Anna Virnich
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Robert Grunenberg |
| Author(s) | Oliver Koerner von Gustorf |
| Design | OOR Studio, Berlin; Vladimir Llovet |
| Size | 15 x 21 cm |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Pages | 40 |
| Illustrations | 25 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-134-4 |
Anna Virnich’s (b. Berlin, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) works resemble a speculative narrative. The artist has collected fabrics, garments, and bedspreads since her childhood, which she cuts up, exposes to the elements, dyes, and sometimes paints on to construct pictures and spaces. Her works are paintings and objects at once and defined by a powerful physical presence in conjunction with a ghostly emptiness. They recall Helen Frankenthaler’s liquefied chromatic landscapes, Paul Thek’s post-minimalist physicality, and the silver-foil transcendence of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Everything in Virnich’s art is a shell or membrane through which something filters in or out, “a part of emerging networks and an exchange of substances, technology, bodies, imageries, of the light of the eyes,” as Baptist Ohrtmann writes. Gathered, the textiles unfold an abstract tale of becoming and passing away, of painting, birth, artificiality, and science fiction.
More books
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game32€ Add to cartThe Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
-
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.
-
Emil Nolde
A Critical Approach by Mischa Kuball40€ Add to cartWhat is Visible and What is Not
Mischa Kuball (b. 1959, Düsseldorf; lives and works in Düsseldorf) investigates public and institutional spaces and the social and political discourses that shape them. At the invitation of the Draiflessen Collection and with support from the Nolde Stiftung, the conceptual artist grappled with the life and oeuvre of the painter Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and created a body of work titled Nolde/critique/Kuball. In piece after piece, Kuball drains Nolde’s works of the colors that made the Expressionist famous, challenging the beholder’s preconceptions and examining perception and its constituent processes. Laid out in black and white, the book accordingly directs our attention not only to what a picture shows, but also to how structures and organizing principles emerge into view.
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, and associate professor of media art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM Karlsruhe since 2007.
Note: This publication is released in German, English and Dutch. When ordering, please let us know which edition you would like to receive. Use the annotation box on the checkout page.
- Out of stock
Flatland
35€ Read moreBetween the Dimensions
The title of this book quotes a literary work by Edwin A. Abbott that was first published in 1884 and gradually gained considerable fame: an allegorical satire whose protagonists are geometric figures, narrated by a square that relates its discovery of a three-dimensional world. Flatland examines the ways in which artists have found inspiration in the formal vocabularies of abstraction since the 1960s. The lavishly designed book gathers works from the past six decades that challenge orthodox interpretations of abstraction.
Contributing artists: Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Francis Baudevin, Philippe Decrauzat, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Hoël Duret, Sylvie Fanchon, Liam Gillick, Mark Hagen, Christian Hidaka, Sonia Kacem, Tarik Kiswanson, Vera Kox, Sarah Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Damián Navarro, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Bruno Peinado, Julien Prévieux, Eva Taulois, John Tremblay, Pierre Vadi, Elsa Werth, Raphaël Zarka
-
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.
-
Vanessa Henn
Same Same35€ Add to cartVanessa Henn’s (b. Stuttgart, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) objects and installations blend formal reduction with playful comedy. The handrails she makes out of a wide variety of materials run along walls, project into rooms, trace spirals, mark lines or arcs, and often solicit our active engagement. Besides banisters, her oeuvre, which straddles the line between architecture and sculpture, also comprises bridges, stairs, and fences. All her creations are energized by the tension between the static work of art and its dynamic environment, which the artist resolves by integrating her works into the goings-on of everyday life. A guardrail that runs perpendicular to a flight of stairs or abruptly ends in the ceiling or floor is relieved of its function; rather than helping us go where we are going, it is a companion who invites us on a stroll into the imaginary and uncertain. And that is what makes Vanessa Henn’s art so alluring.
The book presents Vanessa Henn’s latest works from the years 2019-2023.
Vanessa Henn studied sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (1992–2001) and at Edinburgh College of Art (1995–1996) and completed a Master of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art in Christchurch, New Zealand (1999–2000).
-
Justine Otto
New Traditionalists38€ Add to cartJustine Otto (b. Zabrze, Poland, 1974; lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin) is one of the most promising artists on the contemporary painting scene. An aficionado of the absurd, she unfolds a metaphysical-psychedelic and often gaudily lustrous cosmos in pictures in which representation clashes with abstraction. In her early work, girls, women, and animals were here preferred subjects; more recently, she has painted heroes—the protagonists in myths of masculinity. After generals, officers, and strategists, she has now turned her attention to cowboys, who appear on horseback or resting under a tree, musical instrument in hand.
Justine Otto studied fine art and painting with Peter Angermann and Michael Krebber at the State Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main and obtained an MFA in 2003. She also worked as a scene designer at Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, the city’s municipal theater company. Her paintings are held by collections including the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt; Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, Switzerland; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
-
On Air
Der Klang des Materials in der Kunst der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre40€ Add to cartOn Air showcases a distinctive art form, the sound sculpture, retracing its evolution from the early 1950s, when artists begin dismantling the conventional boundaries of art, to the early 1970s. In no more than a quarter-century, the range of possible answers to the question “What is art?” grows vastly larger. Propelled by the idea of the work of art as a machine and instrument, sounds, noises, tones, vibrations, silence, words, breath become a “tangible” sculptural material. Artists enrich visual perception by adding the acoustic dimension, interweave seeing and hearing, explore time and space with fresh zeal. In emerging artistic genres such as performance, installation, or media art, sound is an integral component of the work. The book focuses on sound objects by Yaakov Agam, Joseph Beuys, Hermann Goepfert, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, David Tudor, Timm Ulrichs, and others.
With five scholarly essays and numerous illustrations and notes on individual works, the comprehensive publication offers an attractive introduction to the subject.
-
Arantxa Etcheverria
Doors38€ Add to cartThe Mythical Power of Grids
Arantxa Etcheverria’s (b. 1975, France; lives and works in Bucharest) creative practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Since 2006, she has been especially interested in modernist architecture, a ubiquitous sight in her adopted country, Romania. Blending rationalism with speculation, the artist draws on historical references including post-Communist turbo architecture, Op art, and minimalism for works that balance between figuration and abstraction, construction and deconstruction. This book documents Etcheverria’s more recent panel paintings and installations, seen in interaction with actors in monochrome costumes. With essays by the Paris-based Romanian curator and critic Ami Barak and the art historian and curator Alina Şerban.
Arantxa Etcheverria studied fine arts at Villa Arson, Nice, and stage design at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg.
-
Clemens Krauss
Antidot | Gegengift40€ Add to cartClemens Krauss restlessly shuttles across history; his vehicles are painting, video art, sculpture, and performance. Yet Krauss is not “just” an artist, he is also a psychoanalyst and physician. As such, he has first-hand experience of time as the defining factor of existence, daring him to play with it. The bosom of painting is where he feels safest after his hazardous excursions back into his youth and forward into death. Executed in thick paints, his work is physical, material, which is also to say, it exists in time: everything passes away, even the picture. Evanescent, more than anything, are encounters of the sort Krauss stages as part of his psychoanalytical practice; all that remains is the indelible impression they leave. To be indelible, to recall the past, while also “letting happen what has never happened,” as he puts it, these are the ambitions he pursues in his art. Preserved between the covers of the present catalogue and reproduced in thousands of copies, his works now fan out in an instant to circulate for an indeterminate period of time among countless hands, whence they will effortlessly penetrate the barriers of our inner lives to bring us one step closer to transcendence.
-
Maria Balea & George Crîngașu
The Mythenstein Project18€ Add to cartMaria Balea (b. Sighetu Marmației, 1990; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) and George Crîngașu (b. Focșani, 1988; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca and Rome) are among the youngest members of the School of Cluj, which has attained international renown in Adrian Ghenie, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, and Ciprian Mureșan. The overarching theme in their works in a range of media is the lived reality of today’s young people between a physical world defined by uncertainties and a virtual parallel universe whose boundless possibilities make it a fascinating yet also often deceptive safe haven. Both artists roam this dizzying kaleidoscope of worlds on a quest for beauty: Balea, through a romantically idealized focus on remnants of untouched or deserted nature; Crîngașu, by abandoning himself to the graphical possibilities of the digital realm, where beauty is often bound up with the bending of natural laws and the physical impossibility of architecture. Yet both, the retreat to an ostensibly natural state and the escape into garish artificiality, are overshadowed by a nameless menace.
-
Sebastian Stöhrer
Residents40€ Add to cartIf there’s an artist whose oeuvre merits the title “creation,” it is Sebastian Stöhrer. Shaping clay—essentially, soil—he molds his “residents”: colorful and friendly-looking sculptural beings, some of them enhanced with sticks or branches reminiscent of limbs. Despite their air of levity and humor, they are not the products of mere momentary inspiration or a whim. It takes decades of dedicated experimentation with the kiln based on the millennia-old art of ceramics as well as expert knowledge of chemistry and physics to create such colors and shapes. Stöhrer has been called an alchemist, and indeed he has made it his mission to vindicate this researcher’s craft, an ancestor of the natural sciences. Alchemy, like Stöhrer’s oeuvre, combines pure rationality with coincidence and a scintilla of magic. The artist plays an intuitive and sensual game with his clay and the virtually incalculable chromaticity of the glazes—chaos, anarchy, and irrepressible urges being an integral dimension of all creation. In Stöhrer’s “residents,” we encounter the embodiments of that creation: likenesses of ourselves and perhaps also heralds of a future more good-natured version.
-
Kensise Anders
10€ Add to cartKensise Anders’s work grapples with the reality of Black people’s lives. Born in Haiti, she was adopted by a German family when she was two. After a difficult childhood, with stints in a psychiatric institution and a boarding school, she eventually found art as a medium that lets her work through her experiences. She uses the crochet needle to create masks with which she ironically appropriates white identities and play carpets that show the world of her childhood—apartment blocks, streets; the “hole,” as she calls this environment. She also arranges crocheted threads on the canvas as though they were brushstrokes. One series of pictures is dedicated to a Black doll; another, to naked female bodies, including the artist’s own, with references to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866). The works are acts of resistance to the prudishness of whites. Black dolls became popular in this country during the colonial era and never quite went away, like the racism in our society and in our heads. Anders’s weapon against that racism is the crochet needle, which she wields patiently and with flair as well as the necessary radicalism.
-
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.
- temporarily not available
David Hockney: Insights
Reflecting the Tate CollectionRead moreDavid Hockney (born 1937 in Bradford) is one of the most influential and technically versatile artists living today. This new publication gathers some of his most defining work from the 1960s to the present, including major works in the Tate collection. From early graphic cycles, double portraits and iconic pool paintings through to his photo collages, plein air landscapes, iPad drawings, and multimedia installations, the volume documents central themes and genres in Hockney’s oeuvre, as well as his constant experimentation.
Original essays by renowned critics and commentators illuminate the artist’s search for new forms of expression, the topographical and biographical reference points of his work, the technical innovation of his painting and printmaking, as well as his approach to new media.
-
Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
-
Tobias Rehberger
1993–202244€ Add to cartIn his sculptural work, Tobias Rehberger (b. Esslingen, 1966; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main) connects strategies from different, also non-art disciplines. His interiors meant to be taken into service have established him as one of the most influential artists of his generation. In 2022, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart will honor Rehberger with a grand exhibition that will feature some of the most important bodies of work from the past three decades. The accompanying book makes a signal contribution to the ongoing critical engagement with his art.
Tobias Rehberger studied with Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1987 until 1992 and later returned to his alma mater as a professor. He has had numerous solo shows in Germany and abroad and, in 2009, furnished the central cafeteria at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which won him a Golden Lion.
-
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.
-
nolde/kritik/documenta (English)
42€ Add to cartEmil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
- Out of stock
Eva Jospin
Wald(t)räume22€ Read moreThe Forest as a Place of Longing: Eva Jospin’s Magical Corrugated Cardboard Sculptures
The French artist Eva Jospin (b. 1975, Paris; lives and works in Paris) cuts and layers corrugated cardboard to create sculptures and reliefs. Handcraft and precision are essential aspects of her work. The artist retains the original color of the cardboard, since, for her, the material itself already contains sufficient color variations and nuances. The recurring motif is the forest — consisting of numerous trunks, branches, and twigs in extreme density and interspersed with black shadows. They suggest depth and stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Eva Jospin does not reproduce nature one to one, but conveys the feelings of fear, anarchy, or freedom that it triggers: The forest as a universal place of longing.
