Barbara Armbruster
Meins Mine
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Andreas Gabelmann, Barbara Armbruster, Clemens Ottnad, Eva-Marina Froitzheim, Iris Dressler, José F.A. Oliver, Marianne Eigenheer, Salwa Bakr, Stefanie Stegmann, Vivien Sigmund |
| Design | Bureau Progressiv |
| Size | 22,5 x 28 cm |
| Pages | 104 |
| Illustrations | 85 |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-64-7 |
An Intercultural Artistic Narrative between Germany and Egypt
In her works, Barbara Armbruster (b. Bad Waldsee; lives and works in Stuttgart) deals with cultural and social spaces, structures, and identities. Influenced by many years of residence in Cairo, Armbruster’s diverse works are points of relationship between two completely different cultural spaces. In her paintings, drawings, photographs, installations, and performative videos, the artist pursues a cross-cultural approach that tells of her time in Egypt and Germany on both a documentary and personal level. The monograph provides fascinating insight into Armbruster’s continuously developed language of expression between Arabic calligraphy, stylized ornamentation, and the photographic staging of everyday architecture.
Barbara Armbruster studied Graphic Art at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, where she later held a teaching position. Her works have been widely exhibited at, among others, the Goethe-Institut in Cairo, the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart, and the Kunstverein Freiburg.
More books
-
Erich Hörtnagl
Unforgettable – Unforgotten48€ Add to cartHow can a life be remembered—what remains, what vanishes?
In Unforgettable | Unforgotten, Erich Hörtnagl brings together photographic fragments that are more than just memories: they are symbols of lived time. Roland Barthes’ concept of the “punctum” experience—that instant when a detail in an image pierces the heart—provides a key to Hörtnagl’s photographic gaze. It is not the spectacular events but the quiet and incidental things that move us. The seemingly insignificant becomes a projection screen for memory, loss, and emotion. The focus is not on what is staged, but on what eludes creative control.
Accompanied by insightful writings by Alois Schöpf and Kurt Höretzeder, a quiet monologue emerges about happiness and missed opportunities, about what we receive—and what we give. A book that doesn’t provide answers but asks questions: What makes a life worth living? What remains unforgettable or unforgotten?
-
Yes To All
Die Schenkung Paul Maenz Gerd Vries42€ Add to cartThe catalog accompanying the exhibition YES TO ALL offers profound insight into a collection of over nine hundred works on paper—from postcards and drawings to photographs and posters—that was gifted to the Kupferstichkabinett in 2022, with subsequent additions over the years until 2025. The donors are Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, who ran a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne until 1990 and chaperoned the evolution of avant-garde art from the conceptualism of the late 1960s to the neo-expressive painting of the 1980s. The most recent works in the collection date from 2024. Several essays and a conversation with the donors invite the reader to experience the stylistic and thematic polyphony of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in new ways.
EXHIBITION:
YES TO ALL. THE GIFTS OF PAUL MAENZ GERD DE VRIES TO THE KUPFERSTICHKABINETT
KUPFERSTICHKABINETT, STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -
Africa
in the View of the Photographers19,90€ Add to cartContemporary Photography from Africa
Stereotypes still dominate the Western image of Africa; we tend to know little about cities like Lagos, Porto-Novo, or Kinshasa. The book presents photographs by African artists who tell stories from everyday life in the metropolises, of the unruliness of nature and industry, of traces of the past and pop culture. Osborne Macharia, for example, interweaves Kenya’s cultural identity with fictional Afro-futuristic plots; Yoriyas documents the small moments of life in his native Casablanca in pictures that have been picked up by the New York Times, National Geographic, and Vogue; Alice Mann’s intimate essays in portraiture, meanwhile, explore ideas about the making of pictures as a collaborative act. With additional works by Ilan Godfrey, Fabrice Monteiro, Kibuuka Mukisa Oscar, Léonard Pongo, and Fethi Sahraoui, the book offers a profoundly original survey of African realities.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Das Rheinprojekt48€ Add to cartReinterpreting the Classical Panorama
The mythical character of the Rhine as a ‘German symbol’ has long been of profound interest to poets and visual artists. Today, however, the Rhine has lost the aura of a great romantic river along much of its course: from Basel to Rotterdam, it serves as a high-volume shipping lane, and sprawling industrial installations line its banks.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) went on an almost eight-months-long walking tour, following the Rhine from its source at the foot of Piz Badus in Switzerland to its debouchment into the North Sea near Rotterdam. During this thousand-mile trek along the river’s right bank, he stopped every minute—after between two and three hundred feet—to take a photograph of the opposite shore. In this way, his camera compiled a painstaking record of the Rhine in 21,449 individual shots. Digitally assembled in a single six-inch-tall composite image, the pictures form a two-and-a-half-mile stream.
What Kaluza created in this project would have been inconceivable before the development of digital photography, which made the seamless presentation of the pictures in a single panoramic band possible. What is more, the computers capable of processing the enormous quantities of data did not arrive until a few years ago. It took the artist’s assistants a full two years just to edit the images. Harnessing digital technology, Kaluza creates for photography what had been the exclusive precinct of painting: a sweeping holistic perspective. A large number of the fascinating panorama photographs were published in the imposing tome Der Rhein in 2007. Das Rheinprojekt now presents a freshly composed selection from this treasure trove.
Stephan Kaluza received a comprehensive education in Düsseldorf in the 1990s, studying photography at the city’s University of Applied Sciences, art history at the Academy of Fine Arts, and history and philosophy at Düsseldorf University. Since 1995, his work has been shown at numerous galleries in Seoul, Shanghai, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Berlin and elsewhere. Kaluza’s plays have been performed in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Stuttgart.
-
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.
-
Irmel Droese. Felix Droese
Die Fruchtbarkeit der Polarität28€ Add to cartA Tribute to the Artist Couple
Irmel Droese (b. 1943, Landsberg an der Warthe) and Felix Droese (b. 1950, Singen/Hohentwiel) first met in 1970, when both were students in Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In a decades-long partnership in life and art, they have built oeuvres that, both each for itself and in dialogue with each other, scrutinize a rapidly changing reality. Irmel Droese creates expressive stage characters, sculptural oil paper figures, and depictions of humans on paper, while Felix Droese’s diverse ensembles and large-format papercuts grapple with money, economic questions, and the rising predominance of commercial considerations. His art gained international renown with his participation in documenta 7 in 1982 and the 43rd Biennale di Venezia in 1988. Designed in close collaboration with the artists, the publication documents their separate and joint oeuvres, drawing attention to societal questions.
-
Jürgen Claus
To the Oceans with Imagination18€ Add to cartThe Sea as a Space of Artistic Experience
Jürgen Claus’s (b. 1935, Berlin; lives and works in Aachen and Baelen, Belgium) oeuvre encompasses paintings, films, light and solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, with theoretical works that have sold over 100,000 copies. “Jürgen Claus is the first one to see the ocean through an artist’s rather than a scientist’s lens,” Michel Ragon writes. In this book, Claus intertwines his experiences working on the fascinating underwater installations with a pressing contemporary concern: the global efforts to restore the seas to health. The publication combines visual art, architecture, poetry, and music for a multifaceted engagement with the world’s oceans.
Jürgen Claus majored in theater studies at the Universität München and was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne.
-
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
-
Taube
18€ Add to cartHuman, City, Pigeon
Public perceptions of the pigeon have shifted drastically over the past centuries. In the 1700s, it was welcomed as a guest who commanded humans’ unfailing solicitude; today, by contrast, it is often perceived as a nuisance. It has become an animal that defaces squares and buildings. Why does the pigeon in the settings of our daily lives prompt feelings of loathing and fascination, but also indifference? Jens Gerber’s photographs undertake an expedition into the city of the pigeons. Rounded out by essays by Marina Rüdiger and Laurens Schlicht, the book illuminates the subject of the city pigeon from the perspectives of photography, science, and literature, and explores the question of how pigeons shape the built environment and how the latter informs their behavior in turn.
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
Special Edition60€ Add to cartSPECIAL EDITION in clothbound slipcase
The 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.
- Release January 2026
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.
-
Candida Höfer
Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn35€ Add to cartThe Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Yesterday and Today
The imposing presence of architecture captured in the absence of humans: that is the defining characteristic of the photographs with which Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde; lives and works in Cologne) has risen to international renown. In 1992, she captured the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in ten analogue black-and-white pictures that have not been on public display. In 2020, Höfer returned to the institute to take more pictures using a digital camera. The two series now make their public début in the institute’s halls and are gathered in this book. Undertaking a historically and aesthetically captivating comparison, Höfer probes the ways in which university life has changed over almost three decades.
Candida Höfer was a member of Bernd Becher’s inaugural photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works were shown at documenta 11 in 2002, and in 2003, she and Martin Kippenberger represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.
-
Martin Noël
The Retrospective38€ Add to cartThe Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut
The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.
Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
-
Heike Negenborn
Terra Cognita24€ Add to cartLebensraum of our Time: Contemporary Landscape Painting
The central theme of Heike Negenborn (b. 1964, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler; lives and works in Windesheim) is the seen lebensraum. In reference to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, her works stand in a specific tradition of capturing reality. With her new group of works titled Net-Scape – Landscape in Transition, Negenborn transfers art historical references into contemporary images. The artist is interested in the possibilities of media transfer and the increasing appropriation of analog reality by the digital image. The present volume provides impressive insights into the developments of the landscape painter from 2007 to 2020.
Heike Negenborn studied fine arts at Austin College, Texas, Art Education at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, and Painting and Printmaking at the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz.
-
Logan T. Sibrel
But I’m Different50€ Add to cartLogan T. Sibrel’s (born 1986 in Jasper, IN, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) paintings and drawings depict moments of great joy and beauty, but also fear, sadness, desire and aggression. Frequently only part of the mostly male figures is depicted. Sibrel’s cropping can feel simultaneously intimate and alienating—fragmentary stories are told that touch you through their authenticity and vulnerability. Sibrel’s artistic maneuvers include overlapping, shifted perspectives, and text fragments that appear like snippets of overheard conversations and thus create a collage effect.
This book is the artist’s first comprehensive publication with works from the last twenty months. While the first part presents the artist’s paintings, the second part presents his drawings with the edges of the backing paper digitally removed so that it looks as if the images were drawn directly into the book.
Logan T. Sibrel completed his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington in 2009 and his master’s degree at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2011. His most recent solo exhibitions include In Another Life and Galerie Thomas Fuchs (Stuttgart, DE) and Brake For Your Sweetheart at Auxier Kline (New York, NY).
- temporarily not available
Sonia Gomes
I Rise – I’m a Black Ocean, Leaping and WideRead more“My Work is Black, it is Feminine, and it is Marginal. I‘m a Rebel.”
The biomorphic sculptures of Sonia Gomes (b. 1948, Caetanópolis, Brazil; lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil) have an eerie, almost magical presence. As the daughter of a black mother and a white textile industrialist, she grew up between two worlds. But the African culture and spirituality of her mother and grandmother, as well as an interest in rituals, processions, and myths, made a lasting impact on her life and her later work as an artist. As a teenager, Gomes began deconstructing textiles and items of clothing to create her own style and to make both items for practical use and craft objects. Having previously participated in the 56th Biennale di Venezia in 2015, Sonia Gomes now counts among the most influential artists in Brazil.
-
Jörg Heieck
CRUX29€ Add to cartTwo Fascinating Series of Works by the Photographer and Physicist
Expertly wielding the vintage photographic technique of the cyanotype, Jörg Heieck (b. 1964, Münster; lives and works in Kaiserslautern) transmutes nature into a fascinating play of shades of blue and defamiliarized shapes. Desolate sceneries, barren landscapes—the first series gathered in the book was created in the Sahara, Iceland, and Spitsbergen. Humanity has reached a crossroads: can we avert the destruction of the planet? Contrasting this symbolic crux, the second section presents populated intersections replete with signage from China, Japan, Russia, Israel, India, Greece, and Georgia. With these panoramas of urban life standing as a counterpoint to the abstraction in the photographs in the first section, the book offers insight into the artist’s extraordinary oeuvre.
Jörg Heieck has a PhD in physics and worked for many years as a researcher at Agfa, Kodak, and the ITER nuclear fusion reactor project. His art has been shown in numerous countries, including at the Goethe-Institutes in Damascus and Beirut, the Aleppo International Photo Festival, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, and Kunsthalle Mannheim.
-
Petra Arnold
Beyond Starlight39,90€ Read moreThe Fischer Family of Circus Artists: A Photographic Long-term Observation
For more than a decade, the photographer Petra Arnold has shadowed the Zirkus Starlight troupe and the Fischers, a family of performers, taking analog photographs, mostly black-and-white, of their life behind the scenes. When she began the project, the Fischers were a large family, with thirty grandchildren. Over time, the company has had to downsize – the business environment is difficult, and few people can make a living as circus artists these days. Arnold’s photographs peek behind the curtain for a study of an existence between circus family and family circus – mostly outside the limelight. The portraits and unstaged scenes are documents of contemporary history and draw attention to the steady decline of circus culture.
-
Shara Hughes
58€ Add to cartBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
-
Horst Keinig
Scoop29€ Add to cartAn Artist Book Setting New Visual Processes in Motion
Around the year 2009, Horst Keining (b. 1949, Hattingen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) began to create blurred contours with the help of a small spray gun used without stencil. Up to four partially superimposed pictorial planes result in the oscillation and almost three-dimensional pulsation of the pictorial space. In interplay with a contrasting juxtaposition of strongly contoured images, his works convey a completely new visual experience. Since the resulting “blur effect” shrinks due to the reduction, this artist book places an essential accent on the reproduction of image details in their original size, followed by a full image of the picture.
