Elias Sime
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Felicity Korn |
| Author(s) | Meskerem Assegued, Andria Hickey, Felicity Korn, Felix Krämer, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Elias Sime |
| Design | Benjamin Wolbergs |
| Size | 29.5 x 22.5 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 112 |
| Illustrations | 82 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-227-3 |
Ethiopia’s multi-award-winning artist Elias Sime (born 1968 in Addis Ababa) impresses with monumental wall reliefs made of ornamentally interwoven wires and cables or sawn-up circuit boards. For years, together with his team, he has been tirelessly
reworking discarded electronic components into complex and colorful assemblages. In doing so, he draws on traditional Ethiopian techniques of weaving, braiding and carving. Sime is interested in the “biography of the material” and each collage is a search for traces (of the local and global past). The artist obtains the electronic waste, which the countries of the global North are known to like to “dispose of” in the African continent, from the flea markets in Addis Ababa. His friezes are monuments both to the throwaway society and to global networking and interaction.
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ, a richly illustrated book, gives an overview over the artist’s fascinating career and is published on the occasion of the solo show at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. The volume includes insightful essays by Felicity Korn and Andria Hickey as well as an important conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist from 2016. Also discussed is the Zoma Museum complex, which was initiated by Sime (together with the curator Meskerem Assegued)—a total work of art that is exemplary for sustainability and community building.
More books
-
Can Yasar Köklü
CYK55€ Add to cartThe young photographer, graphic designer, and filmmaker Can Yasar Köklü (b. Schwelm, 2003; lives and works in Brooklyn) grew up between Cologne and Istanbul and currently studies at New York’s renowned Pratt Institute. In his first publication CYK—an artist’s book featuring breathtakingly beautiful photographs and personal writings—he explores his experiences growing up, the traditions that inform his art, and his feelings in three different cultures: “Heimat” charts his native Germany, where he spent most of his life; “Memleket” is dedicated to Turkey, where his roots are; and “Home” presents the impressions Köklü gathered during a year in high school in Los Angeles and now in New York, where he continues his education. Driven by a passion for storytelling, he captures singular—fascinating and deeply moving—moments in time.
-
João Onofre
Untitled (in awe of)25€ Add to cartJoão Onofre’s works are tributes to art history and pop. He gleans what is in danger of being lost right now, realigns it, and translates it into something sublime. His art encourages the beholders to reconsider a past that has faded in collective memory with a critical eye and make peace with it. His creative process is guided by the material and a clearly defined concept that nonetheless does not restrict a work’s finding its own way. That is why he does not commit to a particular medium, making videos, performances, installations, and much more. What all his works have in common is that they probe the limitations of their medium and our perceptive capacities in novel ways. This catalogue presents three recent works in which the essence of Onofre’s art becomes manifest: he molds myths and symbols into awe-inspiring images, sounds, and forms—not for nothing have critics labeled him an alchemist. In the catalogue, his tangible compressions of cultural history are rendered in imposing pictures and flanked by an ambitious essay that places them in their context.
-
René Holm
45€ Add to cartRené Holm goes for the big picture, painting the ambivalence of human existence and our relationship with nature. Some of his protagonists are physically naked, and all embody an interior life through their poses. The faceless figures function as screens onto which the beholders can project their own feelings, as symbols of universal human experiences. That is why, Holm notes, people very often recognize themselves in his protagonists. The effect is in part due to the forest, the setting of all pictures in this catalogue, which has been Holm’s studio and preferred backdrop for decades. It is where he finds the twilight that glows in all of our souls: woodlands nourish and menace us, they are home to helpful fairies and nasty demons, one can find life and death alike in them. He translates the sublime of the forest—a central motif in the Romantics—into a contemporary visual idiom. In his pursuit of this endeavor, he has recently ventured a radical aesthetic change: instead of using thick paints as before, he now applies the pigments to the canvas in thinner and drier layers. The book illustrates this spectacular fresh start, carrying us off into the depths of the soul and mysterious woodlands.
- temporarily not available
Andreas Eriksson
Read moreAll is related, from the outside in. Look what’s behind it.
Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975 in Björsäter, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden) is one of Sweden’s most notable contemporary artists. His artistic practice is based on a traditional painterly language, but he constantly expands this field to also encompass a vast production of textile works. He examines different histories through conceptual twists and turns in sculpture and prints. This monograph, the artist’s first, seeks to explain and illustrate Eriksson’s development and thoughts behind the meandering array of works he produces. It is a close look behind the canvas.
Andreas Eriksson studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1993 to 1998 and represented Sweden with the Nordic Pavilion at the 54. Biennale di Venezia. His most comprehensive solo exhibition to date took place in 2014 at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.
-
Anaïs Horn
Fading14€ Add to cartThe mystery of love and its language, translated into a photographic discourse
The starting point for the series by Anaïs Horn, which the artist, who works in Vienna and Paris, began in 2013 and now comprises eighty photographs, is the book Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Fragments of a Language of Love) by the French philosopher and author Roland Barthes. Terms such as “asceticism,” “magic,” “yearning,” “venerable,” and “unfathomable” serve Horn as models for her staged photographs. The linguistic “figures,” from which Barthes developed his “discourse” in an open structure, find their counterparts in views of people, landscapes, objects, and spaces. The result is a cosmos of images that is as non-binding as it is intimate, as touching as it is light, as vulnerable as it is challenging, and appears to be infinitely expandable. Viewed together, fragments of collective experiences and cultural codes of our notions of love become visible.
-
Wege in die Abstraktion
Marta Hoepffner und Willi Baumeister24,90€ Add to cartUnknown Influences of Modern Painting and Photography
Marta Hoepffner (b. 1912, Pirmasens; d. 2000, Lindenberg) is considered a pioneer of experimental photography. For the first time, this book compares the artist’s early photographic experiments, portraits, and color photographic studies with the paintings of Willi Baumeister (b. 1889, Stuttgart, d. 1955 Stuttgart). As professor at the Frankfurter Kunstschule – today’s Städelschule – Baumeister had a decisive influence on the development of his student Hoepffner. An extraordinary book that presents more than fifty works from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Marta Hoepffner’s works have been exhibited at, among others, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Willi Baumeister studied at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart and was a member of the influential November Group. He was defamed as “degenerate” during the Nazi regime and is now considered one of the outstanding artists of modernism.
-
Ralf Cohen
Synthese25€ Add to cartThe First Comprehensive Overview of the Work of the Photo Artist from 1972 to the Present Day
Ralf Cohen (b. 1949, Solingen; lives and works in Karlsruhe) makes use of the entire material complex of photographic image production for his own creative purposes. He works exclusively with analog processes and explores the limits of the medium with a variety of experiments in the darkroom, altering his photographs through solarization, long-term exposure, light/dark reversal, chromatic filtering, and further manual processing. This comprehensive volume presents Cohen’s works, from the high-contrast black-and-white architectural photographs of the early period and the work groups of people in cities from the late 1980s to the latest photographic series with their enigmatic light effects, seemingly glowing planetary surfaces, hails of stars, and fantastical islands. Ralf Cohen’s fascinating cosmos of imagery breaks viewing habits and, with his imaginary universes, opens up a new perception of the world.
-
Larissa Kikol
SIGNED. Unterwegs mit der 1UP-Crew und Moses & Taps18€ Add to cartWho owns the city? It is a question to which graffiti artists and politicians have very different answers. 1UP and Moses & Taps are international stars of the scene, realizing radical creative concepts in spectacular actions. The art critic Larissa Kikol shadowed them on their nocturnal forays for three years and gathered her experiences in a book that has become a singular tribute to the graffiti scene. It lets us witness the genesis of the artists’ works on the knife’s edge between civil disobedience, criminal liability, and an irrepressible freedom. Traveling throughout Germany, Kikol records absorbing dialogues that reflect the contrast between different worlds: the legal and the illegal art worlds, painting and protest. Always on the hop and in danger of being discovered and arrested, she ventures beyond the bounds of permissible art, into subway tunnels, up on roofs, across switchyards. A portrait emerges of Germany and Berlin and the power relations that shape our society.
Larissa Kikol (b. 1986) works as a freelance art critic, art scholar, and writer. She writes for Die Zeit, Spiegel Online, Art, Kunstzeitung, Mare, Monopol Online, and Kunstforum International. In 2016, she won C/O Berlin’s international Talents award in the art criticism category. She teaches and lectures at art schools and universities in Germany and France.
Kikol studied stage design and dramaturgy in Berlin-Weißensee and obtained a Ph.D. in art studies from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. She lives and works in Marseille and Cologne.
-
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.
-
Secundino Hernández
Miettinen Collection36€ Add to cartSecundino Hernández’s (b. Madrid, 1975; lives and works in Madrid und Berlin) paintings and works on paper blend figuration and abstraction, the linearity of drawing and exuberant color, minimalism and gesture. Slowly and methodically moving across the canvas, Hernández sets down sinuous lines and marks, using a brush or applying the paint straight from the tube before rinsing and scratching off the surfaces. The resulting compositions feel organized yet charged with explosive energy and evince manifold references: a physicality reminiscent of Action Painting, cartoon-style terse figuration, and passages that bring to mind Old Masters and especially the Spaniards El Greco and Velázquez. As Hernández observes, his works “may look like Action Painting or Expressionism, but they represent a profound and painstaking scrutiny of these visual idioms, a way of articulating my own contemporary perspective on certain aesthetic movements.”
Secundino Hernández studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid from 1995 until 2000 and at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2005–2006.
-
Gregor Hildebrandt
A Blink of an Eye and the Years are Behind us48€ Add to cartFor the past two decades, Gregor Hildebrandt (b. Bad Homburg, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) has transformed analog audiotapes, cassettes, and records into collages, sculptures, panel paintings, and installations. Melding visual art with music, he has charted a complex creative vision crossing boundaries of medium and genre that he continually refines. Before using a tape, he records selected music—typically a single song—on it, whose lyrics he quotes in the work’s title. The artist’s output draws on his personal repertoire of bands that share a romantic narrative of loneliness and a melancholy keynote. The same attitude toward life is reflected in Hildebrandt’s work. The book offers insight into all periods of the artist’s oeuvre and is rounded out by archival materials from Hildebrandt’s studio, his project space Grzegorzki Shows, and the music label Grzegorzki Records that illustrate his creative process.
Gregor Hildebrandt studied at Kunsthochschule Mainz from 1995 until 1999 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1999 until 2002. He was a fellow of the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice in 2003 and worked in Vienna on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2005–06. He has been professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2015.
-
Ugo Rondinone
winter, spring, summer, fall20€ Add to cartUgo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media—painting, sculpture, film, and installation art—his work is rooted in the transformation of outward reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres that capture the contemporary mood.
This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone’s work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a lightbulb . winter at theSørlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light . summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath, Vienna.
-
ODOR
Immaterial Sculptures40€ Add to cartThe effect of odor is immediate. Smells arouse feelings in us, put us in moods, awaken recollections. They color the other senses and shape our perceptions more profoundly than we are aware. Scents create closeness and distance at the same time. They become imprinted on our memories and consolidate our experiences. And yet their existence in the world of three dimensions remains invisible, and the act of picking up a scent is fleeting.
The publication Odor—Immaterial Sculptures zooms in on the power of smells. Contributions from curators, artists, scientists, and scholars frame a variety of perspectives on this evanescent phenomenon, examining the olfactory sense and the qualities of the immaterial. Full-page plates conceived by the artists provide additional information, imagery, and contexts around the individual works, which put odor as an olfactory and spatial experience at the center of the engagement with art. The works operate between the poles of time and space, individual and community, consciousness and the subconscious, visibility and invisibility, the everyday and the miraculous, the sense of self and the perceptions of others, presence and absence, life and death.
Artists : Jason Dodge, Carsten Höller, Koo Jeong A, Oswaldo Maciá, Teresa Margolles, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sissel Tolaas, Clara Ursitti, Luca Vitone
-
SOMA
Collective SineUmbra18€ Add to cartOn the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
- temporarily not available
David Hockney: Insights
Reflecting the Tate CollectionRead moreDavid Hockney (born 1937 in Bradford) is one of the most influential and technically versatile artists living today. This new publication gathers some of his most defining work from the 1960s to the present, including major works in the Tate collection. From early graphic cycles, double portraits and iconic pool paintings through to his photo collages, plein air landscapes, iPad drawings, and multimedia installations, the volume documents central themes and genres in Hockney’s oeuvre, as well as his constant experimentation.
Original essays by renowned critics and commentators illuminate the artist’s search for new forms of expression, the topographical and biographical reference points of his work, the technical innovation of his painting and printmaking, as well as his approach to new media.
- Release September 2025
The Magnificent Seven+
Strong Contemporary Female Artists44€ Add to cartWhen The Magnificent Seven hit the silver screen in 1960, heroism was firmly men’s business. Now it is women artists who are redefining the art world with visionary energy. Sebastian C. Strenger portrays outstanding women making art today, including Ingeborg Lüscher, Elfie Semotan, Xenia Hausner, Valérie Favre, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Cristina Lucas. Their works question power structures, play with identity, or deconstruct prevailing narratives. Their art is figurative or abstract, narrative or conceptual, political or introspective. These women are changing the art market and dominate the new canon at international institutions by calling existing structures in question and opening up spaces for fresh thinking.
-
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.
-
Stefan Knauf
10€ Add to cartStefan Knauf (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) uses selected materials such as construction supplies or plants to investigate the histories of botany, migration, trade, science, and architecture and critique an idealized and anthropocentric conception of nature that is still prevalent. His sculptures, geometric-abstract pictures, and installations, with echoes of constructivism and minimal art, are contact zones in which everything is related to everything: human and non-human history, the natural and the artificial, ecology and ideology. Knauf’s works do not propose to unravel these entanglements. Rather, they suggest alternative perspectives and topographies guided by the idea of the “modified landscape” and devise material and alchemistic forms of knowledge and a novel and multiperspectival approach to the history and reality of the Anthropocene.
-
Jürgen Claus
To the Oceans with Imagination18€ Add to cartThe Sea as a Space of Artistic Experience
Jürgen Claus’s (b. 1935, Berlin; lives and works in Aachen and Baelen, Belgium) oeuvre encompasses paintings, films, light and solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, with theoretical works that have sold over 100,000 copies. “Jürgen Claus is the first one to see the ocean through an artist’s rather than a scientist’s lens,” Michel Ragon writes. In this book, Claus intertwines his experiences working on the fascinating underwater installations with a pressing contemporary concern: the global efforts to restore the seas to health. The publication combines visual art, architecture, poetry, and music for a multifaceted engagement with the world’s oceans.
Jürgen Claus majored in theater studies at the Universität München and was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne.
-
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt – Wie eine Spinne im Netz
38€ Add to cartRuth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. Wurzen, Germany, 1932; lives in Berlin) is one the few East German female artists who devoted themselves to graphic art produced on the typewriter. Working on her trusty “Erika,” she arranged letters, digits, commas, and plus signs to compose imaginative visual creations. Under her hands, the black and red characters were transformed into poetic verbal images, gently undulating waves, serial patterns, and architectonic or figurative formations. Sometimes verging on concrete poetry, these typewritings also evince unmistakable affinities with conceptual and minimalist art. In the 1980s, the artist expanded on them in collages that recall Hannah Höch’s Dadaist visual montages. With her graphic work, Wolf-Rehfeldt was also an active participant in the GDR’s mail-art program: she sent the typewritings to artists beyond the impassable borders of her country, building an extensive network of correspondences that spanned the globe.
The richly illustrated monograph underscores the diversity and contemporary relevance of Wolf-Rehfeldt’s works, which were created in the shadow of the Cold War and address the fragility of peace as well as early manifestations of the environmental devastation wrought by the industrial age.
