Alexandru Chira
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Călin Dan, Mălina Ionescu |
| Author(s) | Ionuț Cioană, Alexandru Chira, Călin Dan, Mălina Ionescu, Diana Marincu, Alexandra Titu |
| Design | Radu Manelici, Andrei Turenici |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Size | 23,5 x 28 cm |
| Pages | 416 |
| Illustrations | 749 |
| Language(s) | English, Romanian |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-103-0 |
Alexandru Chira’s (b. Tăușeni, Romania, 1947; d. Bucharest, 2011) oeuvre systematically and comprehensively maps a fictional field of research. His paintings, drawings, and objects, whose individual elements recall switches, screens, keyboards, and levers, were designed to “bring rain and rainbows,” to promote prosperity and prevent floods. Working in his art laboratory, Chira resembled a farmer tilling his field. He sowed symbols across his paintings, sometimes transplanted them to create new semiotic interconnections, then reaped them and stored up his harvest in painted machines of varying shapes and dimensions. In the 1990s—by then Chira held a professorship and was a widely recognized artist—he fulfilled a lifelong dream by building the “Tăușeni Ensemble,” the largest monument single-handedly created by one man in Transylvania. Much of his oeuvre accordingly consists of sketches and elaborations relating to the monument. In the course of his decades-long fascination with an agrarian aesthetic, architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, ufology, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy fused, yielding a kind of practical knowledge as well as spiritual speculations sustaining his endeavor.
The extensive monograph with more than 750 illustrations surveys Alexandru Chira’s output of four decades and synthesizes years of research undertaken at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. It contains numerous transcriptions of textual parentheses, legends, and instructions on how to decode the works and poetic fragments embedded in Chira’s pictures.
More books
-
Barbara Armbruster
Meins Mine24€ Add to cartAn Intercultural Artistic Narrative between Germany and Egypt
In her works, Barbara Armbruster (b. Bad Waldsee; lives and works in Stuttgart) deals with cultural and social spaces, structures, and identities. Influenced by many years of residence in Cairo, Armbruster’s diverse works are points of relationship between two completely different cultural spaces. In her paintings, drawings, photographs, installations, and performative videos, the artist pursues a cross-cultural approach that tells of her time in Egypt and Germany on both a documentary and personal level. The monograph provides fascinating insight into Armbruster’s continuously developed language of expression between Arabic calligraphy, stylized ornamentation, and the photographic staging of everyday architecture.
Barbara Armbruster studied Graphic Art at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, where she later held a teaching position. Her works have been widely exhibited at, among others, the Goethe-Institut in Cairo, the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart, and the Kunstverein Freiburg.
-
Wolfgang Gäfgen
Photographic Miracles45€ Add to cartA Mysterious Play of Light and Shadow
While Wolfgang Gäfgen’s (b. Hamburg, 1936; lives and works in Stuttgart and Esslingen) hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less accomplished than the artist’s graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier history of art or allusions to historic myths.
-
auf Erkundung
Anne Deuter und Monika Supé25€ Add to cartA Dialogue on Time
The two artists Anne Deuter (b. 1986, Halle; lives and works in Halle) and Monika Supé (b. 1967, Munich; lives and works in Munich) engage in self-exploration to find ways to convey an experience of body, space, and time. Grappling with formalist elements, they devise their compositional practices in graphite and ink and in words and images, respectively. Enhanced by selected works by contemporary poets, the publication opens up new perspectives on what it means to exist in time.
Anne Deuter studied visual art and art history at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald. She rounded out her education in the book art program at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. Monika Supé studied architecture at the Technischen Universität München and completed a doctorate on visual perception training at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Since 1995, she has taught in the design divisions of various universities.
-
Ugo Rondinone
winter, spring, summer, fall20€ Add to cartUgo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media—painting, sculpture, film, and installation art—his work is rooted in the transformation of outward reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres that capture the contemporary mood.
This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone’s work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a lightbulb . winter at theSørlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light . summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath, Vienna.
-
Jean-Marie Biwer
D’après nature42€ Add to cartPainterly Investigations of the Present
For over four decades, Jean-Marie Biwer (b. 1957, Dudelange, Luxembourg; lives and works in Basbellain, Luxembourg) has made art that records his fine-grained observations. Grappling with the grand themes of art history – the landscape, the human figure, the still life – Biwer consistently questions the role painting can play in a world shaped by a deluge of images and information. Responding to the omnipresence of the latter and reacting to the increasingly frantic pace of our lives, he creates paintings that allow the intensity of the present moment to unfold. The richly illustrated book gathers his most important works since 2005.
“These things are there, we just need to look at them. They are simple, but today they have the power to bring so much to people.”—Jean-Marie Biwer
Jean-Marie Biwer’s work has been shown throughout Europe and in 1993 he represented Luxembourg at the 45th Biennale di Venezia. His works can be found in the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, IKOB, Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc-Jean amongst others.
-
Stephan Grunenberg
10€ Add to cartStephan Grunenberg (b. 1954) paints peculiar portraits: not heads or sitting and reclining figures but seemingly independent feet, legs, trousers, socks or soles of shoes. These and other under-appreciated motives are playfully arranged in captivating compositions which take issue with our hierarchical habits while looking at art. “Leaving out the ‘civilized’, educated head and centering on neglected parts such as the legs, including the lower abdomen—which is either eroticized or made taboo—is the artist’s point”, writes Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in an essay that accompanies the images inside this small and attractive new book. The paintings reproduced in this volume were all exhibited in Grunenberg’s latest exhibition in 2024, which was titled tongue-in-cheek „Representatives Regional To Earth.”
-
Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia.
-
Andreas Wegner
Wir fahren mit der Schneckenpost, weil sie uns keinen Pfennig kost50€ Add to cartThe art of Andreas Wegner is an inquiry into capitalist urbanity. His interventions explore alternative models for urban interaction, trade, city development, traffic, or the use of public space. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Charles Fourier’s social utopias, Wegner founded, e.g. a cooperative department store in Berlin, a grocery store in Vienna, and conducted real estate business as a form of creative resistance. This monograph illustrates the artist’s most important projects with ample imagery, essays by renowned authors, interviews, and his own texts. Alongside collective initiatives, installations, photography, film, and sculpture, painting remains a constant in Wegner’s oeuvre to this day.
-
Beate Höing
It’s all about Love28€ Add to cartRecollections—What remains?
The painter and ceramist-sculptor Beate Höing (b. 1966, lives and works in Coesfeld and Münster) creates works of art whose aesthetic is deeply informed by the ornamentation and manual techniques of folk art. Drawing inspiration for her motifs from souvenir culture, but also from fairy tales and myths, she unfurls her burgeoning imagination in works defined by an unmistakable style and a singular allure. Poetic pictures and sculptures deftly toy with the conventions of kitsch and forms of traditional craftsmanship. Tangible objects, associations, and recollections coalesce in an ambivalent play between reality and fiction in which only a fine line separates dream from nightmare, congeniality from alarm.
The lavishly illustrated monograph presents a comprehensive survey of the artist’s output between 2011 and 2021.
-
Brandon Lipchik
10€ Add to cartIn recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.
-
Simone Haack
HAIR30€ Add to cartSimone Haack (b. 1978 in Rotenburg/Wümme, lives and works in Berlin) has always made the inwards legible in the outer appearance of her figures in her painting. This is also the case in her block of works in the exhibition of the same name, Hair. Already in the late 17th century, magic and superstition were attributed to hair. In it one suspected the whole power of the soul. The artist, who was formed in the painting class of Katharina Grosse and Karin Kneffel, symbolically reveals the fragility of the DNA of human beings through her hair landscapes, which are sometimes placed macroscopically in the picture in the spirit of a New Magic Realism. At the same time, her accompanying exhibition publication always also tells of the triangle of tension of physical as well as psychological existence, which in her case runs through the painterly psychoanalysis.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Mechanik Sehnsucht. Kunsterzeugung und Betrachtung14€ Add to cartUngewohnte Antworten aus der Sicht des Kunsterzeugers
Die Frage, was Kunst ist und wie sie entsteht, wird gerne von denen beantwortet, die sie selbst nicht erzeugen. Die Betrachtung und Interpretation steht im Vordergrund und damit eine wissenschaftliche Distanz zur Kunst. Es gibt aber durchaus die Eigen-Betrachtung derer, die Kunst aktiv herstellen und naturgemäß einen inneren Blick auf die prozessualen Bedingungen haben, die überhaupt erst das entstehen lassen, was anschließend betrachtet und beurteilt wird. Diese Sichtweise ist nicht zwangsläufig identisch mit der von außen. Nicht die Interpretation oder eine deduktive Schlüssigkeit steht hier im Vordergrund, sondern ein ableitender und besonders ein schöpferischer Sinn, der sich aus dem Prozess des Kunstherstellens von selbst ergibt.
Die Arbeiten von Stephan Kaluza (geb. 1964 in Bad Iburg, lebt und arbeitet in Düsseldorf) wurden unter anderem im Ludwig Museum Koblenz, im State Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, in der Kunsthalle Osnabrück, im Palacete des Artes Rodin, Salvador, im Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, sowie in der KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, ausgestellt.
-
SERIES
Prints from Warhol to Wool40€ Add to cartA Creative Strategy and Technique of Modernism
Series are open systems, telling stories, toying with rhythms, permitting variations, and documenting creative processes. Andy Warhol’s famous silkscreen prints made the serial iteration of images his trademark stratagem. In the mid-1960s, Pop Art and Fluxus had established the fine art print as a medium in which seminal work was being done. New graphic techniques such as serigraphy and offset printing, used with aggressive colors and punchy motifs, not only allowed for large numbers of copies, they also opened the door to an unprecedented engagement with the imagery of popular print and advertising media. Opening with an inquiry into how serial fine art prints are made, the book presents and contextualizes the explosive visual and political energy of graphic series. The numerous illustrations and essays are rounded out by an interview with Thomas Schütte and Ellen Sturm.
With works by Josef Albers, Joseph Beuys, Ulla von Brandenburg, John Cage, Helen Cammock, Nina Canell, Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Donald Judd, Ronald B. Kitaj, Maria Lassnig, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Stefan Marx, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Fred Sandback, Nora Schultz, Thomas Schütte, Dasha Shishkin, Frank Stella, Rosemarie Trockel, Victor Vasarely, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Corinne Wasmuht, Emmett Williams, Christopher Wool, and others.
-
Candida Höfer
Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn35€ Add to cartThe Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Yesterday and Today
The imposing presence of architecture captured in the absence of humans: that is the defining characteristic of the photographs with which Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde; lives and works in Cologne) has risen to international renown. In 1992, she captured the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in ten analogue black-and-white pictures that have not been on public display. In 2020, Höfer returned to the institute to take more pictures using a digital camera. The two series now make their public début in the institute’s halls and are gathered in this book. Undertaking a historically and aesthetically captivating comparison, Höfer probes the ways in which university life has changed over almost three decades.
Candida Höfer was a member of Bernd Becher’s inaugural photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works were shown at documenta 11 in 2002, and in 2003, she and Martin Kippenberger represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.
-
Martin Krumbholz
Alex, Martin und Ich14€ Add to cart“The Vocation of Saint Matthew”: that is the title that Martin Krug has chosen for his novella, after Caravaggio’s iconic painting at the Church of San Luigi degli Francesi in Rome. The irony is unmistakable—Martin, the protagonist of his narrative, hesitates to accept a promotion: he has been offered the job of his boss, for whose wife, Marion, he has fallen on a shared vacation. Yet Martin’s friend, whom he has asked for advice, proposes a different title: Ghost Story—a key element of the plot is the mysterious Alexander’s disappearance, seemingly forever, in the sea …
Martin’s friend and interlocutor, the novel’s first-person narrator, embeds the novella in a narrative framework that mirrors its motifs: love as passion, eros and sex, loyalty and betrayal, manliness and chivalry, art, film, and music. Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, glamorously adapted for the silver screen by Jean-Luc Godard, is reread and discussed as a MeToo story.
Martin Krumbholz (b. Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, 1954; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a writer and theater critic. His first novel, Eine kleine Passion, came out in 2013.
-
Katharina Arndt
While waiting for Death38€ Add to cartLife for the most part consists of banalities. What to make of it? Katharina Arndt has decided to dip thick brushes into luminous bold acrylic paints, which she applies expansively without regard for the ostensible gray areas of life. Every stroke is valid, there’s no remorse or trepidation, everything is foreground, all elements of a picture are equipollent. The people in Arndt’s paintings from 2022–23 gathered in this catalog are simply there, for the moment, gaping into their cell phones, stuffing themselves with burgers. Nothing more. That makes her works distorted depictions of our hedonistic society with its craving for sensuality, even as we always have one eye riveted on the virtual. The harder, then, to face up to physical reality; with all photo filters off, its imperfections are unmistakable. And so, although we clearly delight in these gaudy colors, the pictures contain intimations of melancholy and death, too. Knowing that the hour of farewell is near, Arndt’s figures stimulate their senses. They kill time down to the very end with jarring trivia, agitated Sisyphuses wallowing in their glittering inadequacy.
-
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.
-
Winston Roeth
Speed of Light32€ Add to cartColor Is Light
Intense monochrome areas of color, radiant pigments, and multifaceted surfaces are the characteristics of the art of Winston Roeth (b. Chicago, 1945; lives and works in Beacon, New York, and Waldoboro, Maine). He has devoted himself to abstract color field painting since the 1970s, with the grid as a leitmotif running through his oeuvre; both are fraught with painterly memories of light, “a light that can jump out and grasp the beholders, a color saturation that throbs with a deep glow,” as the artist himself puts it. It emanates from the strata of paint in his pictures, encountering the light that, falling upon his works, molds their chromatic effect. Roeth experiments with pure pigments, which he mixes by hand to make paints he applies in layers to diverse media including paper, aluminum, honeycomb, slate, and wood panels. The book documents a tour of an exhibition, presenting works dating from between the early 1990s and 2020.
-
Yes To All
Die Schenkung Paul Maenz Gerd Vries42€ Add to cartThe catalog accompanying the exhibition YES TO ALL offers profound insight into a collection of over nine hundred works on paper—from postcards and drawings to photographs and posters—that was gifted to the Kupferstichkabinett in 2022, with subsequent additions over the years until 2025. The donors are Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, who ran a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne until 1990 and chaperoned the evolution of avant-garde art from the conceptualism of the late 1960s to the neo-expressive painting of the 1980s. The most recent works in the collection date from 2024. Several essays and a conversation with the donors invite the reader to experience the stylistic and thematic polyphony of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in new ways.
-
Lars Breuer
The Love of the Gods32€ Add to cartThe art of Lars Breuer (b. Aachen, 1974; lives and works in Düsseldorf and Cologne) is set apart by its broad spectrum of systems of reference. In his large-format installations, text-based works in his own typography draw connections to literature and art history. They are complemented by figurative and abstract paintings and photographs.
In The Love of the Gods, Breuer presents 104 C-prints of photographs for which he pointed the camera’s lens into the barrels of disused rifles, pistoles, revolvers, and cannons. The pictures were taken on the artist’s travels to Athens, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Leverkusen, Ingolstadt, Melbourne, New York, Oslo, and Phnom Penh, in museums, palaces, and public squares. Breuer’s conceptual and meticulously sober-minded approach yields almost abstract compositions showing nothing but the round muzzles and the dark interiors of the weapons on a deep-black ground. We see only a ring-shaped ornament until it dawns on us that it is part of a lethal implement. A cruel constant of human existence stares us in the face: humans behind these weapons were perpetrators, humans in front of these weapons were victims. Lars Breuer’s turn the spotlight on what the aura of the ornaments conceals: they have wrought death.
