Beyond the Box
Dohmen Collection
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Christoph Balzar, Renate Puvogel, Oliver Zybok |
| Design | Axel Baltzer, Cologne |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Size | 24 x 28 cm |
| Pages | 206 |
| Illustrations | 135 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-023-1 |
Breaking the Mold of Convention
Presenting installations, sculptures, objects, and paintings from Mexico, Cuba, West Africa, Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, rounded out by extraordinary works from the U.S. and Europe, this selection from the Dohmen Collection features artists from countries that did not typically register on “Western” art radars until fifteen years ago. It was the seminal documenta 11 (2002), curated by a team led by Okwui Enwezor, that ushered in a departure from the contemporary art world’s entrenched geopolitical ideas. This book showcases a treasure that has long been ahead of its time yet did not attract public attention: the private collection of Werner Dohmen, a physician in Aachen. It includes works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Wim Delvoye, Jimmie Durham, Diango Hernández, Rodney McMillian, Pavel Pepperstein, Nora Turato, Haegue Yang, and other artists who continue to provoke audiences, ask probing questions, and prompt fresh thinking.
Dr. med. Werner Dohmen has been head of the board of Neuer Aachener Kunstverein since 1988. In addition to building his own collection, he has been a committed supporter of the intercultural project No es arte, which advocates for the return of goldwork of the pre-Colombian Tairona people that was stolen from sacred sites during the colonial conquest of South America.
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Andreas Eriksson
Read moreAll is related, from the outside in. Look what’s behind it.
Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975 in Björsäter, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden) is one of Sweden’s most notable contemporary artists. His artistic practice is based on a traditional painterly language, but he constantly expands this field to also encompass a vast production of textile works. He examines different histories through conceptual twists and turns in sculpture and prints. This monograph, the artist’s first, seeks to explain and illustrate Eriksson’s development and thoughts behind the meandering array of works he produces. It is a close look behind the canvas.
Andreas Eriksson studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1993 to 1998 and represented Sweden with the Nordic Pavilion at the 54. Biennale di Venezia. His most comprehensive solo exhibition to date took place in 2014 at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.
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Slawomir Elsner
Precision and Chance38€ Add to cartComplex Processes of Abstraction
International audiences know Sławomir Elsner (b. Wodzisław Śląski, Poland, 1976; lives and works in Berlin) for his naturalistic paintings and abstract watercolors, but it was his brilliantly executed colorful drawings that made him famous. The technique of his work in crayons is as formidable as it is singular and underlies his many adaptations of legendary works from the history of painting that seem blurry but are actually drawn in accurate lines.
More generally, Elsner’s art probes the effect of different media and the stories they tell. He interrogates the images they transport and challenges the consumers to subject their own visual experiences to a similar critical review. Do pictures represent reality or distort it? That is the question that guides his inquiries.
Elsner works almost exclusively in series. What makes this book special is that it includes an index in which eleven of these bodies of work are reproduced in their entirety. The Old Masters series alone comprises 143 works made in the years after 2014. It is complemented by the series Windows on the World (2008–2010), Feuerwerk- und Luftabwehr (2004), Unsere Sonnen (2004–2005), the watercolors of Tagstücke and Nachtstücke (2014–2021), and others.
Many of the works frame accidents, disasters, wars, nuclear tests, or other horrible events. By harnessing the means of art to detach their depiction from a documentary setting, Sławomir Elsner achieves an unrivaled degree of aestheticization; his works are fascinating at first glance, only to fill the beholder with a creeping dread.
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wolfgang thiel
skulpturale standpunkte38€ Add to cartWolfgang Thiel (b. Zweibrücken, 1952; lives and works in Plochingen) is a sculptor who makes figurative work. He is especially interested in the southern German tradition of colorfully painted sculpture, which he seeks to bring into the twenty-first century. His experimental handling of various genres and materials suggests a researcher’s mind. Switching between different materials is key to Thiel’s approach because their particular characteristics demand his constant attention. Å playful aspect is essential to all his works, which include large-format sculptures in public settings (more than thirty have been installed in Germany) as well as sculptural garden landscapes, stage designs, and costumes.
The opulent wide-format book containing almost three hundred illustrations offers a representative overview of Wolfgang Thiel’s oeuvre and includes the first complete chronological catalogue raisonné of his works in wood.
Wolfgang Thiel studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design from 1970 until 1976 and later taught at his alma mater from 1987 until 1991. From 2008 until 2018, he held a teaching position at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart. In 1990, he won the Art Award of the City of Stuttgart. Since 1977, Thiel’s work has been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions in Switzerland, France, and Germany.
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Chiharu Shiota
The Unsettled Soul48€ Add to cartWidely acclaimed for her distinctive visual language, which combines drawing, performance, sculpture, and installation art, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972 in Osaka, lives and works in Berlin) addresses fundamental human concerns. Creating large-scale thread installations that incorporate a variety of everyday objects and memorabilia, she forms powerful environments that evoke a sense of nostalgia, personal history, and collective memory. The catalog accompanies the exhibition The Unsettled Soul, the first presentation of the artist in the Czech Republic. In addition to extensive photographic documentation of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha, the publication features an essay by Jason Waite discussing Shiota’s early works as well as an interview with the artist conducted by the editor, Christelle Havranek, about her key themes and the creation of the Prague exhibition.
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Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
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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
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Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
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Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst38€ Add to cartContemporary Visual Communication in a Historic Weaving Technique
Margret Eicher’s (b. Viersen, Germany, 1955; lives and works in Berlin) large-format tapestries combine the baroque form of the woven picture with familiar motifs excerpted from contemporary media images. She digitizes her sources and then assembles them in painstaking editing work on the computer. The resulting ‘media tapestries’ occupy the interface between the traditional work of art as a physical object and the electronic noise of the digital realm: two worlds that at first glance would seem to be incompatible yet find themselves in harmonious union in Eicher’s art. In Göttliche Liebe (Divine Love), for example, Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns meets a kissing gay couple from a pro-tolerance campaign in Berlin, while Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is sampled together with a subway station in Frankfurt. In conceptual art production, the creative idea is central and its realization becomes secondary; in a final twist, Lob der Malkunst (Praise of Painting) elects this practice as its artistic lodestar. Eicher installs the painter Martin Kippenberger in the interior of Berlin’s Paris Bar, where he poses as a dandy and presides over a clash between the different tendencies in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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João Penalva
The Asian Books40€ Add to cartThe First Survey on the Exceptional Artist Books of João Penalva
Since 2007 João Penalva (b. 1949, Lissabon; lives and works in London) has exhibited large format unbound books, printed with archival inks on fine art paper, displayed on tables with chairs, to be handled freely. Each one is published in an edition of three and one artist’s proof. Those whose content relate to Asia, whether factually or fictionally, are collected here for the first time: Taipei Story, 2007; Portraits: Machines and Kabuki Wigs, 2009; The Toshiba Book of Happiness, 2009; Hello? Are you there?, 2009; Michio Harada, 2015; Boro, 2017.
João Penalva studied Fine Art at the Chelsea School of Art in London. His works have been shown in manifold international exhibitions. Penalva represented Portugal 2001 at the Venice Biennale and 1996 at the São Paulo Biennale.
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Louise Hindsgavl
Conversation Pieces68€ Add to cartThe Danish sculptor Louise Hindsgavl (born 1973, lives in Copenhagen) is known for hybrid figurines made of porcelain and glazed stoneware: half animal, half human. Only their material evokes the idealized and kitschy scenes traditionally rendered in porcelain; however, Hindsgavl’s “sculptural collisions” tell of disturbing encounters between tormented beast-like people. For that she draws from brutal folktales of the past as much as from the ubiquitous “fairytales” of today’s social media that normalize violence, sexual abuse, and self-harm. Using one of the most fragile materials, she brings these trends into focus for discussion, calling her sculptures Conversation Pieces—which is also the title of this interesting and provocative book.
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Drucksache Bauhaus
38€ Add to cartThe Early Years of the Weimar Print Workshop
At the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, the print workshop began operation in the spring of 1919 as the first workshop. Printmaking corresponded to the basic idea of the Bauhaus in that it realized the unity of art and craftsmanship in an ideal manner. With the groundbreaking project Bauhaus-Drucke. Neue Europaeische Graphik, four portfolios were created in which forty-five representatives of the European artistic avant-garde participated. In the announcement brochure of 1921, it stated: “The many who do not yet know about the work of the Bauhaus, and who cannot know, are to be made aware of us through this work.” The book presents the portfolios published between 1921 and 1924, together with other works printed at the Bauhaus by Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer. The Stuttgarter Prolog also sheds light on the influence of Adolf Hölzel, whose students and later Bauhaus masters Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten brought many of his ideas to the Bauhaus.
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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.
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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.
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SOMA
Collective SineUmbra18€ Add to cartOn the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
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Laura Schawelka
Double Issues24€ Add to cartSales Spaces without Merchandise
In her installations, Laura Schawelka (b. 1988, Munich; lives and works in Berlin) makes use of photography, video, and sculpture in a multilayered dialogue. In her latest works, the artist focuses on the role of photography in the development of modern consumer society. What does it mean if goods are only communicated through other goods, such as computers, cell phones, tablets? If this withholding of the genuine object is precisely what prompts the desire for it? The artist creates sales spaces without merchandise, in which images, photographs, and videos have replaced consumer goods of any kind.
Laura Schawelka studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main as a student of Tobias Rehberger master-class. In 2015, she was awarded the Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and in 2017 she moved to Paris as the recipient of a studio bursary of Hessische Kulturstiftung.
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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.
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Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
with free download link on the inside
You’ve read right, and you’re going to hear it: a bureaucratic document—we’re all familiar with it, for a new one arrives every year—is the subject of this inspired collaboration between the graphic artist Philip Loersch and the virtuoso vocalist Johannes Steck.
The “Renteninformation”—an official letter on cheap paper informing the recipient about their expected future retirement benefits—makes many cultural workers, and others, crack up or break out in tears: arriving unexpectedly, it launches us on an emotional roller coaster between excitement, fascination, resignation, and sheer madness.
The manuscript for this audiobook is Loersch’s actual Renteninformation for 2022. Its intonation is the culmination of a series of works the artist has pursued since 2016. Every year, he has produced a naturalist colored-pencil drawing of his Renteninformation, embedding it in idyllic scenes—in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid autumn foliage, or on a frozen lake, delicately and accurately executed down to the smallest leaf of grass and the tiniest letter.
“Renteninformation 2022” is the ideal gift for all vinyl lovers who need to close a “pension gap” in their collections and a stunning audio experience that redefines what the satire of reality itself and conceptual art can do.
Philip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980) is best known for his unconventional drawings. His works combine painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst, and helped initiate the exhibition series “Drawing Wow.”
Johannes Steck (b. Würzburg, 1966) is one of Germany’s best-known audiobook narrators, having sold over four million copies, including of books by Simon Beckett and Ken Follett, in a three-decade career. Television viewers also know his voice from trailers on Kabel 1 and DMAX and documentaries on ZDF, BR, and Sky. His work has garnered awards including the 2012 HörKules.
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Sonja Yakovleva
Soaplands50€ Add to cartSonja Yakovleva’s (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) silhouettes are informed by her sex-positive feminist views. They mix and match pornography with art-historical references, folkloristic motifs, fairy tales, and myths that have served to ingrain misogynistic, racist, and homophobic ideologies in the collective consciousness since the Middle Ages. The dissemination of such materials was facilitated by the paper cut, a medium that encouraged simplified graphical representations and was seen as domestic and appropriate for women. Yakovleva’s intentions in adopting it, however, are contrarian: her iridescent silhouettes grapple with women’s stories, precarious gray areas, power relations, representation, sexuality, and violence in novel ways.
Soaplands, the title of Sonja Yakovleva’s first monograph, is a nod to Japanese bathhouses where men receive personal care, massages, and sexual services. Most recently, a number of soaplands have opened that cater to women with male prostitutes. Similarly, in the paper cuts in the book, which were created between 2018 and 2023, women have seized sexual power and conquered the patriarchal system. Unchecked by shame, they use men as objects to satisfy their desires.
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Michael Williams
New Paintings40€ Add to cartAwkward Uncertainty
Michael Williams (b. 1978, Doylestown, Pa.; lives and works in Los Angeles) makes work that interrogates the history of painting, often by dismantling its components into their constituent parts. His pictures employ form to reflect on the complexity and contradictions of modern life. He works on canvas, availing himself of a range of techniques including oil painting, collage, and inkjet prints. In his new works, Williams examines the relationship between painting and photography, transferring the chilly aloofness that is characteristic of the latter onto the former. The photographic “negative” yields a smooth canvas disencumbered of its painterly qualities and the medium’s historic ballast. The book includes several foldout plates that illustrate Williams’s creative approach, and a brief essay by his Austrian fellow painter Tobias Pils.
Michael Williams studied fine arts at Washington University, St. Louis, and has exhibited widely, including at the Wiener Secession, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Sabrina Fritsch
syntaxerror28€ Add to cartSabrina Fritsch’s (b. Neunkirchen/Saar, 1979; lives and works in Cologne) paintings explore the potentials of the compositional process and the mechanisms of perception. Many of them feature coarse structures, textile surfaces, and delicate superimpositions. In this publication, Fritsch, who was recently appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, presents a résumé of the painterly oeuvre she has developed since her graduation from the same school in 2008. It encompasses two related books, each of which undertakes a structured study of a major strand in Fritsch’s art. One offers a chronological survey of a representative selection of works created between 2008 and 2019 that illustrate her playful and experimental engagement with the constituents of the painted picture: the picture-as-object, the organization of pictorial space, and the phenomenology of physical color. In addition to works on canvas boasting a wide variety of applications of materials and paint, it also covers serial variations in prints. The other showcases three exhibitions and bodies of work dating from 2020 and 2021 that are dedicated to the three color systems RGB, black-and-white (BAW), and CMYK.
