Arina Dähnick
The MIES Project
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Dirk Lohan, Michelangelo Sabatino |
| Design | Peter Nils Dorén |
| Size | 28 x 32 cm |
| Pages | 144 |
| Illustrations | 93 color and 16 b/w |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover with dustjacket |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-30-2 | Shortlist German Photo Book Award 2019/2020 |
In the Footsteps of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
In her photographic works, Arina Dähnick (b. 1965, Krefeld; lives and works in Berlin) deals with urbanity, spatial reality and visual perception. She discovered the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 2012, when, after a thunderstorm, she perceived the Neue Nationalgalerie in a both fascinating and paradoxical spatial experience of boundless vastness – and a simultaneous feeling of being held. From then on she photographed the building under various conditions until its closure in 2015, afterwards following in Mies van der Rohe’s footsteps from Berlin to Brno, from Chicago to New York. Dähnick captured his most famous buildings – including the Villa Tugendhat, the Seagram Building, and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments – in impressive photo series, which have been exhibited during the Chicago Architecture Biennial amongst others. The book was awarded the silver medal of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis.
Shortlist German Photo Book Award 2019/2020
More books
-
Art in a Conflicted World
34€ Add to cartTrans-European Perspectives in the Age of Cultural Fragmentation
Since the turn of the millennium, much of the world has become an increasingly unstable and dissonant place. Sharp disruptions define many aspects of our social, cultural, and political relations. Art in a Conflicted World addresses this evolving reality, featuring critical positions articulated by visual artists and writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Great Britain—regions embroiled in extraordinary strife and upheaval. The publication takes a frank look at these multifaceted states of social dissonance and reflects them in diverse artistic and literary inquiries and responses. The contributions are the fruits of an interdisciplinary fellowship program at Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf that offers the participants an opportunity to gain fresh creative and cultural insights, test ways of engaging with complexity, and develop models for the future that transcend national boundaries.
The publication presents works by Sarah Dobai, Nikita Kadan, Ali Eisa, and Sebastian Lloyd Rees (Lloyd Corporation) as well as writings by Alisa Ganieva and Tanya Zaharchenko.
The project was mentored by Wolfgang Tillmans, Tom McCarthy, Katharina Raabe, and Mark Gisbourne and received funding support from the German Federal Foreign Office.
-
Hans Karl Zeisel
Hundred and more34,95€ Add to cartPossibilities 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.
-
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.
-
Born in the Woods
Jems Koko Bi & HAP Grieshaber24€ Add to cartThe Political Substance of Wood
Jems Koko Bi (b. Sinfra, Côte d’Ivoire, 1966; lives and works in Kaarst, Germany, Dakar, and Abidjan) is world-renowned for the monumental wood sculptures he creates using a machine saw. This book juxtaposes his most recent body of works with the large-format woodcuts of HAP Grieshaber (b. Rot an der Rot, Germany, 1909; d. Eningen unter Achalm, 1981). Although the two artists never met, their oeuvres are characterized by similar themes, values, and materials. The central concern is the fate of the forests and its momentous political and social implications: Grieshaber’s woodcuts articulate his principled opposition to the predatory exploitation of nature in the 1970s—an issue that is more relevant than ever today in light of the climate crisis and the Fridays for Future movement. Koko Bi’s figural groups bring this tradition of political art into our time, making a global and universally compelling case for a sustainable husbandry of our resources.
Jems Koko Bi studied at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts et de l’Action Culturelle (INSAAC), Abidjan, and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; at documenta 13; the Havana Biennial; and several Venice Biennials and Dakar Biennials. In 2019, he founded the forest biennial Abidjan Green Arts.
HAP Grieshaber studied advertising art at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart. His work is regarded as a signal contribution to the renewal of the woodcut medium in the twentieth century. He participated in documentas I, II, and III, held a professorship at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, and was honored with numerous awards and retrospectives.
- Release August 2025
Bettina Buck
Finding Form45€ Add to cartThe German sculptor Bettina Buck (1974-2017) called attention to herself with her “performative sculptures,” which she often presented vis-à-vis museal objects. Buck’s preferred materials came from the hardware store: corrugated cardboard, ceramic tiles, pressed foam, or plastic foil, which are all not meant to last. Out of these materials she created a kind of changeable and transient “protagonists,” who didn’t have a final form but rather emphasized the actual process of finding form (as well as losing form). In a provocative action in 2015, Buck dragged an oversized foam bloc through a museum collection and let it rest next to famous artworks, which gained a new dynamic in this interplay. Buck herself said once that her works were meant to “simultaneously attract and alienate the viewer.” In the exhibition space the objects should “create a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with its surroundings.”
Finding Form, a posthumous monograph presents Bucks complete sculptural works on over 300 pages and contains texts by Phyllida Barlow, Paolo Icaro, Cecilia Canziani, and Andrea Maria Popelka. The book was conceived and published by the artist’s estate, Bureau Bettina Buck.
-
Rooted
Female Brazilian Artists28€ Add to cartThe book Rooted. Female Brazilian Artists, accompanies the eponymous exhibition at Brainlab/Munich, which is open until the end of September 2025. The works of the 16 artists come from the collection of Sergio Linhares and Stefan Vilsmeier. The collectors present this selection hoping to illuminate important and difficult themes such as, among others, discrimination, displacement, and violence but also to remind of our shared rootedness in nature. “Art has no obligation to comfort us; it can challenge, disrupt and remind us that our coexistence is fragile.” The volume shows installation views along with close-ups of the individual works and it includes short texts for each artist along with an essay by curator Tereza de Arruda.
Artists: Marlene Almeida, Azuhli (Luiza Diogo Veras), Tarsila do Amaral, Beatrice Arraes, Carmezia Emiliano, Sonia Gomes, Iêda Jardim, Lucia Laguna, Laura Lima, Rosilene Luduvico, Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa, Paula Siebra, Luzia Simons, Nádia Taquary, Alexsandra Ribeiro, Larissa de Souza
-
Jenny Michel
Doors, Windows and Cells38€ Add to cartThe Detritus of Our Society
For around two decades, the artist Jenny Michel (b. Worms, 1975; lives and works in Berlin) has devoted herself to minute particles such as dust, cobwebs, and electromagnetic fields in space. Her fascination with orders of knowledge, symbolism, and utopian visions is reflected by installations, drawings, prints, and sculptures that she exhibits in carefully composed sprawling ensembles. Aggregating fantastic fragments of the world manufactured from paper, adhesive tape, staples, and other industrially made small parts, Michel builds disconcertingly dense structures—human knowledge is transformed into the debris of civilization, its legibility lost beneath palimpsestic layers of meanings and resignifications. The extensive monograph surveys major series in the artist’s oeuvre and presents new works on paper.
Jenny Michel studied at Kunsthochschule Kassel and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been on view at Museum Wiesbaden, the Draiflessen Collection, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and Berlinische Galerie, among other venues. In 2010, Michel was honored with the HAP Grieshaber Prize.
-
Mon Trésor
34€ Add to cartEurope’s Treasure Chamber
What do the torque of the princess of Reinheim, the tableware from the Orient Express, and the radio station Europe 1’s studio building have in common? They are among the treasures of the Saar region. The book presents outstanding archaeological objects and achievements of technology and art dating from the age of the Celts to the present. Drawn from the Saarland and neighboring Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, and Rhineland-Palatinate, the unexpected riches illustrate the cultural and social dimensions of this multinational region in the heart of Europe. The title Mon Trésor describes many of them quite literally: the note a seven-year-old dashed off to his father before his family was evacuated in the first days of World War II; the Roman-era ring that is also a relic, witnessing to flight and danger. All treasures are personal first and foremost, though others may later cherish them as cultural assets.
-
“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 -
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
READ48€ Add to cartThroughout their careers, the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961, and Ingar Dragset, b. Trondheim, Norway, 1969, live and work in Berlin) have eschewed the traditional “White Cube” exhibition format by creating large-scale installations and staging narrative situations in which autobiographical quotes blend with fictional stories and cultural references.
For the solo exhibition READ, Elmgreen & Dragset have transformed Kunsthalle Praha into a minimalist version of a modern public library to prompt reflections on our relationship with physical books and knowledge in the age of digital media. With new works by Elmgreen & Dragset as well as performances, videos, collages, paintings, and sculptures by other artists, READ also probes the relation between books and the making of art.
This richly illustrated publication documents the dynamic interaction between language, books, and art. With contributions from renowned scholars and a curatorial text by Elmgreen & Dragset.
-
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.
-
Ivonne Thein
TECHNO BODIES28€ Add to cartIn her multidisciplinary work, Ivonne Thein (born 1979 in Meiningen, lives and works in Berlin) addresses the current body images of a digital culture that is undergoing fundamental change due to extensive technologization. Today, new technologies are profoundly shaping both the physical body and its virtual representations in the visual culture of our time. Thein works with AI systems for her installations and places the question of the problem of imitating nature, and thus the relationship between art, technology and body, at the center of her artistic work. To do this, she combines digital techniques with sculptures that she creates by hand from silicone. Thein thereby evokes an intrusive closeness in the exhibition space, as the images generated with the AI no longer remain just a pure data set on the screen. The book presents works from 2020–2023.
- temporarily not available
Norbert Bisky
Im FreienRead moreThe beauty of male bodies, hedonism, bold colors—Norbert Bisky (b. Leipzig, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) is widely regarded as the most successful exponent of contemporary figurative painting in Germany. Now the artist has created a series of seventeen works on canvas and paper based on associations sparked by the oeuvre of the Expressionist Max Pechstein (1881–1955). The title “Im Freien” not only refers to the scenes they depict, which play out under the open sky; Bisky—who grew up in East Germany, which is to say, in what he calls “circumstances that were not free”—also grapples with the question of what liberty means to us today and what we do with it. The preoccupation with freedom led both painters to a quest for a personal utopia. Pechstein found it in the South Seas, where he had visited Palau, then a German colony, in 1914; the archipelago seemed paradisiacal to him, an idyll far removed from political and social reality. Bisky, by contrast, focuses less on the exotic landscape than on its residents, whom he stages as individual members of a globalized society.
Norbert Bisky enrolled at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in 1994 to read German literature and art history but switched to the Berlin University of the Arts before year’s end; he studied painting with Georg Baselitz and entered Baselitz’s master class in 1999. He was a visiting professor at the Haute école d’art et de design, Geneva, in 2008–2010 and at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in 2016–2018.
-
Roland Schappert
Liebe +–24€ Add to cartRoland Schappert’s Liebe+– is a poetic voyage into the mysterious and paradoxical landscapes of love. Combining an unrelenting eye with lyrical precision, Schappert captures the fragile equilibrium between intimacy and distance, between the longing for union and the need for detachment. The +– in the title is a symbolic shorthand for the ambivalence of love: attraction and repulsion, delight and pain, their constant interplay defining the dynamic of love.
The terse and sometimes aphoristic writings enter into a dialogue with the author’s artful and enigmatic pictures and sculptures—text images sewn out of strings of beads or painted in Champagne chalk that subtly mirror and refract the emotional tension of the poems. Nimbly balancing on the fine line between devotion and disaffection, Schappert’s verses are interspersed with ironic allusions to our digital and urban contemporary world.
By forging a symbiosis of poetry and image, this artist’s book charts a world unto itself in which the boundaries between I and you blur and subject and object are fused in a collective we. It invites us to contemplate love with a fresh eye—as tender touch and fractious idea, as a play of expectation and disappointment that we begin anew every day.
‘Love in the age of social media and dating apps, but not from a Gen Z perspective – but from someone who has known this feeling for much longer. And who brings his experiences – which are certainly representative of many – in ever new combinations of text and images into a form that makes reading and viewing a memorable experience.’ – Wolfgang Ullrich
-
Urban Art! Biennale® 2019
27,50€ Add to cartThe World’s Most Important Exhibition of Urban Art — Presented for the Fifth Time in 2019
Its themes are the city and urban lifestyle, its can-vases walls, doors, or windows, its artists cosmo-politan. Since the turn of the millennium, Urban Art has developed out of the non-commercial, often illegal art forms of graffiti and street art. Although it makes use of the same stylistic means — spraying, tagging, the deliberate inclusion of drips, the use of graffiti scripts, etc. — it transports these as commis-sioned works into the legal space of the museum, gallery, or architecture. The Urban Art Biennial at the World Cultural Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte is the largest international exhibition of its kind. Fifty individual works and twenty-five installations by one hundred artists shed light on the latest developments and positions from Western metropolises, as well as from current hot spots around the globe.
-
FREIGEISTER
FRAGMENTS OF AN ART SCENE IN LUXEMBOURG AND BEYOND35€ Add to cartThinking Otherwise—the Mudam in Luxembourg at Fifteen
A free spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, is someone who “thinks otherwise than is expected of him in consideration of his origin, surroundings, position, and office, or by reason of the prevailing contemporary views” (Human, All Too Human,1878). As the German philosopher saw it, one must seek to become “untimely” and remain a “stranger” to one’s time in order to question its premises. This view to states of alienation unites the positions of fourteen young Luxembourgish artists in Freigeister, the publication accompanying the celebrations on occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.
In recent years, Luxembourg’s art scene has grappled in a wide variety of ways with the challenges that come with the small yet economically successful country’s ongoing transformation. Charting realities between the familiar and the unknown, the artists featured in Freigeister employ photography, painting, and installation as well as film, sculpture, printmaking, and performance art to paint a carefully considered but by no means dispassionate portrait of today’s society in an effort to build bridges between identity and the future.
The book presents works by Yann Annicchiarico, Laurianne Bixhain, Aline Bouvy, Marco Godinho, Sophie Jung, Catherine Lorent, Filip Markiewicz, Karolina Markiewicz & Pascal Piron, Claudia Passeri, Daniel Reuter, Nina Tomàs, Daniel Wagener, and Jeff Weber.
-
Lovis Corinth
Maestro del colore – Maestro della grafica35€ Add to cartLovis Corinth (b. Tapiau, East Prussia, 1858; d. Zandvoort, Netherlands, 1925) ranks among the leading German Impressionists. But he has also been described as a precursor of Expressionism for his impulsive and passionate style in painting and graphic art as well his liberal handling of form, which vividly conveys agitated states of mind and powerful emotions. In addition to an eminent body of paintings and numerous drawings and watercolors, he left a graphic oeuvre encompassing over a thousand prints. In his paintings as in his etchings and lithographs, Corinth dedicates himself to a set of recurring themes: mythological and religious motifs, nudes, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits of his family and close friends. His graphic work also shows him engaging with the challenges of self-portraiture.
-
João Onofre
Untitled (in awe of)25€ Add to cartJoão Onofre’s works are tributes to art history and pop. He gleans what is in danger of being lost right now, realigns it, and translates it into something sublime. His art encourages the beholders to reconsider a past that has faded in collective memory with a critical eye and make peace with it. His creative process is guided by the material and a clearly defined concept that nonetheless does not restrict a work’s finding its own way. That is why he does not commit to a particular medium, making videos, performances, installations, and much more. What all his works have in common is that they probe the limitations of their medium and our perceptive capacities in novel ways. This catalogue presents three recent works in which the essence of Onofre’s art becomes manifest: he molds myths and symbols into awe-inspiring images, sounds, and forms—not for nothing have critics labeled him an alchemist. In the catalogue, his tangible compressions of cultural history are rendered in imposing pictures and flanked by an ambitious essay that places them in their context.
-
Fabian Treiber
For a While Longer34€ Add to cartUnstable Prototypes of a Reality We Know
Fabian Treiber’s (b. Ludwigsburg, 1986; lives and works in Stuttgart) paintings show what appear to be interiors while interrogating subjective projections and our perceptions of reality. The artificial spaces bear witness to human existence even though there are no people to be seen. In his still lifes, Treiber negotiates classical questions of painting: form and structure, color and composition, representation of space and organization of the surface. His paintings primarily implement formal rather than narrative decisions. This lets the artist provoke a deliberate breach in which the ostensibly fallacious emerges as the essential quality of painting—the effect is that of works that seem somehow off but are actually just right.
Fabian Treiber studied painting and intermedia design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (ABK Stuttgart). His works have won him a Karl Schmidt Rottluff Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the 2021 Hans Purrmann Grand Prize. He has had numerous solo shows, including at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; and Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Cologne; and contributed to group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel—Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. For a while longer is published on occasion of his first solo exhibition at Haverkampf Galerie.
-
Filip Henin
10€ Add to cartThe events captured in Filip Henin’s (b. Mayen, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are set in a world beyond time and place, as though on an empty stage prepared for a Samuel Beckett production. It is virtually impossible to say whether a picture shows a coastal region or a craggy slope up in the mountains, whether a field of blue represents the sea or a band of open sky. Henin strips landscapes down no less than human figures, subtracting specific features to isolate basic forms that might be found in the hill country around his hometown in western Germany or in Tuscany. His work integrates quotations from antiquity, Romantic landscape painting, and postmodernism as well as Italian Transavanguardia, the mysticism of Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and the figurative painting of the 1990s. Without veering into drama or pathos, he harnesses two utterly antithetical energies: the reflection on painting and the history of art and the need to be simple.
