



Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Meinrad Maria Grewenig, Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte |
Author(s) | Frank Krämer, Inge Plettenberg, Meinrad Maria Grewenig, Peter Backes, Werner Spies |
Size | 24 x 28 cm |
Pages | 160 |
Illustrations | 60 |
Design | Glas AG |
Cover | Hardcover |
Language(s) | German |
ISBN | 978-3-947563-27-2 |
Erinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
More books
- Release October 2025
Fidel Martínez
Todesfuge. Das Leben des Dichters Paul Celan26€ Add to cartThe Spanish graphic artist Fidel Martínez Nadal’s (b. Seville, 1979) graphic novel Todesfuge recounts the life of Paul Celan (1920–1970), one of the most eminent lyric poets of the twentieth century. The narrative interweaves biographical and literary aspects of Celan’s life, including his Jewish identity, his lifelong trauma as a Holocaust survivor, and his acclaimed poem Todesfuge. Martínez’s expressive and somber illustrations visualize Celan’s struggles with feelings of guilt, memory, and his creative efforts to find words for the unspeakable. An artistically brilliant homage to Paul Celan’s oeuvre, Todesfuge is an impressive contribution to the engagement with the Shoah in the medium of the graphic novel pioneered by Art Spiegelman.
-
The Art of Society
1900–194529€ Add to cartThe Collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the last building designed by Mies van der Rohe, has been closed a full six years for refurbishment. To mark its reopening the museum is presenting the highlights of its classical modernist collection under the title The Art of Society, 1900–1945. Visionary, critical, resigned or utopian, the paintings and sculptures bear witness to art’s dialogue with prevailing social conditions – from the German Empire to the First World War, the Weimar Republic and ultimately National Socialism. The catalogue documenting all works in the exhibition traces the major artistic tendencies during the first half of the 20th century in thirteen chapters. The Art of Society, 1900–1945 offers a renewed encounter with works by Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tamara de Lempicka, Lotte Laserstein, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and many others that is as captivating as it is illuminating.
Click here for the German edition.
-
Hannes Norberg
2728€ Add to cartThe Ideal of Simplicity, Clarity and Timelessness
To make his photographs, Hannes Norberg (b. 1969, Worms; lives and works in Düsseldorf) constructs artificial spaces that integrate elements of painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. Rather than reproducing selected details of an existing reality, his works make empty space and the play of light and shadow their point of departure. In his most recent pieces, the artist has focused on samples of typography that he collected on his travels and in numerous libraries all over the world and subjected to graphical redaction. Captured in natural light in his studio, his pictures showcase the quiet beauty of writing and paper, while their landscape-like aura gestures toward their place of origin. Designed by the artist himself, the book marks the public première of a selection of twenty-seven new photographs.
Hannes Norberg studied fine arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was an artist-in-residence in Paris, New York, Florence, São Paulo, Xiamen and Seoul.
-
Vanessa Henn
Same Same35€ Add to cartVanessa Henn’s (b. Stuttgart, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) objects and installations blend formal reduction with playful comedy. The handrails she makes out of a wide variety of materials run along walls, project into rooms, trace spirals, mark lines or arcs, and often solicit our active engagement. Besides banisters, her oeuvre, which straddles the line between architecture and sculpture, also comprises bridges, stairs, and fences. All her creations are energized by the tension between the static work of art and its dynamic environment, which the artist resolves by integrating her works into the goings-on of everyday life. A guardrail that runs perpendicular to a flight of stairs or abruptly ends in the ceiling or floor is relieved of its function; rather than helping us go where we are going, it is a companion who invites us on a stroll into the imaginary and uncertain. And that is what makes Vanessa Henn’s art so alluring.
The book presents Vanessa Henn’s latest works from the years 2019-2023.
Vanessa Henn studied sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (1992–2001) and at Edinburgh College of Art (1995–1996) and completed a Master of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art in Christchurch, New Zealand (1999–2000).
-
Tobias Pils
Drawings55€ Add to cartDrawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils’s (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms—the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces—constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils’s visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He—his art—remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils’s drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).
Tobias Pils studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1990 until 1994. His works have been displayed in museums around the world, including at the mumok, Vienna (2021); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); the Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2018); the Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010). In 2020, he executed a large wall painting at the École normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay.
-
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
- Out of stock
Flatland
35€ Read moreBetween the Dimensions
The title of this book quotes a literary work by Edwin A. Abbott that was first published in 1884 and gradually gained considerable fame: an allegorical satire whose protagonists are geometric figures, narrated by a square that relates its discovery of a three-dimensional world. Flatland examines the ways in which artists have found inspiration in the formal vocabularies of abstraction since the 1960s. The lavishly designed book gathers works from the past six decades that challenge orthodox interpretations of abstraction.
Contributing artists: Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Francis Baudevin, Philippe Decrauzat, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Hoël Duret, Sylvie Fanchon, Liam Gillick, Mark Hagen, Christian Hidaka, Sonia Kacem, Tarik Kiswanson, Vera Kox, Sarah Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Damián Navarro, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Bruno Peinado, Julien Prévieux, Eva Taulois, John Tremblay, Pierre Vadi, Elsa Werth, Raphaël Zarka
-
Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
-
Corona, Queens
Photographs by Cara Galowitz32€ Add to cartFor seven years Cara Galowitz (b. 1964, lives and works in New York) walked the streets of Corona, Queens every day during her lunch break from her nearby museum job, where she worked as an art director. These photographs, which she calls “an exercise in seeing”, capture the vivid juxtapositions of one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the world.
Through layers of irony, humor, and visual sophistication, these photographs evoke a place that is a continual work-in-progress, where the past, be it faded lettering or crumbling architecture, collides with the present in the form of spontaneous street decorations, signage, graffiti, and religious iconography. The images evoke the struggle and resilience of the people of Corona, as well as capturing the quirky beauty of the streets.
Cara Galowitz is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art where she focused on graphic design, photography, and fine art. She has pursued a long career as a museum art director and has shown work at the Newark Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Grey Art Gallery.
-
Considering Finland
14€ Add to cartContemporary Art from Finland
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.
-
Birgitta Thaysen
Amor and Psyche24€ Add to cartAspects of Love
The fine art photographer Birgitta Thaysen (b. Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1962; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and in Nan Hoover’s master class. Her photographic oeuvre encompasses urban motifs as well as likenesses of humans. In black-and-white portrait shots, she revisits the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche; embodiments of the yearning for love and the bafflements of the soul, the title characters have long been vehicles for variegated interpretations in visual art. Thaysen chose to shoot her portraits at Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf, where the tale is present in an adaptation as a lavishly made wallpaper from the nineteenth century. She captured the protagonists lying on the floor, bedded on cushions, their heads upside down, for a vertiginous exploration of states of mind between self-abandonment and doubt.
Birgitta Thaysen studied art with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her conceptual photographic series have been seen by wide audiences in numerous exhibitions.
-
Logan T. Sibrel
But I’m Different50€ Add to cartLogan T. Sibrel’s (born 1986 in Jasper, IN, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) paintings and drawings depict moments of great joy and beauty, but also fear, sadness, desire and aggression. Frequently only part of the mostly male figures is depicted. Sibrel’s cropping can feel simultaneously intimate and alienating—fragmentary stories are told that touch you through their authenticity and vulnerability. Sibrel’s artistic maneuvers include overlapping, shifted perspectives, and text fragments that appear like snippets of overheard conversations and thus create a collage effect.
This book is the artist’s first comprehensive publication with works from the last twenty months. While the first part presents the artist’s paintings, the second part presents his drawings with the edges of the backing paper digitally removed so that it looks as if the images were drawn directly into the book.
Logan T. Sibrel completed his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington in 2009 and his master’s degree at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2011. His most recent solo exhibitions include In Another Life and Galerie Thomas Fuchs (Stuttgart, DE) and Brake For Your Sweetheart at Auxier Kline (New York, NY).
-
Michel Majerus 2022
49€ Add to cartMichel Majerus (1967–2002) ranks among the most interesting painters of his generation and left a singular and multifaceted oeuvre that still speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns. His works quote phenomena of everyday culture such as comic strips, advertisements, and videogames as well as sources of inspiration from art history ranging from minimalism to Pop Art. Decontextualizing the different elements of pictures, he integrated them into novel contexts of meaning by, for instance, setting them on a par with art-historical references.
Twenty years after his death, a series of exhibitions throughout Germany showcase different periods and aspects of his creative output. Five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate, and Galerie neugerriemschneider, Berlin, pay tribute to Michel Majerus’s art in unprecedented breadth.
Concurrently, thirteen museums mount presentations of works by Michel Majerus from their collections: Ludwig Forum Aachen; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum Hannover; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Saarlandmuseum—Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
The extensive publication accompanying the exhibition series Michel Majerus 2022 includes three essays and two artists’ contributions as well as visual documentation of the exhibitions and presentations from the collections. It is rounded out by a biographical sketch of Michel Majerus, a history of exhibitions of his work, and archival photographs.
-
Roland Schappert
Liebe +–24€ Add to cartRoland Schappert’s Liebe+– is a poetic voyage into the mysterious and paradoxical landscapes of love. Combining an unrelenting eye with lyrical precision, Schappert captures the fragile equilibrium between intimacy and distance, between the longing for union and the need for detachment. The +– in the title is a symbolic shorthand for the ambivalence of love: attraction and repulsion, delight and pain, their constant interplay defining the dynamic of love.
The terse and sometimes aphoristic writings enter into a dialogue with the author’s artful and enigmatic pictures and sculptures—text images sewn out of strings of beads or painted in Champagne chalk that subtly mirror and refract the emotional tension of the poems. Nimbly balancing on the fine line between devotion and disaffection, Schappert’s verses are interspersed with ironic allusions to our digital and urban contemporary world.
By forging a symbiosis of poetry and image, this artist’s book charts a world unto itself in which the boundaries between I and you blur and subject and object are fused in a collective we. It invites us to contemplate love with a fresh eye—as tender touch and fractious idea, as a play of expectation and disappointment that we begin anew every day.
‘Love in the age of social media and dating apps, but not from a Gen Z perspective – but from someone who has known this feeling for much longer. And who brings his experiences – which are certainly representative of many – in ever new combinations of text and images into a form that makes reading and viewing a memorable experience.’ – Wolfgang Ullrich
-
Thyra Schmidt
Über Diebe und die Liebe. On Thieves and Love.15€ Add to cartAn artist’s book, an artist’s text
On twenty-two large-format typographic sheets, Thyra Schmidt (b. 1974, Pinneberg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) develops a narrative featuring moments in an amorous relationship. Thoughts and encounters between “her” and “him” are captured in poetically constructed, fragmentary units of meaning. Imaginary images are conjured in the mind’s eye: Close-ups and intimate insights into a delicate web of interpersonal incidents. Personal observations and experiences form the starting point of this artistic exploration of love. Yet the focus of her work is not on autobiographical rendering, but rather on the tracking down of elementary structures, a general understanding of intimacy.
-
Ottmar Hörl
Second Life – 100 Arbeiter14,80€ Add to cartThe Workman Sculptures at Völklinger Hütte Steelworks
Sculptures on topics of everyday life are at the center of the work of Ottmar Hörl (b. 1950, Nauheim; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main and Wertheim). His major projects gained international recognition, they are based on the artist’s concept of art as a communication model. For the Völklingen Ironworks World Heritage Site, Hörl conceived the sculpture project Second Life, which features 100 figures modeled on the Völklingen ironworker with helmet and work clothes. The book documents the impressive project that focuses on the universal theme of the Völklingen Ironworks: work and the working people.
-
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.
-
Michelle Jezierski
Verge28€ Add to cartHow does a simple line become a horizon? When do we begin to see colors and shapes as a landscape? Michelle Jezierski’s painting homes in on the tipping point at which our perception begins to oscillate between color/surface and space/representation. At that very point, she captures the essence of the landscape as such, which is not a concrete place but a metaphor for inner states of affairs. To get there, Jezierski distills what she sees in her surroundings down to the elements of painting—shapes and colors—which just barely intimate a pictorial space while persistently drifting toward abstraction. The defining feature of her technique is that she layers several pictorial planes and spaces on the canvas in staggered arrangements. “Perpetually discovering new ways to unsettle the visual space,” as she puts it, she engenders ruptures and structures that open up multiple perspectives and a portal for reflection on one’s own perception. Above all, however, the cuts lend her pictures a peculiar rhythm that powerfully pulls in the gaze, making the reader paging through this catalogue forget time and space.
-
Philip Loersch
POW – PORTRAITIST OF WRITING34€ Add to cartPhilip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980; lives and works near Munich) combines painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His works reveal the fragility of truth and authenticity while commenting with subversive irony on the postmodern disintegration of the idea of originality. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions like Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst. This monograph gathers his works created between 2016 and today.
-
Erich Hörtnagl
to be a man38€ Add to cart“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” The witty remark, attributed to Diane Arbus, succinctly captures the twofold code at work in Erich Hörtnagl’s (b. Innsbruck, 1950) pictures. Aesthetically appealing photographs, mostly in black and white, show men (and women) in a wide variety of cultural, social, and religious contexts: from Swedish bikers and drag queens to monks in Myanmar, from Turkish belly dancers to Tyrolean performers in traditional attire. What looks at first glance like a conventional photobook soon reveals itself to be a brilliantly staged interactive riddle around clichéd notions of masculinity with positive and negative connotations, around gender roles and persistent stereotypes. With the deftly composed visual meta-narrative in to be a man, Hörtnagl, a seasoned theater and film director, lures us into a trap, and the only way out is by taking the challenge head-on: by engaging in self-reflection and questioning our own prejudices and ideas.