




Ed Sommer
Planetare Allianz
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Peter Weibel |
| Author(s) | Gillo Dorfles, Holger Jost, Kurt Leonhard, Marc Adrian, Peter Weibel, Yong Sa |
| Design | Holger Jost, Neckarhausen |
| Size | 22,5 x 23 |
| Pages | 176 |
| Illustrations | 200 |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-10-4 |
A Monograph on the Pioneer of Op Art
The complex and extraordinary work of the Schwäbisch Gmünd-based artist Ed Sommer (1932–2015), who preferred to call himself a Bildsprachenmaler (painter of visual imagery), includes metal objects, formations of acrylic glass, gestural painting, erotic films, projection photography, dialogical portraits, and spoken texts. In 2014, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe added a large number of works by the artist to its collection. This publication now presents the collection holdings, supplemented by further works by Ed Sommer.
Ed Sommer, together with his artist friend Marc Adrian, was one of the most important representatives of op and kinetic art and received considerable attention in the 1970s with his films and photographs.
More books
-

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.
-

Horst Keinig
Scoop29€ Add to cartAn Artist Book Setting New Visual Processes in Motion
Around the year 2009, Horst Keining (b. 1949, Hattingen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) began to create blurred contours with the help of a small spray gun used without stencil. Up to four partially superimposed pictorial planes result in the oscillation and almost three-dimensional pulsation of the pictorial space. In interplay with a contrasting juxtaposition of strongly contoured images, his works convey a completely new visual experience. Since the resulting “blur effect” shrinks due to the reduction, this artist book places an essential accent on the reproduction of image details in their original size, followed by a full image of the picture.
-

GABRIELE BASCH, GESA LANGE
UND_NEWS_FROM_NOW_HERE18€ Add to cartBeyond Painting
Gabriele Basch’s (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) cut-outs and Gesa Lange’s (b. 1972, Tongeren, Belgium; lives and works in Hamburg) drawings are meditations on construction and deconstruction as well as doubts and how to overcome them. Both artists expand the range of painting: Basch, with incisions into the medium and a creative handling of the tinged shadows that transform the painted panel into a wall-mounted object; Lange, by embroidering her canvases with colorful threads that open up the pictorial space on all sides. The book presents works by both artists, initiating an animated and dynamic dialogue between their nonrepresentational visual idioms. Gabriele Basch is professor of painting at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Gesa Lange is professor of graphic art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. She has received the Kunsthalle Rostock Prize and other awards.
-

Nicola Staeglich – Farbe schwebend / Color floating
22€ Add to cart“The more slowly one approaches Staeglich’s works, the more they reveal.” Stephan Berg
Nicola Staeglich transforms color and traces of the act of painting into complex pictorial spaces that exude light and make time visible. Using an extra-wide brush, she applies luminous oil paints to (semi-) transparent foils and solid support media made from acrylic glass. Each movement of her body leaves a distinct mark on the paintings. Once the works are placed in the exhibition space, they absorb their environment and ambient light as well as the eye. The artist’s experimental approach generates a rich dynamic: paint hovers in mid-air, disembodied, while a constant oscillation between color and surface, between pictorial body and setting unlocks novel dimensions in space and time. The picture continually coalesces in the eye of the beholder, metamorphosing as the angle of incidence shifts and the mind parses the traces and strata of paint. Even in printed form, Staeglich’s works convey a rousing vitality.
The catalogue accompanies Staeglich’s solo exhibition at Städtische Galerie Waldkraiburg.
- Release September 2021

Paul Uwe Dreyer
Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken68€ Add to cartA Painter, Draftsman, and Draftsman of Concrete Art
Paul Uwe Dreyer (b. 1939, Osnabrück; d. 2008, Stuttgart) taught painting as a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart for more than three decades. His oeuvre shows the hallmarks of geometric constructive art: inspired by subjective experiences of reality, Dreyer’s compositions visualize the dialectics of organizing principles and their potentials for variation, a guiding interest that is already evident in his early work since the 1960s and especially in the pairs and series of pictures he begins creating in the early 1970s. His art unfolds a fascinatingly dynamic yet nonhierarchical dialogue between colors, surfaces, and lines. The chronological catalogue raisonné reveals the consistency with which motifs evolve from his early to his late oeuvre, from architectural, figural, and ornamental tokens through elements resembling symbols and icons to complex penetrations of spaces.
-

Cahier #1
Heinz Gappmayr22€ Add to cartDo we think in images or in language? Can writing visualize time? Heinz Gappmayr (1925-2010) was interested in text as a spatial event and in letters as architecture. Although his works were often presented in the context of Visual Poetry, Gappmayr himself preferred the more neutral term text to lyricism. His understanding of written language as a conceptual medium and typography as an indicator of physicality was closer to Lawrence Weiner’s approach than to that of the Concrete Poets. This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Tiroler Landesmuseum and includes Gappmayer’s most important art-in-architecture projects, as well as a complete notebook from 1961, with commentary by Gaby Gappmayr, the artist’s daughter. A conversation with her provides valuable philosophical insights into her father’s work.
-

Nicola Staeglich
Color Light Matter Mind36€ Add to cart“This painting springs from the ambition to paint color into the air.” (Ulrich Loock)
Nicola Staeglich’s (b. Oldenburg, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) work with color achieves a distinctive intermediate state between physical presence and atmospheric radiance. She stages painting now as a performative action with broad propositions in color, now as an installation in three dimensions with multilayered translucent painted panels. Color Light Matter Mind is Staeglich’s first monograph, setting recent works in relation to her earlier output (1998–2021). From the spiral-shaped reliefs to her Liquid Lights, the artist opens up a fresh dimension for color.
Nicola Staeglich studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz, and the Chelsea College of Art, London. She won numerous fellowships and has been professor of painting/graphic art at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste Essen since 2015. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad and is held by private and public collections.
- Out of stock

Otto Dix in Baden-Württemberg
Museumsführer9,80€ Read moreSeven Museums Jointly Present the World’s Largest Collection of Works by the Famous German Painter.
In 1933, after the loss of his professorship in Dresden and mounting defamation by the National Socialists, Otto Dix (b. 1891, Untermhaus; d. 1969, Singen) retired to Lake Constance, where he lived for more than thirty years. Together, seven museums in the state of Baden-Württemberg — including the museum in his former home in Hemmenhofen — have the world’s most comprehensive collection of his works at their disposal, providing insight into all facets of his creative work: from the social criticism of the major works, at times depicted with brutal verism, to the old masterly glaze painting of his inner emigration and the expressive alla prima paintings of the late years. For the first time ever, this treasure trove is presented in one volume.
The participating museums: Kunstmuseum Albstadt, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Museum Haus Dix, Gaienhofen-Hemmenhofen, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Kunstmuseum Singen, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
-

America! America!
How real is real?38€ Add to cartMyths, Projections, Aspirations
In times of fake news and alternative facts it is becoming even more clear how the American Dream is closely interwoven with emotional pictures and symbols. At the same time, it can be said that no other nation might have the same strong awareness of the power of images. Images of the American Way of Life, which are produced in media and entertainment, are able to consolidate existing power structures and perceptions of reality, but also question them in a radical way. The psychologically charged canvasses of Eric Fischl, the hermetic scenes of Alex Katz, the enormous film-noir-like graffiti paintings of Robert Longo dissect the dreams and fears of an insecure white middle class. Simultaneously, artists such as Jeff Wall or Cindy Sherman conquer scenes that critically reflect our media-influenced perception, becoming models for subsequent generations. By showing 70 masterpieces of US-contemporary art, the book shows how artists from the 1960s to date comment on the American reality.
-

Brandon Lipchik
10€ Add to cartIn recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.
-

Pokorny
25€ Add to cart“Abstraction means the omission of the irrelevant and the unnecessary in order to find more substantial content and form.”—Werner Pokorny
His often monumental sculptures can be found in many places in Germany and abroad, including Aachen, Berlin, Busan (South Korea), Frankfurt am Main, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Riehen, Saarbrücken, and Stuttgart. Werner Pokorny works (b. 1949, Mosbach; lives and works in Ettlingen) exclusively with Corten steel for his outdoor sculptures and with wood, steel, and bronze for his indoor works. Well-known basic forms such as bowls, spheres, cuboids, and houses serve as points of departure and reference, which are abstracted by reduction, rotation, tilting, or combination with other elements. The artistic field of tension characteristic of Pokorny’s impressive sculptural oeuvre is due to the oscillation between form and abstraction, figure and reduction, hard edges and soft curves.
-

Billy Al Bengston
Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe Pop Artist as Master of Watercolor Painting
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is a master of the watercolor. Themes and motifs that also determine the painterly work gain a special expressiveness here: bizarre landscapes and opulent blossoms, fantastic celestial bodies and colorful abstractions. This opulent volume presents this part of Bengston’s oeuvre for the first time in great breadth with roughly 400 works. They demonstrate the skill of an artist who has brought watercolor to extreme precision and enriched it with numerous new aspects.
Billy Al Bengston attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. His works can be found in outstanding permanent collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- Release January 2026

Stefan Reiterer
Inflection Point38€ Add to cartThe Austrian artist Stefan Reiterer (born 1988, lives in Vienna) transfers digital maps and satellite images into analog physical space through abstract painting. He manipulates data from sources such as Google Earth or NASA, transforming them into illusory topologies and pseudo-cartographies to challenge our perception. What is recognized, discovered, rejected? Where is the viewer’s location? Andrea Kopranovic writes of Reiterer’s painted emptiness as a “pitting” and projection surface “for glitches, black holes, and abysses” and a metaphor for potential “interpretations, enrichments, and yet unimagined spaces of possibility.” This richly illustrated book documents Reiterer’s 2025 exhibition at the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst in Otterndorf.
-

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.
-

Ohne Schlüssel und Schloss
Chancen und Risiken von Big Data19,90€ Add to cartVon Kunsthandwerk zu digitaler Verschlüsselung
An jeder Haustür ziehen wir Grenzen, wir schließen auf und schließen ab. Und noch in jüngster Vergangenheit war eindeutig, was als Verschlusssache galt. Ganz anders stellt sich diese Frage im IT-Zeitalter. Ausgehend von der kunsthandwerklichen Sammlung des Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern wird deutlich, wie in früheren Jahrhunderten über mechanisch und symbolisch aufwendig gestaltete Schlösser, Schränke oder auch Reliquienbehältnisse Distanzen austariert wurden. Sie alle sind sichtbares Vehikel für die bewusste Wahrnehmung von innen und außen, zugehörig und ausgegrenzt, wissend und unwissend oder öffentlich und privat. Für Big Data gilt dies in keiner Weise mehr. Beim Digitalen werden Serviceleistungen mit Datenerhebungen verbunden, deren weiteren Einsatzbereiche wir weder unmittelbar verstehen noch überblicken können. Historische, technologische und philosophische Überlegungen bieten wichtige Beträge zur aktuellen Debatte und Einschätzung der Risiken und Chancen von Big Data.
-

Rainer Jacob
justICE30€ Add to cartRainer Jacob (b. Jena, 1970; lives and works in Leipzig) has anonymously installed objects made of ice in public settings in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, and Budapest since 2013. He then allows them to dematerialize and records the process in photographs. Radiators, wall outlets, QR codes, and the Duchampian pissoir are among his recurrent motifs. The impermanence of the ice objects builds bridges to street art, Fluxus, and action art. Critical observations on the unequal distribution of resources and political power in contemporary society, his works reflect on our perceptions and question the idea of originality in art while also probing the outer limits of sculpture.
The publication showcases the ice objects of the past ten years, embedding them in a decade that has marked a sea change in the life of humankind: JustICE captures an artist’s distinctive perspective on societal processes.
-

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.
-

Werner Schmidt
James Joyce und die Farben des Ulysses59€ Add to cartThis imposing volume is the fruit of the artist Werner Schmidt’s decades-long immersion in the preeminent literary monument of the twentieth century: James Joyce’s Ulysses.
What began as a personal reader’s voyage now attains definite form in an eloquently colorful, interdisciplinary and polyphonic tribute—a work between literary study, theory of color, visual art, and reflection on language.
In the book’s first part, Schmidt analyzes and visualizes the use of colors in Ulysses in unique chromatic diagrams and coded color stripes that were literally painted on the walls in exhibitions. They are complemented by a series of photographs taken in Dublin, the novel’s setting, and accompanied by probing meditations on literary and linguistic facets and aspects of politics and the history of religion in the Joycean universe.
The second part gathers the voices of twenty renowned Joyce scholars, who, in five thematically organized chapters, share their perspectives on the color, texture, structure, and effect of Ulysses.
A feast for all who revere Joyce—and a gift of anyone who would not just read but truly wrap their mind around literature in its boldest and most luminous incarnation.
With texts by Florian Arnold, Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, Erik Bindervoet, Heinz Brüggemann, Jakob Brüssermann, Michael Deckard, Toni Hildebrandt, Otto Jägersberg, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Jūratė Levina, Susanne Peters, Christoph Poetsch, Saskia C. Quené, Dieter Ronte, Werner Schmidt, Fritz Senn, Dirk Teuber, Vega Tescari, Shane Walshe, Andreas Weigel, Keith Williams, Ursula Zeller
-

Mirror
Collaborative Pictures by Merrick d’Arcy–Irvine x Julia Bajanova40€ Add to cartWe humans are social creatures. Without others to reflect our behavior back to us, we lose what defines us—language, culture, the capacity for creative expression. That is why photographer Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine and fashion designer Julia Bajanova are invested in intense encounters: not only with the people who appear in their pictures, but also with each other, as artists and as humans, and between their media and the materials out of which they are made. The materiality and sensual experience of these media in the physical world are the focus of the pictures gathered in this volume, which is why d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova eschewed all digital technologies. Sensuality forges an emotional bond between their creative universes, whose boundaries become permeable, as do the dividing lines between genres. Colors and forms are fused in a shared language of visual art and fashion in which d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova write their messages in light on photographic paper. They speak to what makes us human: creative energies untrammelled by the necessities of everyday life. The pictures in Mirror, then, are reflections of our existence and portals of self-knowledge.
-

Stephan Kaluza & Dieter Nuhr
Transit42€ Add to cartLandscapes in a Dialogue between Painting and Photography
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.






















