“Das Quadrat muss den Raum beherrschen!”
Aurélie Nemours und Zeitgenossen
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Holger Kube Ventura |
| Author(s) | Holger Kube Ventura |
| Design | Thomas Schmid |
| Size | 19 x 21 cm |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Pages | 152 |
| Illustrations | 68 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-203-7 |
Does 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
You may also like…
-
Konkrete Progressionen
François Morellet & Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr & Hartmut Böhm15€ Add to cartThanks to a generous donor, the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret welcomed a number of outstanding works to its collection in 2022. Titled Konkrete Progressionen, the first exhibition to showcase a selection from the gift features four internationally renowned artists whose works are derived from mathematical or geometric procedures: the concrete systematists Hartmut Böhm (1938–2021) and François Morellet (1926–2016) and the pioneers of computer-generated art Manfred Mohr (1938–) and Vera Molnar (1924–).
The book documents the serial paintings, drawings, collages, wall objects, and monumental installations and environments of steel beams or concrete blocks. The works play concrete games with the beholder’s ability to recognize patterns in binary contrasts or layered grids. They show sine waves, vector series, hypercubes, and markings derived from the circular constant π or the Fibonacci sequence—and in each instance demonstrate primarily how the basis of calculation takes on a life of its own.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen runs until April 14, 2024.
More books
-
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.
-
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.
-
Jan Zöller
Keine Zeit zum Baden38€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach im Kinzigtal, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) art brims with personal references and experiences that he translates into his distinctive personal visual idiom. His paintings are theatrical arrangements for which he draws on a multifarious repertoire of motifs. Zöller’s first monograph Keine Zeit zum Baden presents new works engaging with the exhibition space such as a floating installation with blue tiles from the exhibition of the same title at Städtische Galerie Ostfildern and videos and large-format paintings from the cycle Badebrunnen that were created between 2019 and 2022. The bathtubs in the pictures hint at private moments of relaxation; the fountains, at the “eternal cycle” of nature. The title Keine Zeit zum Baden (No Time for Bathing), then, gestures toward the subjects of the works, but also suggest the dilemma of striking a healthy balance between life, work, and one’s vocation.
Jan Zöller studied with Marijke van Warmerdam und Leni Hoffmann at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe from 2012 until 2017 and with Jean-Marc Bustamante at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016. He won the Federal Prize for Art Students of the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, in 2018, followed by Stiftung Kunstfonds’s working fellowship in 2021.
-
Franziska Windisch
Walk with a wire14€ Add to cartThe interweaving of traces, sounds, and movements in an impressive work of sound art
The narrow brown magnetic tape of an audio cassette runs through a half-opened hand, slides through the fingers, is palpated in constant motion, and finally falls to the ground. The hand and its touching, particles of sand and small stones leave their traces and, when the tape is played, generate a multi-layered soundscape with crackling and background noises.
In her performative action in the ruins of the city of Messene in the Peloponnese region of Greece, Franziska Windisch (b. 1983) thematizes aspects of repetition and recording. Her artistic examination of the vestiges of the ancient urban space, the reciprocal transition from traces to writing in her video documentation, and the graphic element of the line visible on the ground lead to a reflection on temporality, dissolution, and decay. -
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.
-
Austin Eddy
Selected poems40€ Add to cartSince 2018, the American painter and sculptor Austin Eddy (b. Boston, 1986; lives and works in Brooklyn) has probed the manifestations of modern painting in a world between abstraction and figuration. As a child and teenager, Eddy immersed himself in the imageries of comics, cartoons, and record covers. In the early 2010s, he studied in Chicago with Barbara Rossi, who had been one of the Chicago Imagists in the 1960s. The deconstruction of everyday objects into innumerable forms and hues became his central theme. Eddy’s works play with luminous colors, overlaid textures, animated bird motifs, and abstract planes of light while grappling with a human existence defined by loss and the passage of time. Situated on the margins of reality, his paintings and sculptures are like visual poems, celebrating the evanescent instant that exists only for a second before fading into the past.
Austin Eddy completed a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.
-
Roland Schappert
Coronasehnsucht14€ Add to cartThe coronavirus pandemic hit us in a time of disparate foci of attention. A fundamental lack of comprehension and hate speech contrast sharply with an unspoken consonance of ideas as well as feelings. What do reality, statistics, love, and yearnings do to us? They are playing a game with reality, sans fiction. Relationships sustain our lives. What was unmistakable before is now manifest, with stark certainty. Are we ready for loving dissension? Can we bear to think only as far ahead as we can see? How do our emotions answer these questions, and how does our intellect? The Cologne visual artist and writer Roland Schappert retraces his personal voyage through this sun-kissed rain-drenched time. The book is a diary-like tour de force of digital amorous overtures, an attempt to explain the world of art via WhatsApp, and the real challenges of life as a single artist in a major German city in precarious circumstances.
-
Feuer und Farbe
Gemälde und Grafiken von Walter Jacob35€ Add to cartWalter Jacob (1893-1964) was a painter whose oeuvre and life reflected the discontinuities of the twentieth century in condensed form. Contemplative natural scenes and the self-portraits were constants to which he hewed throughout his career; in stylistic terms, however, his oeuvre could hardly be more contradictory. Working first in the Impressionist, then in the Expressionist style, he eventually forged a form of expression tending toward abstraction, although he rejected modernist painting throughout his life. The Nazis considered his early work “degenerate,” which led him—a committed National Socialist and active member of the SA—to adapt not just his ideological convictions, but also his aesthetics to the new era: starting in the mid-1930s, he produced naturalistic depictions, sometimes suggestive of the New Objectivity, of “popular” motifs like landscapes, animals, soldiers, and more. Tellingly, though, the backs of some of his canvases are taken up by works that suggest the pleasure he took in experimenting with color and form. The same tension is palpable in the abstract landscapes of his late oeuvre. This catalog gathers works to retrace Jacob’s checkered career, complemented by (art) historical essays that embed his output in its context.
-
Tony Cragg
Points of View24€ Add to cartThe biomorphic and monumental sculptures of British sculptor Tony Cragg (born 1949, lives in Wuppertal) impress with their virtuosity and their dynamic appearance. They might even evoke movement, as if they are still becoming. Often exhibited outdoors, and in church or museum contexts, they blend into their surroundings like organic entities. Since the 1960s, Cragg’s search for sculptural form manifested through methods like layering and stacking existing materials, rearrangement, and assemblage. He now employs both traditional and new technologies and materials, yet his sculptures have to be seen in clear contrast to normative, repetitive industrial production. This book documents Cragg’s 2025 exhibition in the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie Dessau.
-
Ilit Azoulay
Facts and Tales. Truth be Told120€ Add to cartIn an era in which multiple perspectives and oral histories are increasingly vital, Facts and Tales—Truth Be Told delves into the haunting work of Ilit Azoulay. The artist, who was born in Jaffa in 1972, transforms objects, archives, and museum holdings into vessels, challenging traditional hierarchies of knowledge. In her most recent solo exhibition Mere Things at the Jewish Museum, New York, Azoulay presents works that probe the delicate balance between factual representation and nuanced storytelling.
The publication accompanying the exhibition includes archival pages, the artist’s notes, and depictions of the works as well as an introduction by curator Shira Backer and an essay by the art critic, curator, and writer Sarit Shapira, who passed away in 2018. Titled Houses of Junk and Specters: On Ilit Azoulay’s Early Works, it underscores the importance of honoring both factual accuracy and oral histories and invites readers to explore the complex interplay between concrete evidence and the rich and nuanced stories.
Azoulay has devised a singular method to shed light on the blanks in hegemonic narratives and expose them. As though to produce an extortion letter, she clips her pictures from archival materials and photographs of the walls of abandoned buildings and composes them in collages interweaving a multiplicity of views. The resulting works question the exclusive truth claim of museum expertise and reveal its constructed quality. The catalog of her works, designed as a box replete with texts and images, reflects this approach, aiming to dismantle established narratives and open up diverse perspectives.
Box containing 6 different standalone publications, limited edition of 500 copies
THIS PUBLICATION WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE GALLERY LOHAUS SOMINSKY, MUNICH
- Release October 2025
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Monographie68€ 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.
-
Katja Aufleger
Schwindelerregende Höhen30€ Add to cartOn a Razor’s Edge: Evanescent Moments
Katja Aufleger’s (b. Oldenburg, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) works bring instants of suspense and uncertainty into focus in a variety of aesthetic forms. Their nuclei are typically everyday phenomena and physical models, which she combines with a range of concepts from cultural history and psychology. The publication presents several series, some of which capture explosive tensions. Among them are photographs of homemade Molotov cocktails for which the artist set perfume flacons on fire, making this most recent series a probing exploration of the potentials of material aesthetics and emotion. With an introductory essay by Julia Katharina Thiemann.
Katja Aufleger studied visual art the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK), where Andreas Slominski, Matt Mullican, and Michael Diers were her teachers.
-
Candida Höfer
Editions 1987–202044€ Add to cartAll of Candida Höfer’s Editions in One Book
Candida Höfer’s (b. Eberswalde, 1944) shots of deserted libraries, opera houses, concert halls, churches, and museums have made her a member of the international photographic avant-garde. One strand in her acclaimed oeuvre are editions—photographic prints in small formats issued in larger numbers—that Höfer produces to support institutions and art publishers. Gathered for the first time in this book, with an introductory essay by Anne Ganteführer-Trier, the around one hundred such editions she created between 1987 and 2020 offer a representative cross-section of Candida Höfer’s art.
Candida Höfer studied in the first photography class of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works have been exhibited at documenta 11 and in 2003 she represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia alongside Martin Kippenberger.
-
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.
- Release October 2025
Werner Hahn
Kailas. Berg und Gott72€ Add to cartKailas is far more than just a mountain—it is a symbol of spiritual quest, transcendence, and enlightenment. In this book, the painter and photographer Werner Hahn (b. Karlsbad, now Czech Republic, 1944) approaches the holiest peak in Asia from a unique perspective: as an artist, traveler, and profound connoisseur of its cultural history. This book interweaves art, mythology, and historical accounts from Buddhism and Hinduism. Hahn’s personal travel experiences, complemented by reflections on Western travel literature and spiritual sources, enter into a dialogue with ancient traditions, revealing Kailas as a place of both deep personal experience and artistic contemplation. A visual pilgrimage to one of the most significant mountains in the world.
-
Karin Hochstatter
gegengerade20€ Add to cartA Provocation of Vision between Surface and Depth
In her sculptural works, Karin Hochstatter (b. 1960, Cologne; lives and works in Cologne) deals with forms and their dissolution, as well as the perceptual mechanisms that arise from this. Everyday materials from high-tech production processes, such as construction products and foils, become fragile and expansive structures that question both our way of seeing and our notion of sculpture. The book documents her more recent works since 2012, which always exist as singular events in space and never appear a second time in the same way.
Karin Hochstatter studied Visual Art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Philosophy at Heinrich-Heine- Universität Düsseldorf. Since 1998, she has been a visiting professor and lecturer at universities in Germany and the USA.
-
MEUSER
Werke 2012–2023 (GERMAN)48€ Add to cartEver since his studies with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich, since his first exhibitions – for instance at ‘Kippenberger’s Office’ in 1979 – Meuser (b. Essen 1947, lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been a solitaire. His sculptures are unyielding and unruly, just as much as they are vulnerable and tender. They are witty and heart-touchingly charming.
Meuser finds his material in the scrapyard. Confidently and empathically, he reinstates form and dignity to the remnants and vestiges of industrial society. As a romantic, he grants things a life of their own and turns them into self-reliant protagonists, once more. Unwaveringly, he works to re-poetize a standardized and maltreated world.
The lavishly designed monograph is published on the occasion of Meuser’s 75th birthday, presenting works and exhibitions from the past ten years. Eight international authors and scholars create a dazzling mosaic and reveal how Meuser boldly holds his own in face of Duchamp, Minimalism, and Social Sculpture. An open-ended outlook.
Meuser studied 1968–1976 at Art Academy, Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich. 1991 he received the ars viva award. 1992-2015 professorship at Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe.
Since 1976, numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions and works in international collections: Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; documenta IX / Fridericianum, Kassel; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Joanneum, Graz; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe.
-
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.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (ENGLISH)28€ Add to cartThe sculptor and object artist Liam Gillick (b. Aylesbury, UK, 1964; lives and works in New York) has created an intervention titled Filtered Time for the historic galleries of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Projections of light and color and acoustic effects condense six thousand years of cultural history into an immersive spatial experience. Gillick initiates a conversation between the iconic Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, the monumental sculptures of Tell Halaf, and other exhibits, engendering new layers of meaning across all historical periods. The first joint project of the Vorderasiatisches Museum and the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart makes for a singular visual and sensory experience. Designed by the artist himself, the publication not only documents the richly colorful production, but also provides insight into the eventful history of the museum, which is approaching its centennial.
Liam Gillick studied at the Hertfordshire College of Art in 1983–1984 and at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1984 until 1987. Gillick is a prolific published writer as well, producing essays, reviews, fiction, and theatrical scenarios.
-
Anna Bogouchevskaia
Shouldn’t Be Gone25€ Add to cartAnna Bogouchevskaia (b. Moscow, 1966; lives and works in Berlin) sees her work in sculpture as a geopolitical engagement with concerns on the intersection between figuration and abstraction. Macroscopic aluminum drops, bizarre bronze flowers, fog and snow made of silver—the artist, a committed environmentalist, has created a peculiar and fascinating world of evanescent natural phenomena. Focusing on two molecules—carbon dioxide and water—in their various states of aggregation, she draws attention to the threats posed by climate change.
The publication Shouldn’t be gone presents Bogouchevskaia’s most recent works since 2019: an urgent message of warning from an artist whose sculptural oeuvre even today has the air of a monument to a world in demise.
