer Petra Arnold has shadowed the Zirkus Starlight troupe and the Fischers, a family of performers, taking analog photographs, mostly black-and-white, of their life behind the scenes. When she began the project, the Fischers were a large family, with thirty grandchildren. Over time, the company has had to downsize – the business environment is difficult, and few people can make a living as circus artists these days. Arnold’s photographs peek behind the curtain for a study of an existence between circus family and family circus – mostly outside the limelight. The portraits and unstaged scenes are documents of contemporary history and draw attention to the steady decline of circus culture.
-
B.A.R.O.C.K.
24,80€ Add to cartArtistic Interventions in the Caputh Palace. Contemporary Parallels to the Baroque Era
Four international women artists spent more than three years studying Caputh Palace near Potsdam and creating works specifically for this magnificent location. The tapestries by Margret Eicher (b. 1955, Viersen; lives and works in Berlin), the floral scans by Luzia Simons (b. 1953, Quixadá, Brazil; lives and works in Berlin), the wax sculptures by Rebecca Stevenson (b. 1971; lives and works in London), and the ceiling painting projections by Myriam Thyes (b. 1963, Luxembourg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) blend into the surrounding space both naturally and surprisingly. With twelve double-page collages, the large-sized catalog is an artistic commentary on the ambitious project.
- temporarily not available
MEUSER
Works 2012–2023 (ENGLISH)Read moreEver since his studies with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich, since his first exhibitions – for instance at ‘Kippenberger’s Office’ in 1979 – Meuser (b. Essen 1947, lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been a solitaire. His sculptures are unyielding and unruly, just as much as they are vulnerable and tender. They are witty and heart-touchingly charming.
Meuser finds his material in the scrapyard. Confidently and empathically, he reinstates form and dignity to the remnants and vestiges of industrial society. As a romantic, he grants things a life of their own and turns them into self-reliant protagonists, once more. Unwaveringly, he works to re-poetize a standardized and maltreated world.
The lavishly designed monograph is published on the occasion of Meuser’s 75th birthday, presenting works and exhibitions from the past ten years. Eight international authors and scholars create a dazzling mosaic and reveal how Meuser boldly holds his own in face of Duchamp, Minimalism, and Social Sculpture. An open-ended outlook.
Meuser studied 1968–1976 at Art Academy, Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich. 1991 he received the ars viva award. 1992-2015 professorship at Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe.
Since 1976, numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions and works in international collections: Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; documenta IX / Fridericianum, Kassel; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Joanneum, Graz; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Paintings & Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe First Monograph on the Californian Pop Artist Since More Than Thirty Years
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is the very personification of the cheerful, carefree attitude towards life in California – with his work as well as his person: a former surfer and motorcycle racer, an extravagant artist and key figure of West Coast Pop Art. After studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the Otis Art Institute, he exhibited at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957 and was the central figure among a group of artists that included Frank Gehry, Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, and Ken Price. BAB, as he apostrophizes himself, inserts car and motorcycle parts as motifs into his otherwise abstract paintings, using lacquer and spray paint instead of oil, and aluminum panels with at times dented surfaces instead of the traditional canvas. Art and lifestyle combine to create the individual “Bengston iconography” of California Cool.
