Bilder des Wohnens
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|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Axel Grünewald, Emanuel Raab, Roman Bezjak, Suse Wiegand |
| Author(s) | Anna Zika, Stefanie Kleinsorge |
| Design | Toni Montana Studios |
| Size | 17 x 24 cm |
| Pages | 64 |
| Illustrations | 42 |
| Cover | Softcover with flaps and Swiss brochure |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-88-3 |
The Cognitive Registers of Photography
All over the world, housing shortages and living conditions are urgent concerns of political and academic debates. Scholars at the FH Bielefeld conducted a three-year research project on Bilder des Wohnens. Architekturen im Bild, focusing on questions of the representation of space and hybrid forms of visualization between documentation and staging as well as photography as an archive of architectural knowledge and tool in the planning process. The book draws on studies of twentieth-century social utopias such as Tashkent, Uzbekistan, an embodiment of the urban-planning ideal of Soviet modernism, and explorations of social and cultural spaces along the coasts of northern Morocco and southern Spain, as well as a photographic typology of urban fabrics in Germany and other sociocultural studies that grapple with the significance of living spaces today.
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Considering Finland
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With fourteen artistic positions from the fields of photography, video, and installation, Considering Finland offers fascinating insight into the Finnish art scene. The themes of the artists from one of the least populated and most densely forested countries in Europe is the relationship between humankind and nature, as well as the political, social, and economic implications of this. Their works point to cultural dispositions and standardizations of the individual within a society based on unattainable maxims, such as permanent success, lasting recognition, and limitless growth. Pictorial traditions, geographical structures, and socio-political and infrastructural factors are the bases of a mental construction that summarizes their artistic work under a national heading. With works by Kenneth Bamberg, Elina Brotherus, Ville Lenkkeri, Aurora Reinhard, Iiu Susiraja, Nestori Syrjälä, and Pilvi Takala.
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“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 -
Stephan Kaluza & Dieter Nuhr
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At first glance, Stephan Kaluza’s (b. 1964, Bad Iburg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) photorealist paintings might be still lifes, portraits of pristine nature. Yet they actually show battlefields and other scenes of past horrors. The idyll in his pictures positively appeals to our vigilance to resist the impression of profound peace. The same ambiguity lies at the heart of the photographs of Dieter Nuhr (b. 1960, Wesel; lives and works in Ratingen). Nuhr, who is also widely known as a comedian, has contributed pictures that are carefully focused renditions of seemingly serendipitous discoveries from his travels in Nepal, Bolivia, India, and Sudan. In their timelessness, Nuhr’s photographs are akin to the locales in Kaluza’s works, which, disburdened of the heavy weight of their histories, reemerge as straightforward natural landscapes. The lavishly illustrated two-volume edition presents the fruits of a collaboration between two artists united by their shared preoccupation with the dialectic of ephemerality and permanence.
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DAWN OF HUMANITY – ART IN PERIODS OF UPHEAVAL
37€ Add to cartThe book and exhibition present works from the first two decades of the twentieth century from the Kunstmuseum Bonn’s collection in dialogue with contemporary creative positions. What the works have in common across the distance of a century is their genesis in, and reflection on, a time of major social and political crisis. Back then, life had been profoundly changed by the industrial revolution; nowadays, climate change, wars, and the rising political power of right-wing ideologies are transforming the life of our communities. The presentation conceives art as a tool that lets us interrogate the world and imparts fresh intellectual impulses, and so also plays an active part in our societies. The title Menschheitsdämmerung – Dawn of Humanity – is borrowed from the poetry anthology of the same title released by Kurt Pinthus in 1919, which samples the Expressionist lyric poetry of the young century in four chapters: “Downfall and Outcry”; “Love Human Beings”; “Awakening of the Heart”; “Entreaty and Indignation.” Florian Illies, who already wrote an afterword for the 2019 centenary edition of Menschheitsdämmerung – the bestselling poetry anthology in the history of German literature – contributed the keynote essay in the book.
Artists: Nevin Aladağ, Francis Alÿs, Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Rebekka Benzenberg, Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Bowers, Heinrich Campendonk, Louisa Clement, Max Ernst, Georg Herold, Franz M. Jansen, Alexej von Jawlensky, Käthe Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Helmuth Macke, Goshka Macuga, Marie von Malachowski-Nauen, Carlo Mense, Zanele Muholi, Heinrich Nauen, Grace Ndiritu, Anys Reimann, Deborah Roberts, Daniel Scislowski, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Tschabalala Self, Monika Sosnowska, William Straube, Emma Talbot, Hans Thuar, Lawrence Weiner
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Larissa Kikol
Neue abstrakte Malerei26€ Add to cartAbstract painting has reinvented itself: rid of political and ideological burdens, it now stands for pure creative autonomy. From the Abstract Expressionism of the postwar era to today’s expansive ease—in essays and conversations, Larissa Kikol sheds light on how this art form broke free of the narratives that attended its emergence and performed a “great reset.” From the seminal innovations of Katharina Grosse or Albert Oehlen and radically subjectivist approaches in Cecily Brown or André Butzer to cutting-edge tendencies like Dirty Minimalism and Post Vandalism, the book presents thrilling insights into a painting that puts emotion, color, and shapes center stage. An inspiring look at the renaissance of abstract art in the 21st century and a must-have reference work for all art lovers.
Artists: Frederic Anderson, Karla Black, Frank Bowling, Andreas Breunig, Jenny Brosinski, Cecily Brown, André Butzer, Diamonds Crew, Willehad Eilers, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Antwan Horfee, Aneta Kajzer, Joan Mitchell, Michael Müller, Oscar Murillo, NEU, NUG, Albert Oehlen, David Ostrowski, Over, Daisy Parris, Marco Pariani, Jackson Pollock, Christopher Wool
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Michelle Jezierski
Simultaneous Spaces34€ Add to cartMichelle Jezierski’s (b. Berlin, 1981; lives and works in Berlin) paintings unfurl simultaneous spaces that are awash in light. Contrasts between bright and dark and muted as well as lucent hues engender a singular atmosphere characterized by depth and dynamism. The artist is as invested in the perception of these constructed spaces as in the capaciousness of natural landscapes. In her paintings, luminous colors and geometric disturbances achieve shifting balances between the extremes of order and chaos, light and shadow, interior and exterior, structure and flux. Simultaneous Spaces, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, presents forty-five works painted between 2017 and 2022.
Michelle Jezierski studied with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of Arts and graduated from Valérie Favre’s class in 2008. She also received a fellowship for a semester abroad at Cooper Union, New York, where she studied with Amy Sillman.
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Mirror
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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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Irmel Droese. Felix Droese
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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.
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Verena Issel
Yellow Pages. Installations and their individual components45€ Add to cartVerena Issel’s installations feel friendly and inviting, they are soft, round, colorful—we cannot but smile when we look at them. The sculptures and pictures she makes for them are replicas, sometimes laced with irony, of familiar objects from nature and culture—palm trees, ancient columns, and more—which she manufactures out of materials that surround us in everyday life and the domestic sphere such as an old bag, foamed plastic fragments, or a drainpipe. They are awkward giants, monochrome, simplified, two- and three-dimensional forms that wish us no ill. Taking a closer look, we realize that they embody what has been lost, that they are a plastic version of what we are destroying or have destroyed already: nature, obviously, but also ourselves and our cultural and social achievements. Their merriment and sympathy are tinged with melancholy, and the loss is doubly painful when we consider that the sculptures and graphic art are filled with no more than an imitation of life, and an exaggerated one. This catalogue presents a survey of Issel’s diverse and sprawling oeuvre. Expertly choreographed shots of the colorful works convey vivid impressions of her installations.
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Alexandru Chira
42€ Add to cartAlexandru Chira’s (b. Tăușeni, Romania, 1947; d. Bucharest, 2011) oeuvre systematically and comprehensively maps a fictional field of research. His paintings, drawings, and objects, whose individual elements recall switches, screens, keyboards, and levers, were designed to “bring rain and rainbows,” to promote prosperity and prevent floods. Working in his art laboratory, Chira resembled a farmer tilling his field. He sowed symbols across his paintings, sometimes transplanted them to create new semiotic interconnections, then reaped them and stored up his harvest in painted machines of varying shapes and dimensions. In the 1990s—by then Chira held a professorship and was a widely recognized artist—he fulfilled a lifelong dream by building the “Tăușeni Ensemble,” the largest monument single-handedly created by one man in Transylvania. Much of his oeuvre accordingly consists of sketches and elaborations relating to the monument. In the course of his decades-long fascination with an agrarian aesthetic, architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, ufology, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy fused, yielding a kind of practical knowledge as well as spiritual speculations sustaining his endeavor.
The extensive monograph with more than 750 illustrations surveys Alexandru Chira’s output of four decades and synthesizes years of research undertaken at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. It contains numerous transcriptions of textual parentheses, legends, and instructions on how to decode the works and poetic fragments embedded in Chira’s pictures.
- Release October 2025
Larissa Fassler
Building Worlds20€ Add to cartThe drawings and sculptures of Larissa Fassler (born 1975 in Canada, lives in Berlin) both document and question the modern metropolis, its public squares, train stations, and functional buildings. Fassler researches her chosen locations extensively in city archives and online. She tracks trends such as economic disparity, gentrification, homelessness, or drug consumption. She supplements these statistical facts with her own subjective survey methods, such as repeatedly visiting and observing the sites. All of the information gathered finds its way into Fassler’s complex cartographic drawings and sculptures, which reflect the socioeconomic and geopolitical challenges of our time. This book accompanies Fassler’s exhibition at the Kunstverein Lingen.
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Michael Bertram
mehr licht35€ Add to cartThe Mülheim-Kärlich Nuclear Power Station, 1975–2019
In 1975, construction began in Mülheim-Kärlich on what was to be the only nuclear power plant in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. After numerous court battles and only two years of trial and regular operation, the plant was decommissioned in 1988 and dismantled starting in 2001. The 530-foot cooling tower, taller than Cologne Cathedral, was the point of reference, landmark, and eyesore of an entire region; its time-consuming demolition became a symbol of the perennial political polarization over the decision to phase out nuclear power.
Michael Bertram (b. Mendig, 1968; lives and works in Mayen) took photographs of the reactor looming between homes and factories in order to record the future past in pictures. The plant cost seven billion deutschmarks to build and one billion euros to take back down: vast resources expended on a temporary installation that lasted forty years and left a lasting mark on the landscape, the surrounding communities, and the people who lived in its shadow. Starting with the demolition, the book presents an inverted timeline in eighty-one black-and-white photographs. The object seems to rise before our eyes until, at the end of the series, five color photographs conjure up a past that was very much present only a moment ago—a singular document of Germany’s industrial heritage.
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Roland Schappert & Wolfgang Ullrich
Aktualitätsjetzt16€ Add to cartPhilistinism, climate change, legitimation discourses—in a tour de force sustained by profound knowledge of the phenomena in question, AKTUALITÄTSJETZT blazes trails through the jungle of contemporary art and its current debates. Over the course of two years, the art scholar and author Wolfgang Ullrich initiated 14 dialogues on Schappert’s word paintings, murals, and interventions. Their distinctive formal features and conceptual and substantial dimensions inspired illuminating conversations that range far beyond the specific works to explore today’s art world and questions of the philosophy of art and the sociology of culture. The best volume of dialogues on art since David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.
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Ion Bitzan
48€ Add to cartThe painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country’s isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceaușescu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and São Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.
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Judit Reigl
Kraftfelder / Centers of Dominance28€ Add to cartBeginning in the 1950s, Judit Reigl (b. Kapuvár, Hungary, 1923; d. Marcoussis, France, 2020) builds a singular creative oeuvre between abstraction and figuration, between Surrealism and gestural painting. After studying art in Budapest, Reigl flees Hungary in 1950; arriving in Paris, she is introduced to André Breton, who organizes her first exhibition in 1954. Under the influence of the École de Paris, she branches out into écriture automatique, then shifts toward free expression. Like her contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler in New York, she lays out ever larger unprimed canvases on the floor and works them with a brush, her fingers, or other instruments. After 1966, bodily shapes emerge from her abstractions, and figures reappear in the pictures.
On occasion of Reigl’s centenary and the gift of three major works, the Neue Nationalgalerie mounts the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Germany. The book surveys the oeuvre of one of the most important protagonists of European art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Judit Reigl studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1942 until 1945 and was a fellow at the Hungarian Academy in Rome in 1947–48. From 1950 onwards, she lived and worked in France.
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Tim Eitel
Propositions for Afterimages 2015–202436€ Add to cartTim Eitel initiates an exchange between recollection and painting. The work on his pictures, he says, is “a conversation about reality and memory” in which he engages the canvas. In the course of this dialogue, Eitel reflects on personal experiences, creating a standalone figural-abstract reality that needs to be internally consistent—the canvas has a strong will of its own. That makes the scenes depicted in his paintings analogues or afterimages of a situation rather than renditions of it. They are characterized by a certain openness that enables the beholders to inject their own recollections into the pictorial space as well. The dialogue between canvas and artist thus gives way to a colloquy between audience and finished work. Not by coincidence, many of the paintings by Eitel gathered in this catalog show people in museums: these scenes facilitate the leap into the pictorial space. The beholders have experienced a situation like the one shown in the pictures in the past or are experiencing it right now, and so they are already at the heart of the works; they become part of the painting, and the picture becomes a particle of their recollection.
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Chunqing Huang
Painter’s Portrait II18€ Add to cartThe artist Chunqing Huang’s (b. Heze, China, 1974) Painters’ Portraits are anything but conventional likenesses. The portraits of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger and Imi Knoebel are acts of gestural-expressive abstraction and probing visual studies of the artist’s own recollections. Chunqing Huang paints meditations on art itself, systematically working through the vocabulary of abstract painting from Germany to the United States. The series Painter’s Portrait II features Chunqing Huang’s thirty most recent works from a series the artist has been transferring to canvases measuring 40 x 30 cm since 2016.
Painter’s Portrait II represents Chunqing Huang’s personal reflections on her influences, from Impressionism to expressive tendencies in abstract painting, which now make its début in book form. The catalogue showcases the portraits, each of which is distinguished by its own gestural quality and individual palette.
Chunqing Huang studied painting and interdisciplinary art at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where Wolfgang Tillmans and Peter Angermann were her teachers, and graduated from Hermann Nitsch’s master class. The German-Chinese artist’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. A first selection from the Painter’s Portrait series was on view at Kunsthalle Wiesbaden and Museum Wiesbaden in the summer of 2021; the catalogue Painter’s Portrait II is released in conjunction with her exhibition of the same title at 68projects, Berlin.
- Release October 2025
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Monograph (EN)68€ Add to cartThe Great German Artist’s Imposing Oeuvre
Ernst Wilhelm Nay (b. Berlin, 1902; d. Cologne, 1968) was one of the most interesting painters of European modernism. Spanning the decades from the 1930s to his death in Cologne in 1968, his output encompasses paintings as well as an abundance of works on paper. The new monograph surveys all periods in Nay’s oeuvre, from the “Fishermen paintings” to the striking late pictures, which leave no doubt about the artist’s outstanding gift for color. Nay’s evolution is embedded in the history and ideas of his time, on which he reflected in lectures, writings, and notes. The volume unlocks a wide spectrum of fresh insights into Nay’s life and art.
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Hofmann’s Ways
Early Drawings (1898-1937)24,80€ Add to cartA Re-Discovery: the Early Graphic Work of Hans Hofmann
A representative of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (b. 1880, Weißenburg; d. 1966, New York) was one of the most important artistic personalities of the 20th century. He began his career as a teacher and artist in the United States in the mid-1930s. The previously unpublished graphic oeuvre presents the highly varied development process that preceded Hans Hofmann’s influential painting of the post-war period.
