


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
-

Vera Mercer
New Works28€ Add to cartBeauty and Melancholy, Joie de Vivre and Vanity
The American photographer Vera Mercer’s (b. Berlin, 1936; lives and works in Omaha and Paris) oeuvre defies easy summary. She started taking pictures in Paris in the 1960s, making portraits of her then husband Daniel Spoerri—who, like she, was initially training as a dancer—and other members of the Fluxus group and Nouveaux Réalistes, including Emmett Williams and Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé. Around the same time, she also photographed Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp for various magazines; her friends Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle were among her favorite sitters.
In the 1970s, she took a long creative hiatus: after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, she poured all her energy into starting a number of restaurants and developing an entire downtown neighborhood. But then, in the early years of the new millennium, she returned to photography, capturing breathtaking neo-baroque still lifes featuring flowers, fruits, freshly killed game, antique glasses, and illuminating candles in large formats.
Vera Mercer’s fourth monograph presents her most recent opulent still lifes in color, as well as a novelty in her oeuvre: restrained black-and-white flower pictures and portraits realized as small-format platinum prints.
-

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.
-

Cornelia Baltes
Dingbats44€ Add to cartCornelia Baltes’s (b. Mönchengladbach, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) paintings and installation straddle the divide between abstraction and figuration. Her pictures are inspired by observations of mundane details—apparel, body parts, or facial expressions—that she pares down to simple lines and shapes. Rendered in vibrant colors and gestural fields, they hint at a narrative in the pictorial space. Baltes works with steadily modulated color gradients, on which she places thick and assertive marks. She often interrogates the painted picture’s function, by painting on the wall beyond the rectangle of the canvas, by hanging a picture in the middle of the room as an object in its own right or laying it out on the floor. Her works blend Pop Art and minimalism with an intensity and dynamic energy—and, sometimes, unmistakable flashes of humor—that cannot fail to captivate the beholder.
This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s oeuvre.
Cornelia Baltes studied at Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2000–2003 and at Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, in 2003–2006, before rounding out her education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2009–2011.
-

Ilit Azoulay
Facts and Tales. Truth be Told120€ Add to cartIn an era in which multiple perspectives and oral histories are increasingly vital, Facts and Tales—Truth Be Told delves into the haunting work of Ilit Azoulay. The artist, who was born in Jaffa in 1972, transforms objects, archives, and museum holdings into vessels, challenging traditional hierarchies of knowledge. In her most recent solo exhibition Mere Things at the Jewish Museum, New York, Azoulay presents works that probe the delicate balance between factual representation and nuanced storytelling.
The publication accompanying the exhibition includes archival pages, the artist’s notes, and depictions of the works as well as an introduction by curator Shira Backer and an essay by the art critic, curator, and writer Sarit Shapira, who passed away in 2018. Titled Houses of Junk and Specters: On Ilit Azoulay’s Early Works, it underscores the importance of honoring both factual accuracy and oral histories and invites readers to explore the complex interplay between concrete evidence and the rich and nuanced stories.
Azoulay has devised a singular method to shed light on the blanks in hegemonic narratives and expose them. As though to produce an extortion letter, she clips her pictures from archival materials and photographs of the walls of abandoned buildings and composes them in collages interweaving a multiplicity of views. The resulting works question the exclusive truth claim of museum expertise and reveal its constructed quality. The catalog of her works, designed as a box replete with texts and images, reflects this approach, aiming to dismantle established narratives and open up diverse perspectives.
Box containing 6 different standalone publications, limited edition of 500 copies
THIS PUBLICATION WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE GALLERY LOHAUS SOMINSKY, MUNICH
-

Roland Schappert & Wolfgang Ullrich
Aktualitätsjetzt16€ Add to cartPhilistinism, climate change, legitimation discourses—in a tour de force sustained by profound knowledge of the phenomena in question, AKTUALITÄTSJETZT blazes trails through the jungle of contemporary art and its current debates. Over the course of two years, the art scholar and author Wolfgang Ullrich initiated 14 dialogues on Schappert’s word paintings, murals, and interventions. Their distinctive formal features and conceptual and substantial dimensions inspired illuminating conversations that range far beyond the specific works to explore today’s art world and questions of the philosophy of art and the sociology of culture. The best volume of dialogues on art since David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.
-

ELASTE
1980 – 198649€ Add to cartThe story of ELASTE is the story of a movement – that of the New Wave generation in West Germany. Founded in 1980 in Hanover, the magazine was a beacon of cultural revolt and the first glossy indie magazine of the Federal Republic: self-published, a statement somewhere between pop avant-garde, subversion, and a sharp sense of style. Among those who shaped the look and spirit of the magazine were Jon Savage, Ellen von Unwerth, and Diedrich Diederichsen. No other magazine operated at the intersection of music, fashion, and society quite like ELASTE — with headliners such as Warhol, The Rolling Stones, and Kraftwerk. This book by the magazine’s editors Thomas Elsner and Michael Reinboth, looks back — at the pioneering spirit, the minds, and the stories behind the magazine.
Incl. download code card for 14 tracks from ELASTE RECORDS
-

Anna Bogouchevskaia
Shouldn’t Be Gone25€ Add to cartAnna Bogouchevskaia (b. Moscow, 1966; lives and works in Berlin) sees her work in sculpture as a geopolitical engagement with concerns on the intersection between figuration and abstraction. Macroscopic aluminum drops, bizarre bronze flowers, fog and snow made of silver—the artist, a committed environmentalist, has created a peculiar and fascinating world of evanescent natural phenomena. Focusing on two molecules—carbon dioxide and water—in their various states of aggregation, she draws attention to the threats posed by climate change.
The publication Shouldn’t be gone presents Bogouchevskaia’s most recent works since 2019: an urgent message of warning from an artist whose sculptural oeuvre even today has the air of a monument to a world in demise.
-

schneider+schumacher
39€ Add to cartA Review and Prospect of the Work of the Frankfurt‑based Architectural Office on the Occasion of its Thirtieth Anniversary
schneider+schumacher is an internationally operating team of architects with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary they present a book in the shape of a red box, whose chapters “Beauty,” “Endurance,” “Curiosity,” “Land Art,” “Integrating,” “Transitions,” and “Made in Germany” cover issues and values that have determined their work since its founding. Renowned authors shed light on the respective concept and its significance for the history of schneider+schumacher, while the office’s works are presented in large-format illustrations – including the extension to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the Siegerland motorway church, and the new pavilion of the Frankfurt Book Fair. In architectural practice, it becomes clear how Till Schneider and Michael Schumacher and their team implement their thematic and theoretical orientation into their working methods, design approach, and understanding of architecture.
-

Stephen Buckley
Close Cousins. Paintings48€ Add to cartThe Artist’s First Publication in more than Thirty Years
For more than forty years Stephen Buckley (b. 1944, Leicester) has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matière of Kurt Schwitters, the dandyism of Francis Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Marcel Duchamp. He takes the two most basic components of a conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), and makes multi-dimensional constructions, joins groups of single canvases together in overlapping structures, makes shaped canvases, cuts a stretcher with a variegated edge, stitches and weaves together strips of canvas, patches pieces of canvas onto another support, and adds cardboard tubing, rope, found objects and cut out shapes. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Buckley saw extended prominence in the art press, starting with the artist being described as “the Punk Rock of contemporary painting” and ending with him gaining the title of “the ubiquitous Stephen Buckley”. There is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Since then, he has made some of his most compelling paintings, lush pop canvases full of symbols and colour, a far cry from the pared-down, industrial feel of some of his early works.
-

Werner Schmidt
James Joyce und die Farben des Ulysses59€ Add to cartThis imposing volume is the fruit of the artist Werner Schmidt’s decades-long immersion in the preeminent literary monument of the twentieth century: James Joyce’s Ulysses.
What began as a personal reader’s voyage now attains definite form in an eloquently colorful, interdisciplinary and polyphonic tribute—a work between literary study, theory of color, visual art, and reflection on language.
In the book’s first part, Schmidt analyzes and visualizes the use of colors in Ulysses in unique chromatic diagrams and coded color stripes that were literally painted on the walls in exhibitions. They are complemented by a series of photographs taken in Dublin, the novel’s setting, and accompanied by probing meditations on literary and linguistic facets and aspects of politics and the history of religion in the Joycean universe.
The second part gathers the voices of twenty renowned Joyce scholars, who, in five thematically organized chapters, share their perspectives on the color, texture, structure, and effect of Ulysses.
A feast for all who revere Joyce—and a gift of anyone who would not just read but truly wrap their mind around literature in its boldest and most luminous incarnation.
With texts by Florian Arnold, Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, Erik Bindervoet, Heinz Brüggemann, Jakob Brüssermann, Michael Deckard, Toni Hildebrandt, Otto Jägersberg, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Jūratė Levina, Susanne Peters, Christoph Poetsch, Saskia C. Quené, Dieter Ronte, Werner Schmidt, Fritz Senn, Dirk Teuber, Vega Tescari, Shane Walshe, Andreas Weigel, Keith Williams, Ursula Zeller
-

Matthias Dornfeld
danke esslingen42€ Add to cartAt first glance, the paintings of Matthias Dornfeld might strike us as naïve or even primitive. However, his still lifes, flower and animal depictions, and abstracted portraits occur in a compelling discourse with the avant-garde of European art history. Yet the works are equally accessible without that background, namely with their playful and provocative gestures, which tend to push the depictions to the brink of possibilities. After a comprehensive retrospective in the Villa Merkel Esslingen, this book documents the show and includes texts by Friedrich Meschede, Daniela Stöppel, and Christian Gögger. The in-depth essays illuminate Dornfeld’s oeuvre and iconography and furthermore discuss the unconventional hanging of the show as well as its reception.
-

Konkrete Progressionen
François Morellet & Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr & Hartmut Böhm15€ Add to cartThanks to a generous donor, the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret welcomed a number of outstanding works to its collection in 2022. Titled Konkrete Progressionen, the first exhibition to showcase a selection from the gift features four internationally renowned artists whose works are derived from mathematical or geometric procedures: the concrete systematists Hartmut Böhm (1938–2021) and François Morellet (1926–2016) and the pioneers of computer-generated art Manfred Mohr (1938–) and Vera Molnar (1924–).
The book documents the serial paintings, drawings, collages, wall objects, and monumental installations and environments of steel beams or concrete blocks. The works play concrete games with the beholder’s ability to recognize patterns in binary contrasts or layered grids. They show sine waves, vector series, hypercubes, and markings derived from the circular constant π or the Fibonacci sequence—and in each instance demonstrate primarily how the basis of calculation takes on a life of its own.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen runs until April 14, 2024.
-

Sinje Dillenkofer
Archives Vivantes34€ Add to cartSinje Dillenkofer’s (b. Neustadt a.d.W., 1959) body of work ARCHIVES VIVANTES inquires into the idea of the “archive,” harnessing the means of visual art to allow us to see and perceive what the archive does not reveal. With staged photographs that combine conceptual rigor with a wide spectrum of creative techniques and devices, Dillenkofer’s pictorial essay turns the spotlight on specimens, artifacts, graphic art, and writings compiled by the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ornithologist Carlo von Erlanger (1872–1904). Examining the archive as a model of nature and reality as well as a mirror of “human nature,” the artist develops compositional ideas inspired by the peculiar features of the objects in the collections in visual analogies, pictorial spaces, and spatial compositions. Animals and plants that died long ago “in the service of science” are vividly embodied through the distinctive use of light and shadow. The resulting pictures consider the archive in a new context, framed by our complex relationships with nature, humankind, society and its values and ideals, circumstances and constellations of power. The pictures were taken in six German collection archives: at the Museum bei der Kaiserpfalz Ingelheim, the Naturhistorisches Museum Mainz, the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt, the Stadtmuseum Berlin, and the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History. Dillenkofer was the first artist to be invited by the Berlin State Library—Prussian Cultural Heritage to translate Humboldt’s American travel diaries into art.
Sinje Dillenkofer studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and has taught at universities and art academies. Her work is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Berlinische Galerie, among others.
- Release February 2026

Roman Ondak
The Day After Yesterday48€ Add to cartThe internationally acclaimed Slovakian conceptual artist Roman Ondak (b. 1966) responds to the historical specificities of Central Europe while also reflecting on the functioning of society in today’s global world in works that highlight the cyclical nature of processes and the reciprocal mirroring of the past and the present. His distinctive creative traits include the use of ordinary objects and materials as well as everyday situations, which he transfers into the exhibition space. This richly illustrated catalogue with essays by Barbora Ropková and Dieter Roelstraete accompanies the exhibition The Day After Yesterday at Kunsthalle Praha and explores Ondak’s artistic universe, in which existential and societal themes naturally intertwine with a biography of his own family.
THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY
KUNSTHALLE PRAHA, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
NOVEMBER 13, 2025 UNTIL MARCH 9, 2026
more info here -

Cudelice Brazelton IV
Mortal Surface35€ Add to cartCudelice Brazelton IV’s works are magnets. He uses them to glean what he finds in the urban landscape, in the street, in factories and studios: fabric, leather, metal, cardboard, and all sorts of implements. He arranges these materials and things atop one another and side by side in collages, assemblages, and sculptures, staging encounters also between the contexts in which they originated and what he calls their “undercurrents,” their subtexts. Such frames of reference, including that of the exhibition space, play a key role in his art, an aspect he will occasionally engage quite explicitly, creating site-specific works for some settings. This makes the space the context and a part of the piece, sometimes physically so, as when Brazelton works directly on the walls. The recent works gathered in this catalogue were displayed in a former railcar repair workshop. It is hard to imagine a more industrial, “metallic” environment. There, as between the covers of this catalogue, Brazelton’s works appear to their fullest advantage, becoming veritable magnets drawing the gaze.
-

Julia Steiner
Am Saum des Raumes24€ Add to cartExpansive Worlds
The pencil drawings of Julia Steiner (b. Büren zum Hof, Switzerland, 1982; lives and works in Basel) are monumental in size. And yet they exude an air of delicacy and evanescence, sprawling across the edges of the paper and taking possession of the space around them. Processes frozen in an instant—like wind sweeping through clouds, light piercing the night, or the ground breaking apart—erupt with unexpected vigor. The beholder believes that he has identified a motif, only to lose sight of it a moment later in the abstraction of the painterly drawing. The artist’s oeuvre lays out a cosmos of images that crack and burst into pieces, explode and implode. The present book accompanies Julia Steiner’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
Julia Steiner studied at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) from 2002 until 2007, with a semester abroad at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2005. In 2018–19, she held an interim professorship at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK), leading the drawing class. Steiner’s work has won her several accolades, including the 2009 Swiss Art Award and the 2017 STRABAG Artaward International (Vienna).
-

André Butzer
Miettinen Collection30€ Add to cartAndré Butzer (b. Stuttgart, 1973; lives in Berlin) rose to renown with pictures he describes as “science fiction expressionism” and iconic characters like the “Peace Siemense,” the “Men of Shame,” or the “Woman” as well as seemingly abstract compositions. Artistic predecessors he admires and emulates include Walt Disney, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Henry Ford. Butzer’s utopian artistic vision is anchored in the fictional place “NASAHEIM”, a kind of pilgrimage destination in outer space. Yet his paintings should not be mistaken for illustrations of narrative structures; they articulate something that could not be said before. Similes of a sort, they embody the forever recurring extremes of history as emblems of human existence.
André Butzer briefly studied at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, before enrolling at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), from which he was expelled after two semesters in 1996. He went on to found the autonomous and anti-institutional Akademie Isotrop (1996–2000), where over twenty artists including Markus Selg, Jonathan Meese, and, in loose association, John Bock trained one another. In 2001, Butzer teamed up with Björn Dahlem to establish the Institute for SDI Dream Research.
-

The Scharf Collection.
Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse48€ Add to cartThe Scharf Collection is a German private collection of French art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and international contemporary art. Now in its fourth generation, it continues a branch of the renowned Otto Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin, which encompasses everything from the beginnings of modernism, represented by Francisco de Goya, to the French avant-garde of the second half of the nineteenth century with Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The richly illustrated catalog accompanies the collection’s first comprehensive exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.
-

Claudia Fährenkemper
Kontextforschung / context research 1980–202268€ Add to cartClaudia Fährenkemper (b. Castrop-Rauxel, 1959; lives in Steinheim/Westfalen) photographs enormous as well as minuscule objects using scanning electron microscopes to produce images that are as fascinating as they are disconcerting. The play with extreme scales yields fantastic visual worlds: American desert and canyon landscapes, the giant industrial machinery of open-pit mines in Germany, insects, plant seeds, crystals, and plankton, plus historic armaments from Europe and Japan. The lavishly designed book is the first to gather works from her entire oeuvre, which now spans four decades. Surveying the most important of Fährenkemper’s conceptual series, it reveals unexpected interconnections between disparate motifs on vastly different scales from nature, technology, science, and cultural history.
Claudia Fährenkemper studied at Fachhochschule Köln, today’s Cologne University of Applied Sciences, where Arno Jansen was her teacher, and with Bernd and Hilla Becher and Nan Hoover at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her photographs are held by numerous museum collections, including at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Margulies Collection, Miami.
-

Ohne Schlüssel und Schloss
Chancen und Risiken von Big Data19,90€ Add to cartVon Kunsthandwerk zu digitaler Verschlüsselung
An jeder Haustür ziehen wir Grenzen, wir schließen auf und schließen ab. Und noch in jüngster Vergangenheit war eindeutig, was als Verschlusssache galt. Ganz anders stellt sich diese Frage im IT-Zeitalter. Ausgehend von der kunsthandwerklichen Sammlung des Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern wird deutlich, wie in früheren Jahrhunderten über mechanisch und symbolisch aufwendig gestaltete Schlösser, Schränke oder auch Reliquienbehältnisse Distanzen austariert wurden. Sie alle sind sichtbares Vehikel für die bewusste Wahrnehmung von innen und außen, zugehörig und ausgegrenzt, wissend und unwissend oder öffentlich und privat. Für Big Data gilt dies in keiner Weise mehr. Beim Digitalen werden Serviceleistungen mit Datenerhebungen verbunden, deren weiteren Einsatzbereiche wir weder unmittelbar verstehen noch überblicken können. Historische, technologische und philosophische Überlegungen bieten wichtige Beträge zur aktuellen Debatte und Einschätzung der Risiken und Chancen von Big Data.





















