





“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
- Release Spring 2026
Jorinde Voigt
Trust42€ Add to cartJorinde Voigt (b. Frankfurt am Main 1977, lives and works in Berlin), declared about the title of the book “Trust is a hybrid of longing for something and the engagement to reach it”. Voigt has thus decided to compile her works, which she realized from May 2019 to spring 2021, under the sign of confidence, connectedness, reliability and integrity. Many of the works presented place themselves in the continuity of those in Immersion, a book that brought together works from the period 2018-2019.
In the extensive volume Trust, sculptures and mobiles are shown alongside the works on paper for which she is known – here immersed in a pigment bath and then worked on with pastel, ink, India ink, oil pastels and gold leaf–.
Jorinde Voigt studied philosophy and modern German literature at the University of Göttingen from 1996. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and studied sociology, philosophy and general and comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin. 1999-2003 she studied art in multimedia at the University of the Arts with Christiane Möbus and visual arts and photography with Katharina Sieverding, whose master student she became in 2004. 2014-2019 she was professor of conceptual drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Since 2019 she is professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.
-
Silke Eva Kästner
Panta Rhei36€ Add to cartSilke Eva Kästner (lives and works in Berlin and Uckermark) developed her creative approach while traveling in India, New York, and Japan. She creates temporary on-site paintings as well as conceptual pieces in which the viewer comes upon prepared materials and becomes part of—or even alters—the picture. Kästner documents these encounters in photographs or filmic traces out of which she compiles films in the editing suite. Probing the potentials of painting as communication, she foregrounds the active intervention and process. In the gallery no less than the urban scene, Kästner places painting in relation to architecture in order to frame it in varying perspectives.
The monograph offers insight into the foci of Kästner’s art; the works are grouped in chapters rather than arranged in chronological sequence. This structure makes the book a space of experience that gives the reader a vivid sense of her ephemeral creations.
After studying with Katharina Grosse at the Weißensee School of Art and Design Berlin, Silke Eva Kästner won the Mart Stam Prize; she honed her craft in India on a NaFöG fellowship and in New York on a yearlong DAAD fellowship. Funding support from the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) enabled her to initiate an ongoing exchange project between Kashmir and Berlin. Her work has been on view at numerous institutions including the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Devi Art Foundation, Delhi; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
-
Simone Demandt
Movers / Beweger38€ Add to cartMotorways are Europe’s lifelines. The products we buy every day arrive on supermarket shelves after traveling along these arteries on the backs of thousands of trucks steered by hard-working drivers. Glancing up into the cabs of their hulking vehicles, we can just barely make out their heads sticking up above the steering wheels. In this overdue volume, Simone Demandt lets us see more of the heroes of the road who confidently posed for her camera. The pictures demonstrate Demandt’s knack for discovering “the intimate in the anonymous and the narrative element in the matter-of-factly” (Matthias Winzen). She has condensed the truckdrivers’ lifeworld into documentary black-and-white shots in which she shows these people as whole persons and individuals—very different from how we perceive them when they’re in the next lane. Movers lets us peek into the cabs through Demandt’s nonjudgmental lens, broadening our horizons hardly less than travelling would and helping us overcome our prejudices about teamsters. If you’ve always wanted to know whom we really have to thank for those never-empty supermarket shelves, you should not miss out on this book.
-
6 U L
Lust and Desire in Art and Design28€ Add to cart“Whose Jizz is this?” Sechs-u-ell: to make sense of the publication title, trust your college German and your phonetic ear. “Sexual,” here, comprises the entire broad spectrum of what we associate with carnal pleasure. Lust, desire, ecstasy, repression, obsession—the world of art, fashion, and design abounds with specimens of eroticism and sexuality in their infinite variety, shopworn stereotypes be damned. Looking back on the thorough revision of society’s ideas about sexuality in the past three decades, the book inquires into how the works of visual artists, fashion creatives, and designers reflect today’s public debates over biological and social gender roles, power structures, and sexual violence or the fading of taboos over sexual practices. With works and designs by Walter Van Beirendonck, Monica Bonvicini, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jürgen Klauke, Peaches, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Vivienne Westwood, and many more. This book documents a grand exhibition scheduled for the past summer at the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig, which had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Release October 2025
The Scharf Collection.
Goya – Monet – Cézanne – Bonnard – Grosse48€ Add to cartThe Scharf Collection is a German private collection of French art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and international contemporary art. Now in its fourth generation, it continues a branch of the renowned Otto Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin, which encompasses everything from the beginnings of modernism, represented by Francisco de Goya, to the French avant-garde of the second half of the nineteenth century with Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The richly illustrated catalog accompanies the collection’s first comprehensive exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.
-
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.
-
Martin Noël
The Retrospective38€ Add to cartThe Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut
The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.
Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
-
Francesca Martí
Passage and Presence42€ Add to cartFrancesca Martí’s (b. Sóller, Mallorca; lives in Mallorca and Stockholm) art revolves around themes like transformation, communication, and deformation, the power of self-determination, the instability of memory, and the effects of the chaos caused by migration and the migration prompted by chaos. In a collaborative process, a multitude of performers, dancers, and musicians help make her vision a reality. The book presents performances, sculptures, and visual works from Francesca Martí’s most important exhibitions in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and China. The portraits of the various series the artist has developed over the past ten years, including Cocoon, Planet of Fusions, Migrant Angel, Dreamers & Believers, Copper and Flux, are rounded out by her drawings, photographs, and making-of shots from her studio in Mallorca.
-
Winston Roeth
Speed of Light32€ Add to cartColor Is Light
Intense monochrome areas of color, radiant pigments, and multifaceted surfaces are the characteristics of the art of Winston Roeth (b. Chicago, 1945; lives and works in Beacon, New York, and Waldoboro, Maine). He has devoted himself to abstract color field painting since the 1970s, with the grid as a leitmotif running through his oeuvre; both are fraught with painterly memories of light, “a light that can jump out and grasp the beholders, a color saturation that throbs with a deep glow,” as the artist himself puts it. It emanates from the strata of paint in his pictures, encountering the light that, falling upon his works, molds their chromatic effect. Roeth experiments with pure pigments, which he mixes by hand to make paints he applies in layers to diverse media including paper, aluminum, honeycomb, slate, and wood panels. The book documents a tour of an exhibition, presenting works dating from between the early 1990s and 2020.
-
Digitale Skulptur
Follow the unknown19,80€ Add to cartCrossing the BNorders of the Tangible
For the first time in art history a competition for the Digital Sculpture Award was announced. What is a digital sculpture anyway? Where are the boundaries between real and virtual worlds? With the advent of digitally generated images, the conditions for our perception and the parameters of our viewing habits are changed. Through the interactive involvement of the viewer, software-controlled image phenomena such as virtual environments lead to an exploring vision. The book presents and documents innovative works, which were conceived for the international competition, initiated by the Museum Ulm.
With works by Morehshin Allahyari, Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz, Jörg Brinkmann, George Crîngaşu, Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez, Marcel Karnapke, Leonard Kern, Nicolò Krättli + Jann Erhard, Martina Menegona and Marjan Moghaddam.
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
Special Edition60€ Add to cartSPECIAL EDITION in clothbound slipcase
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
-
Konrad Mühe
Guide38€ Add to cartAn Artist’s Book as an “Optical Illusion”
Konrad Mühe’s (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany, 1982; lives and works in Berlin) works interrogate the construction of our identities by uncovering the technological and media apparatuses that sustain it and confronting it with the autonomous lives of objects. Their basic formal principle is the installation hybridizing sculpture and digital moving image, with a particular focus on the projector and the interaction of pedestal or suspension and projection screen. Where the classical black box in the movie theater or exhibition venue seeks to conceal the technical equipment in favor of an immersive visual experience, Mühe brings it to the fore and sets it out in the gallery space as sculpture and installation. Yet his works also undercut the conventional display regime in the white cube: the process of projection emerges as the true creative medium and subject. This book acts as a descriptive illustrated Guide to Mühe’s projects.
Konrad Mühe was Hito Steyerl’s master student and trained at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. His works have been featured at numerous film festivals including the 61st Berlinale and in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.
-
auf Erkundung
Anne Deuter und Monika Supé25€ Add to cartA Dialogue on Time
The two artists Anne Deuter (b. 1986, Halle; lives and works in Halle) and Monika Supé (b. 1967, Munich; lives and works in Munich) engage in self-exploration to find ways to convey an experience of body, space, and time. Grappling with formalist elements, they devise their compositional practices in graphite and ink and in words and images, respectively. Enhanced by selected works by contemporary poets, the publication opens up new perspectives on what it means to exist in time.
Anne Deuter studied visual art and art history at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald. She rounded out her education in the book art program at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. Monika Supé studied architecture at the Technischen Universität München and completed a doctorate on visual perception training at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Since 1995, she has taught in the design divisions of various universities.
-
HALBwertsZeit
Zum Umgang mit ‚abgelaufenen‘ Sammlungen28€ Add to cartDo collections have an expiration date? Shifting interests, evolving social contexts, and discursive developments influence when a collection or its presentation is said to be outdated and what that implies for the constraints on, or options for, the actions to be taken in response. The revision or reorientation of a collection presuppose a critical engagement with the criteria regarded as valid at the time, which concern the origins, composition, objectives, and significance of a collection, among other aspects.
The contributions to this volume intertwine historical case studies with contemporary questions about the reasons and circumstances that give rise to the assessment that a collection has outlived its shelf life.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (GERMAN)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.
-
Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
-
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.
- Out of stock
Kurt Weidemann
Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt49,95€ Read moreSignierte Sonderauflage
Kurt Weidemanns Ansichten über Schrift und Typografie ist das beeindruckende Ergebnis eines über Jahrzehnte erlebten und reflektierten Berufslebens als Schriftsetzer, Typograf, Autor, Lehrer und Berater. Das Buch schildert die persönlichen, philosophischen und fachlichen Ansichten seines Metiers.
-
Jenny Michel
Doors, Windows and Cells38€ Add to cartThe Detritus of Our Society
For around two decades, the artist Jenny Michel (b. Worms, 1975; lives and works in Berlin) has devoted herself to minute particles such as dust, cobwebs, and electromagnetic fields in space. Her fascination with orders of knowledge, symbolism, and utopian visions is reflected by installations, drawings, prints, and sculptures that she exhibits in carefully composed sprawling ensembles. Aggregating fantastic fragments of the world manufactured from paper, adhesive tape, staples, and other industrially made small parts, Michel builds disconcertingly dense structures—human knowledge is transformed into the debris of civilization, its legibility lost beneath palimpsestic layers of meanings and resignifications. The extensive monograph surveys major series in the artist’s oeuvre and presents new works on paper.
Jenny Michel studied at Kunsthochschule Kassel and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been on view at Museum Wiesbaden, the Draiflessen Collection, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and Berlinische Galerie, among other venues. In 2010, Michel was honored with the HAP Grieshaber Prize.
-
Gerhard Neumaier
Die Lust an der Macht des Malens zwischen Mythos und Trivialität32€ Add to cartEin Spiel mit den Ambivalenzen
Offenkundig Mythologisches gerät bei Gerhard Neumaier (geb. 1950 in Freiburg, lebt und arbeitet in Baden-Baden) ebenso zur trivialen Episode, wie scheinbar Triviales legendäre Ikonik entfaltet. Dabei bricht sein unvoreingenommener Umgang mit Klassikern wie etwa in der Duchamp-Persiflage „Hokuspokus mit Fokus Lokus“ semantische Vorurteile in den Sehgewohnheiten auf und bietet dem Betrachter neuartige Interpretationen. In der perfomativen Bewegtheit seiner Rakelbilder legt er eine haptische Sinnlichkeit an den Tag, die Cora von Pape in ihrer Einleitung dazu bringt, den Künstler zu zitieren: „Ich male, was ich weiß, damit ich sehe, was ich fühle.“