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.
More books
-
GABRIELE BASCH, GESA LANGE
UND_NEWS_FROM_NOW_HERE18€ Add to cartBeyond Painting
Gabriele Basch’s (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) cut-outs and Gesa Lange’s (b. 1972, Tongeren, Belgium; lives and works in Hamburg) drawings are meditations on construction and deconstruction as well as doubts and how to overcome them. Both artists expand the range of painting: Basch, with incisions into the medium and a creative handling of the tinged shadows that transform the painted panel into a wall-mounted object; Lange, by embroidering her canvases with colorful threads that open up the pictorial space on all sides. The book presents works by both artists, initiating an animated and dynamic dialogue between their nonrepresentational visual idioms. Gabriele Basch is professor of painting at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Gesa Lange is professor of graphic art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. She has received the Kunsthalle Rostock Prize and other awards.
- Out of stock
Soulages
Malerei 1946–201942€ Read more“I paint not with black but with light.”
Pierre Soulages (b. Rodez, France, 1919; lives and works in Paris and Sète, France) is an eminent figure in abstract painting. A member of the Nouvelle École de Paris, he developed his first nonobjective pictures early on, in 1946, putting bars of bold color, typically black, on white grounds. His embrace of total non-representationality, an art that depicts nothing, that stands for nothing but itself, amounted to a radical challenge to the traditional values of painting. In 1979, his work entered a new phase, a painting he calls “outrenoir” or “beyond black.” Soulages now occupies a singular position, and not only by virtue of his choice of materials such as walnut stain and tar and implements like scrubbers, iron hooks, and spatulas. The book documents the arc of his oeuvre from his beginnings after World War II to the present. Illustrating the evolution of his art, it shows how he remained true to his creative vision, a consistency that is doubly imposing given the extraordinary length of his career.
Pierre Soulages studied at the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts, Montpellier, before moving to Paris in 1946. He contributed work to documentas I, II, and III and the 26th Biennale di Venezia. His work has been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; the Musée du Louvre and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier. The Musée Soulages in his native Rodez opened in 2014.
-
CHRISTIAN ROTHMANN
The Light Touch45€ Add to cartA Monograph of Curiosity
Christian Rothmann (b. Kędzierzyn, Poland, 1954; lives and works in Berlin) is an artistic jack-of-all-trades, a builder of bridges between cultures, and a restless globetrotter and traveler across time. He takes photographs wherever he goes, especially when he is on the road, gathering documentaries with a creative edge, spontaneous yet powerfully symbolic pictures, or conceptual series. His motifs have included basketball hoops in the most unbelievable places, toys in restaurants and stores, exotic dishes, and—in the sequence Legs of the World—beautiful legs, of real-world women, but also of advertising-poster idols and art objects. He has a special knack for recruiting accomplices from all age groups and across social and cultural differences, as for his series you and me or Mother & Daughter. Fierce large-format paintings and delicate watercolors on small paper formats from Rothmann’s studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg complement his long-term photographic projects. The Light Touch presents the artist’s variegated visual art on almost five hundred pages.
-
Penny Hes Yassour
Temp-Est24€ Add to cartA Monograph about the Award-Winning Israeli Artist
Penny Hes Yassour (b. 1950, lives and works at kibbutz En-Harod Ihud) tells stories and keeps history alive, explores the boundary between remembering and forgetting. In her installations she combines sound, image, and a multi-part world of objects into narrative mise-en-scènes of great poetic power. Hes Yassour leads the viewer through the Jordan Valley with its many watchtowers, accompanies the transformation of the landscape in a gigantic, stagelike water basin, and documents the flight of bats in a narrow, labyrinthine spatial installation. The book published on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition in Germany provides comprehensive insights into her subtle artistic work.
-
Matilde Damele
New York. 1999-201435€ Add to cartNew York and street photography were made for each other, which is why Matilde Damele (b. Bologna; lives and works in Rome), a master of the genre, left home for the big city in the late 1990s. She spent fifteen years in New York, and now her forays have congealed in this singular picture book. The light, the skyscraper-lined avenues, the pedestrians hurrying past and their loneliness in crowds—nimbly wielding her camera, Damele recorded all of it in classic black and white. The result is an outstanding portrait of a forward-looking metropolis that continually draws our attention to its past.
-
Alexandra Tretter
24€ Add to cartThe art of Alexandra Tretter (*1988) is as deep as it is playful. Owing just as much to the gentle spirituality of Hilma af Klint’s late geometries as it does to Sonia Delaunay’s exuberant disc paintings, almost bursting with sheer chromatic pleasure. Her compassionately designed artist’s book combines monumental paintings with intimate works on paper, all of which are imbued with the contexts of Tretter’s own life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother.
Her kaleidoscopic figurations unfold from a center at rest in itself and multiply in symmetry and asymmetry towards all sides. She contrasts the circular form, the unchanging basic element of her compositions, with the oval, which constantly strives beyond itself, transforming itself in ever-new permutations from one figure into the next, into eyes, mouths, breasts, petals or vulvas.
Her images strive for composure, unfold and blossom, only to let go of all gestalt-like form. Once gained stability is instantly pushed into turmoil. Colors flare up violently or flow delicately about, lighten or shade each other, carry or throw each other off course. Tretter equally realizes materialization and dissolution as basic principles of her painting.
Whereby all, what her images absorb, preserve and release, is experience, growth and slow maturing. Her paintings are “figurations of affection”, in which each individual turns towards something else, doubts or grows, at times turns away or surrenders all the more consciously. They question everything, start anew and yet find their way back to themselves, into their very own.
-
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?
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game32€ Add to cartThe Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
-
Simone Haack
HAIR30€ Add to cartSimone Haack (b. 1978 in Rotenburg/Wümme, lives and works in Berlin) has always made the inwards legible in the outer appearance of her figures in her painting. This is also the case in her block of works in the exhibition of the same name, Hair. Already in the late 17th century, magic and superstition were attributed to hair. In it one suspected the whole power of the soul. The artist, who was formed in the painting class of Katharina Grosse and Karin Kneffel, symbolically reveals the fragility of the DNA of human beings through her hair landscapes, which are sometimes placed macroscopically in the picture in the spirit of a New Magic Realism. At the same time, her accompanying exhibition publication always also tells of the triangle of tension of physical as well as psychological existence, which in her case runs through the painterly psychoanalysis.
-
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).
-
Larissa Kikol
SIGNED. Unterwegs mit der 1UP-Crew und Moses & Taps18€ Add to cartWho owns the city? It is a question to which graffiti artists and politicians have very different answers. 1UP and Moses & Taps are international stars of the scene, realizing radical creative concepts in spectacular actions. The art critic Larissa Kikol shadowed them on their nocturnal forays for three years and gathered her experiences in a book that has become a singular tribute to the graffiti scene. It lets us witness the genesis of the artists’ works on the knife’s edge between civil disobedience, criminal liability, and an irrepressible freedom. Traveling throughout Germany, Kikol records absorbing dialogues that reflect the contrast between different worlds: the legal and the illegal art worlds, painting and protest. Always on the hop and in danger of being discovered and arrested, she ventures beyond the bounds of permissible art, into subway tunnels, up on roofs, across switchyards. A portrait emerges of Germany and Berlin and the power relations that shape our society.
Larissa Kikol (b. 1986) works as a freelance art critic, art scholar, and writer. She writes for Die Zeit, Spiegel Online, Art, Kunstzeitung, Mare, Monopol Online, and Kunstforum International. In 2016, she won C/O Berlin’s international Talents award in the art criticism category. She teaches and lectures at art schools and universities in Germany and France.
Kikol studied stage design and dramaturgy in Berlin-Weißensee and obtained a Ph.D. in art studies from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. She lives and works in Marseille and Cologne.
-
Larry Rivers
An American-European Dialogue38€ Add to cartBetween French Modernism and the New York School
The American painter, musician, and filmmaker Larry Rivers (b. 1923, New York; d. 2002, New York) is considered one of the most influential protagonists of the New York art scene in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. He played with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, was a close friend of Frank O’Hara, and pioneered Pop Art. In dealing with contemporary artist colleagues and historical role models, he always strived to making painting visible as a medium of reflection. From an early age, Rivers was preoccupied with French painting of the late nineteenth century. During his stay in Paris in 1961/62, he met Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, whereupon the range of materials he used was extended to wood, cardboard, and electric light. For the first time, the present volume – the first monograph in twenty years – sheds light on Larry Rivers’ idiosyncratic art with a view to the tension between traditional French painting and Abstract Expressionism around Willem de Kooning.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur14€ Add to cartThe Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
-
Etsu Egami
Rainbow18€ Add to cartWhat is worth talking about in art eludes language. Aesthetic experience is without words, like a human encounter that touches upon our innermost being. Etsu Egami is interested in the margins of understanding, where the communication of ideas and feelings threatens to fail, where forms become illegible. That is the point on which she homes in with her brush, which she wields in a rough calligraphic style, putting almost translucent oil paints on the canvas. Spectral faces emerge that dissolve into abstraction; abstract forms, beheld from the corner of one’s eye, momentarily coalesce into a likeness. Painting, to Egami, is a physical and performative act, the brush an extension of her arm, bringing a picture into being in sweeping rhythmical motions. As we contemplate her work, that momentum imparts itself to us: first our eyes begin to wander, then we feel our bodies stir, and finally the spirit, too, pulsates in the rhythm of the brush. Gathering Egami’s most outstanding works, this catalogue is a universal invitation to join a peculiar dance, an arc of light the artist traces across all barriers to understanding and that speaks to our senses.
-
10 Jahre Württembergische Volksbühne
Reprint der Festschrift von 192915€ Add to cartCentennial Publication of the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen
In 2019, the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen (WLB)—one of the oldest regional theatres in Germany—is celebrating its 100th anniversary. On the occasion of this anniversary, the tenth commemorative publication by the Württembergische Volksbühne from 1929 is being reprinted. The unique document of the time visualizes in a special way the important role that the topics of cultural education and culture in rural areas, which are still relevant today, played in the young Weimar Republic immediately after the First World War. The brochure also documents both the mission and the daily work of the theater. In addition, the reprint is complemented by an essay from Joachim J. Halbekann, the principal of municipal archive of Esslingen, providing—for the first time in the history of the WLB—a comprehensive historical essay that examines the time betweeen 1919 and 1933/34.
-
Sabine Hornig
Passage through Presence45€ Add to cartLayered Spacetimes in Large Formats
Sabine Hornig (b. 1964; lives and works in Berlin) has earned international acclaim with sculptures, photographs, and architectural interventions that interweave image, perspective, and space in distinctive ways. Her works feature translucent pictorial planes on glass panes; integrating these sculptural elements into the setting, she creates environments in which meaning unfolds as viewers allow their gazes—and themselves—to wander. For her new works, which engage with architecture, the artist superimposes enormous photographs on entire façades and concourses. This publication is the first to put the focus on Sabine Hornig’s art in three dimensions, detailing her process from the building of sculptural models and the combination with transparent photographic layers to her creation of works in public settings. It showcases her largest installation to date, at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, which she discusses in a conversation with Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator, Public Art Fund, New York.
- Out of stock
Supernatural
Sculptural Visions of the BodyRead moreThe future of human corporeality in the Anthropocene era
Given the technological development in biogenetics, humans will be able to make existential modifications to all living things, Nature, the animal world and human likenesses in future. What will bodies of the future look like? Who or what will we be? Supernatural offers us some answers in its hyperrealistic and realistic sculptures. These visionary works not only exemplify the impact of the digital revolution and genetic engineering on “posthumans” and the environment, but also illustrate, including in their own hybrid creations, how increasingly blurred the line between nature and culture is now becoming. Technological innovations are also having more and more effects on trends in the latest hyperrealistic sculptures. In using 3D printing to perfect their creation processes and pushing sculptural boundaries to encompass robotics and synthetic biology, artists are opening the door to new design possibilities in artefact, biology and technology for themselves as well.
The book presents works by Anne Carnein, Isa Genzken, Glaser/Kunz, Thomas Grünfeld, Sam Jinks, Josh Kline, Krištof Kintera, Reiner Maria Matysik, Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, Fabien Mérelle, Patricia Piccinini amongst others.
-
Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th 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.
-
Mirror
Collaborative Pictures by Merrick d’Arcy–Irvine x Julia Bajanova40€ Add to cartWe humans are social creatures. Without others to reflect our behavior back to us, we lose what defines us—language, culture, the capacity for creative expression. That is why photographer Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine and fashion designer Julia Bajanova are invested in intense encounters: not only with the people who appear in their pictures, but also with each other, as artists and as humans, and between their media and the materials out of which they are made. The materiality and sensual experience of these media in the physical world are the focus of the pictures gathered in this volume, which is why d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova eschewed all digital technologies. Sensuality forges an emotional bond between their creative universes, whose boundaries become permeable, as do the dividing lines between genres. Colors and forms are fused in a shared language of visual art and fashion in which d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova write their messages in light on photographic paper. They speak to what makes us human: creative energies untrammelled by the necessities of everyday life. The pictures in Mirror, then, are reflections of our existence and portals of self-knowledge.
