Ann Wolff
Observations and Reflections
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Dorothea Kriele |
| Author(s) | Mark Gisbourne, Dorothea Kriele, Luc Muller |
| Design | Book Book, Berlin |
| Size | 27 x 30 cm |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover |
| Pages | 272 |
| Illustrations | 131 |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-102-3 |
“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.
More books
-
ODOR
Immaterial Sculptures40€ Add to cartThe effect of odor is immediate. Smells arouse feelings in us, put us in moods, awaken recollections. They color the other senses and shape our perceptions more profoundly than we are aware. Scents create closeness and distance at the same time. They become imprinted on our memories and consolidate our experiences. And yet their existence in the world of three dimensions remains invisible, and the act of picking up a scent is fleeting.
The publication Odor—Immaterial Sculptures zooms in on the power of smells. Contributions from curators, artists, scientists, and scholars frame a variety of perspectives on this evanescent phenomenon, examining the olfactory sense and the qualities of the immaterial. Full-page plates conceived by the artists provide additional information, imagery, and contexts around the individual works, which put odor as an olfactory and spatial experience at the center of the engagement with art. The works operate between the poles of time and space, individual and community, consciousness and the subconscious, visibility and invisibility, the everyday and the miraculous, the sense of self and the perceptions of others, presence and absence, life and death.
Artists : Jason Dodge, Carsten Höller, Koo Jeong A, Oswaldo Maciá, Teresa Margolles, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sissel Tolaas, Clara Ursitti, Luca Vitone
- Out of stock
Hans Karl Zeisel
Hundred and more34,95€ Read morePossibilities of concrete art
What is possible without turning away from the cocrete? In the Bauhaus tradition, the typographer, graphic artist, designer and author Hans Karl Zeisel opens up countless design options with basic forms. His wooden cuboids demand a humorous approach to sculpture. They are creativity training, study tools and meditation game all in once. A playful experiment that reveals the diversity of concrete art.
-
Sprache/Text/Bild
32€ Add to cartSpoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change—that we share responsibility for them.
Artists: John Baldessari, Maria Bartuszová, Alice Bidault, Alejandro Cesarco, Ayşe Erkmen, Nadine Fecht, Gary Hill, Janice Kerbel, Gabriel Kladek, Gordon Parks, The National AIDS Memorial, Markus Vater, Gillian Wearing
-
Considering Finland
14€ Add to cartContemporary Art from Finland
With fourteen artistic positions from the fields of photography, video, and installation, Considering Finland offers fascinating insight into the Finnish art scene. The themes of the artists from one of the least populated and most densely forested countries in Europe is the relationship between humankind and nature, as well as the political, social, and economic implications of this. Their works point to cultural dispositions and standardizations of the individual within a society based on unattainable maxims, such as permanent success, lasting recognition, and limitless growth. Pictorial traditions, geographical structures, and socio-political and infrastructural factors are the bases of a mental construction that summarizes their artistic work under a national heading. With works by Kenneth Bamberg, Elina Brotherus, Ville Lenkkeri, Aurora Reinhard, Iiu Susiraja, Nestori Syrjälä, and Pilvi Takala.
-
Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
-
Isabelle Graw
In einer anderen Welt. Notizen 2014–201726€ Add to cartPersonal Observation as an Analytical Lens on Society
Isabelle Graw (b. 1962, Hamburg; lives in Berlin) is publisher of the magazine Texte zur Kunst and has been professor of art theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2002. In this book, she branches out from her work as an art historian and critic to offer reflections on a wide range of observations from her own life. Never before has Graw addressed her readers more frankly than in these 160 notes.
“She is blindingly frank, addressing the questions that envelop her days: waxing salons, the arrival of Syrian refugees in Germany, exhibitions and grief, electoral and family politics. Subtly, Graw reveals how impressions and beliefs arise out of circumstance.”
Chris Kraus, American filmmaker and author of I Love Dick“In crisp and striking vignettes, this book shows how self-scrutiny and minute observation of the world intermesh and form the dense web of her analysis. This is a unique and original book, literary, psychological and sociological, all at once.”
Eva Illouz, French-Israeli sociologist -
Erich Hörtnagl
to be a man38€ Add to cart“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” The witty remark, attributed to Diane Arbus, succinctly captures the twofold code at work in Erich Hörtnagl’s (b. Innsbruck, 1950) pictures. Aesthetically appealing photographs, mostly in black and white, show men (and women) in a wide variety of cultural, social, and religious contexts: from Swedish bikers and drag queens to monks in Myanmar, from Turkish belly dancers to Tyrolean performers in traditional attire. What looks at first glance like a conventional photobook soon reveals itself to be a brilliantly staged interactive riddle around clichéd notions of masculinity with positive and negative connotations, around gender roles and persistent stereotypes. With the deftly composed visual meta-narrative in to be a man, Hörtnagl, a seasoned theater and film director, lures us into a trap, and the only way out is by taking the challenge head-on: by engaging in self-reflection and questioning our own prejudices and ideas.
-
Räume hautnah (GERMAN)
Draiflessen Collection32€ Add to cartWe live in spaces that we shape in accordance with our own ideas. Our everyday lives leave traces in them that speak to our habits. Spaces promise shelter and belonging, but they can also instill a sense of constraint. We grow into the spaces we inhabit—and they in turn become expressions of our personalities. Conversely, spaces, depending on their architecture and location, inform our existence. RÄUME HAUTNAH gathers works of art that, rather than conceiving of the human sphere and the spatial domain as separate, comprehend them in their complex entanglements: in bodily experience, emotional dependency, or the instinctive need for protection. An essay by Olesja Nein, the project’s curator, offers an introduction to the exhibition and takes the reader on a tour, describing each artist’s space of activity and supplying helpful information. Philipp Zitzlsperger, meanwhile, zooms in on a key aspect of the art in the exhibition, the imprint as an artistic technique with a distinctive aura, and illuminates its origins and significance since the dawn of modernism.
Artists: Absalon, Shannon Bool, Heidi Bucher, Eileen Gray, Do Ho Suh, Mary Mattingly, Tracey Snelling, Francesca Woodman
-
Gregor Hildebrandt
A Blink of an Eye and the Years are Behind us48€ Add to cartFor the past two decades, Gregor Hildebrandt (b. Bad Homburg, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) has transformed analog audiotapes, cassettes, and records into collages, sculptures, panel paintings, and installations. Melding visual art with music, he has charted a complex creative vision crossing boundaries of medium and genre that he continually refines. Before using a tape, he records selected music—typically a single song—on it, whose lyrics he quotes in the work’s title. The artist’s output draws on his personal repertoire of bands that share a romantic narrative of loneliness and a melancholy keynote. The same attitude toward life is reflected in Hildebrandt’s work. The book offers insight into all periods of the artist’s oeuvre and is rounded out by archival materials from Hildebrandt’s studio, his project space Grzegorzki Shows, and the music label Grzegorzki Records that illustrate his creative process.
Gregor Hildebrandt studied at Kunsthochschule Mainz from 1995 until 1999 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1999 until 2002. He was a fellow of the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice in 2003 and worked in Vienna on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2005–06. He has been professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2015.
-
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.
-
“Das Quadrat muss den Raum beherrschen!”
Aurélie Nemours und Zeitgenossen15€ Add to cartDoes everything in the world obey a mathematical logic, can everything be calculated? In our present age of probability, some would say the answer is a straightforward yes, inevitably prompting the question: Even art? Yes, even art, or so the defenders of Concrete Art would respond, a twentieth-century movement that took abstraction as a focus on the “idea of art itself” (W. Kandinsky) to the next level. The act of painting was now to be subject to preconceived organizing principles as though they were laws of nature. One prominent exponent of the genre was Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005), who had a penchant for the square; her credo was that it needed to “rule space.” That is why the equilateral quadrangle is the defining shape in this catalog, which brings Nemours’ oeuvre into focus. Her iconic position is flanked by works by seventeen others that similarly grapple with the square, including pictures and sculptures with square basic forms, grids, or canvases. All these works derive their force from the stern authority of the square: only when art constrains its means can it bring its full potential to bear.
ARTISTS:
JOSEF ALBERS, GÖTZ ARNDT, MAX BILL, AD DEKKERS, HELMUT FEDERLE, GOTTFRIED HONEGGER, KATHRIN KAPS, FRITZ KLINGBEIL, JOHN MEYER, GEROLD MILLER, AURÉLIE NEMOURS, JOHN NIXON, PETER ROEHR, JAN SCHOONHOVEN, ANTON STANKOWSKI, KLAUS STAUDT, HERMAN DE VRIES, GERHARD WITTNER -
Female Gaze
From Virtual to Reality25€ Add to cartWorks of Art Take a Stance
The “female gaze” embodies a stance that is the polar opposite of the “male gaze.” The latter term came into use in the movie and advertising industries in the 1970s to describe the fact that women typically appear in films in supporting roles, as accessories to men, rather than as protagonists. The male gaze originated in a patriarchal society that has begun to change. The female gaze champions a modern form of emancipation that challenges men to abandon entrenched structures. Much more importantly, it encourages women to become aware of the strength that lies in their femininity and make it the source of their own creative expression and their own perspective on the world. For many years, the writer Silke Tobeler has visited artists in their studios, collecting the photographs she took there and her conversations with her hosts on her blog, Female Gaze.
-
Ed Sommer
Planetare Allianz22€ Add to cartA Monograph on the Pioneer of Op Art
The complex and extraordinary work of the Schwäbisch Gmünd-based artist Ed Sommer (1932–2015), who preferred to call himself a Bildsprachenmaler (painter of visual imagery), includes metal objects, formations of acrylic glass, gestural painting, erotic films, projection photography, dialogical portraits, and spoken texts. In 2014, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe added a large number of works by the artist to its collection. This publication now presents the collection holdings, supplemented by further works by Ed Sommer.
Ed Sommer, together with his artist friend Marc Adrian, was one of the most important representatives of op and kinetic art and received considerable attention in the 1970s with his films and photographs.
-
Agostino Iacurci
10€ Add to cartAgostino Iacurci’s (b. Foggia, Italy, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings, sculptures, installations, and murals are based on vegetal forms and botanical subjects. Lucid compositions in radiant colors unfurl fantastical ornaments that transcend the division between figuration and abstraction and the hierarchical distinctions of applied art, design, fine art, and folk art. His central theme is the painted garden, in which he stages plants, humans, architecture, geometry, and decoration in a fashionably theatrical landscape. In Iacurci, the interpenetration of nature and civilization is real, integrating mythological motifs from across the history of art and culture, from antiquity to futurism and postmodernism, into his singular style.
Agostino Iacurci studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Since 2009, he has realized numerous large-format murals and installations for public and private institutions. He has also worked with international brands including Apple, Adidas, Hermès, and Starbucks.
-
Karlheinz Bux
über Linie …15€ Add to cartClarity, Complexity, and Linearity
The defining artistic means in the work of Karlheinz Bux (b. 1952 in Ulm, lives and works in Karlsruhe) is the line. As edges and folds, they determine vertically oriented sculptures, which simultaneously convey compactness and openness, dynamism and repose. In Bux’s pencil drawings and photo-based works, they form the subject of the image in the form of complex linear structures. This present book documents the artist’s large-format works and provides insight into his oeuvre, with texts by Michael Hübl, Christine Reeh-Peters, and Carmela Thiele.
Karlheinz Bux studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe and taught as a lecturer at Pforzheim University and as a visiting professor at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences. His works are represented in private and public collections, including the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Hurrle Collection, and the Würth Collection.
-
Jan Muche
Agora42€ Add to cartTracing the Wear of the Life of Labor
The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century’s ideologies – Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche’s roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear’s “heroes of labor” into focus.
Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin.
-
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.
-
Language/Text/Image
32€ Add to cartSpoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change—that we share responsibility for them.
Artists: John Baldessari, Maria Bartuszová, Alice Bidault, Alejandro Cesarco, Ayşe Erkmen, Nadine Fecht, Gary Hill, Janice Kerbel, Gabriel Kladek, Gordon Parks, The National AIDS Memorial, Markus Vater, Gillian Wearing
-
Slawomir Elsner
Precision and Chance38€ Add to cartComplex Processes of Abstraction
International audiences know Sławomir Elsner (b. Wodzisław Śląski, Poland, 1976; lives and works in Berlin) for his naturalistic paintings and abstract watercolors, but it was his brilliantly executed colorful drawings that made him famous. The technique of his work in crayons is as formidable as it is singular and underlies his many adaptations of legendary works from the history of painting that seem blurry but are actually drawn in accurate lines.
More generally, Elsner’s art probes the effect of different media and the stories they tell. He interrogates the images they transport and challenges the consumers to subject their own visual experiences to a similar critical review. Do pictures represent reality or distort it? That is the question that guides his inquiries.
Elsner works almost exclusively in series. What makes this book special is that it includes an index in which eleven of these bodies of work are reproduced in their entirety. The Old Masters series alone comprises 143 works made in the years after 2014. It is complemented by the series Windows on the World (2008–2010), Feuerwerk- und Luftabwehr (2004), Unsere Sonnen (2004–2005), the watercolors of Tagstücke and Nachtstücke (2014–2021), and others.
Many of the works frame accidents, disasters, wars, nuclear tests, or other horrible events. By harnessing the means of art to detach their depiction from a documentary setting, Sławomir Elsner achieves an unrivaled degree of aestheticization; his works are fascinating at first glance, only to fill the beholder with a creeping dread.
-
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.
