ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
READ
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| Editor(s) | Elmgreen & Dragset |
| Author(s) | Paul Benzon, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ivana Goossen, Christelle Havranek, Michal Přibáň, Barbora Ropková |
| Design | Anežka Minaříková, Marek Nedelka |
| Size | 19 x 26,5 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover with Screenprint |
| Pages | 260 |
| Illustrations | 160 |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-170-2 |
Throughout their careers, the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961, and Ingar Dragset, b. Trondheim, Norway, 1969, live and work in Berlin) have eschewed the traditional “White Cube” exhibition format by creating large-scale installations and staging narrative situations in which autobiographical quotes blend with fictional stories and cultural references.
For the solo exhibition READ, Elmgreen & Dragset have transformed Kunsthalle Praha into a minimalist version of a modern public library to prompt reflections on our relationship with physical books and knowledge in the age of digital media. With new works by Elmgreen & Dragset as well as performances, videos, collages, paintings, and sculptures by other artists, READ also probes the relation between books and the making of art.
This richly illustrated publication documents the dynamic interaction between language, books, and art. With contributions from renowned scholars and a curatorial text by Elmgreen & Dragset.
More books
- Release February 2026
Tim David Trillsam
Willkommen im Panoptikum38€ Add to cartWith his idiosyncratic figurative bronze sculptures Tim David Trillsam (born 1985 in the Swabian Alb) has hit a nerve. The artist’s “self memorials” ask the viewer to remember the transience and illusion of this very self. Although Trillsam employs a loaded material that evokes many great sculptors before him, his own sculptures resist the past. His figures are tangibly protagonist of the present and they provoke with their exaggerated sensuality, twisted bodies, and oversized hands and feet. “The oversizing is programmatic. As is the skeptical approach to the human species. Trillsam proceeds as a thoughtful questioner with doubt yet also irritation,” writes Dorothee Baer-Bogenschütze. Her in-depth art-historical analysis is part of this forthcoming book about Trillsam’s oeuvre since 2012.
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Stephan Kaluza
Das Rheinprojekt48€ Add to cartReinterpreting the Classical Panorama
The mythical character of the Rhine as a ‘German symbol’ has long been of profound interest to poets and visual artists. Today, however, the Rhine has lost the aura of a great romantic river along much of its course: from Basel to Rotterdam, it serves as a high-volume shipping lane, and sprawling industrial installations line its banks.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) went on an almost eight-months-long walking tour, following the Rhine from its source at the foot of Piz Badus in Switzerland to its debouchment into the North Sea near Rotterdam. During this thousand-mile trek along the river’s right bank, he stopped every minute—after between two and three hundred feet—to take a photograph of the opposite shore. In this way, his camera compiled a painstaking record of the Rhine in 21,449 individual shots. Digitally assembled in a single six-inch-tall composite image, the pictures form a two-and-a-half-mile stream.
What Kaluza created in this project would have been inconceivable before the development of digital photography, which made the seamless presentation of the pictures in a single panoramic band possible. What is more, the computers capable of processing the enormous quantities of data did not arrive until a few years ago. It took the artist’s assistants a full two years just to edit the images. Harnessing digital technology, Kaluza creates for photography what had been the exclusive precinct of painting: a sweeping holistic perspective. A large number of the fascinating panorama photographs were published in the imposing tome Der Rhein in 2007. Das Rheinprojekt now presents a freshly composed selection from this treasure trove.
Stephan Kaluza received a comprehensive education in Düsseldorf in the 1990s, studying photography at the city’s University of Applied Sciences, art history at the Academy of Fine Arts, and history and philosophy at Düsseldorf University. Since 1995, his work has been shown at numerous galleries in Seoul, Shanghai, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Berlin and elsewhere. Kaluza’s plays have been performed in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Stuttgart.
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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.
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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.
- Release November 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.
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FLATZ
Hitler. Ein Hundeleben18€ Add to cartAn Attempt to Break a Taboo – Trivial and Provocative
A black, pure-bred Great Dane named Hitler accompanied the Austrian performance artist and documenta participant FLATZ (b. 1952, Dornbirn; lives and works in Munich and London) like a shadow through the 1990s. The naming—as well as the subtitles of the photographs created—relates the banal everyday life of the dog to the inglorious life of its namesake, thus opening up an extremely provocative range of possible associations. “Hitler is always with me,” says the artist, “just as we always carry the historical Hitler around with us, because he is part of our history, which—as long as it is suppressed, transfigured, or tabooed—is not overcome.”
With more than 350 illustrations, Hitler. Ein Hundeleben is an extended and revised reprint of the book published in 1992, which has been out of print for a long time.
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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.
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nolde/kritik/documenta (English)
42€ Add to cartEmil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
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Beate Passow
Monkey Business24€ Add to cartDrawing on the Past to Build a Better Future
Beate Passow (b. Stadtoldendorf, Germany, 1945; lives and works in Munich) creates installations, photodocumentaries, and collages that seek to salvage her subjects from oblivion, though as she sees it, her art is an effort to come to terms not so much with the past as with the present. When her compositional inventions touch on painful memories, their objective is not to arrive at new insights. Rather, she aims to uncover visible and verifiable states of affairs and throw them into sharp relief. In her cycle of pictures Monkey Business, the artist unfolds a mysterious fairy-tale world with a political edge. Strange animals and mythical figures populate the large-format black-and-white tableaux, which a closer look reveals to be woven tapestries. The unusual protagonists roam readily identifiable locations: Gibraltar, New York’s Wall Street, Brussels, or the island of Lampedusa. Behind these ostensibly simple facts of geography loom the darker aspects of contemporary European politics: Passow’s work calls for a debate on the systems, economic structures, and political movements that rule the continent.
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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.
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FREIGEISTER
FRAGMENTS OF AN ART SCENE IN LUXEMBOURG AND BEYOND35€ Add to cartThinking Otherwise—the Mudam in Luxembourg at Fifteen
A free spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, is someone who “thinks otherwise than is expected of him in consideration of his origin, surroundings, position, and office, or by reason of the prevailing contemporary views” (Human, All Too Human,1878). As the German philosopher saw it, one must seek to become “untimely” and remain a “stranger” to one’s time in order to question its premises. This view to states of alienation unites the positions of fourteen young Luxembourgish artists in Freigeister, the publication accompanying the celebrations on occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.
In recent years, Luxembourg’s art scene has grappled in a wide variety of ways with the challenges that come with the small yet economically successful country’s ongoing transformation. Charting realities between the familiar and the unknown, the artists featured in Freigeister employ photography, painting, and installation as well as film, sculpture, printmaking, and performance art to paint a carefully considered but by no means dispassionate portrait of today’s society in an effort to build bridges between identity and the future.
The book presents works by Yann Annicchiarico, Laurianne Bixhain, Aline Bouvy, Marco Godinho, Sophie Jung, Catherine Lorent, Filip Markiewicz, Karolina Markiewicz & Pascal Piron, Claudia Passeri, Daniel Reuter, Nina Tomàs, Daniel Wagener, and Jeff Weber.
- temporarily not available
MEUSER
Works 2012–2023 (ENGLISH)Read moreEver 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.
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Rooted
Female Brazilian Artists28€ Add to cartThe book Rooted. Female Brazilian Artists, accompanies the eponymous exhibition at Brainlab/Munich, which is open until the end of September 2025. The works of the 16 artists come from the collection of Sergio Linhares and Stefan Vilsmeier. The collectors present this selection hoping to illuminate important and difficult themes such as, among others, discrimination, displacement, and violence but also to remind of our shared rootedness in nature. “Art has no obligation to comfort us; it can challenge, disrupt and remind us that our coexistence is fragile.” The volume shows installation views along with close-ups of the individual works and it includes short texts for each artist along with an essay by curator Tereza de Arruda.
Artists: Marlene Almeida, Azuhli (Luiza Diogo Veras), Tarsila do Amaral, Beatrice Arraes, Carmezia Emiliano, Sonia Gomes, Iêda Jardim, Lucia Laguna, Laura Lima, Rosilene Luduvico, Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa, Paula Siebra, Luzia Simons, Nádia Taquary, Alexsandra Ribeiro, Larissa de Souza
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Lars Breuer
The Love of the Gods32€ Add to cartThe art of Lars Breuer (b. Aachen, 1974; lives and works in Düsseldorf and Cologne) is set apart by its broad spectrum of systems of reference. In his large-format installations, text-based works in his own typography draw connections to literature and art history. They are complemented by figurative and abstract paintings and photographs.
In The Love of the Gods, Breuer presents 104 C-prints of photographs for which he pointed the camera’s lens into the barrels of disused rifles, pistoles, revolvers, and cannons. The pictures were taken on the artist’s travels to Athens, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Leverkusen, Ingolstadt, Melbourne, New York, Oslo, and Phnom Penh, in museums, palaces, and public squares. Breuer’s conceptual and meticulously sober-minded approach yields almost abstract compositions showing nothing but the round muzzles and the dark interiors of the weapons on a deep-black ground. We see only a ring-shaped ornament until it dawns on us that it is part of a lethal implement. A cruel constant of human existence stares us in the face: humans behind these weapons were perpetrators, humans in front of these weapons were victims. Lars Breuer’s turn the spotlight on what the aura of the ornaments conceals: they have wrought death.
- 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
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Yes To All
Die Schenkung Paul Maenz Gerd Vries42€ Add to cartThe catalog accompanying the exhibition YES TO ALL offers profound insight into a collection of over nine hundred works on paper—from postcards and drawings to photographs and posters—that was gifted to the Kupferstichkabinett in 2022, with subsequent additions over the years until 2025. The donors are Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, who ran a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne until 1990 and chaperoned the evolution of avant-garde art from the conceptualism of the late 1960s to the neo-expressive painting of the 1980s. The most recent works in the collection date from 2024. Several essays and a conversation with the donors invite the reader to experience the stylistic and thematic polyphony of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in new ways.
EXHIBITION:
YES TO ALL. THE GIFTS OF PAUL MAENZ GERD DE VRIES TO THE KUPFERSTICHKABINETT
KUPFERSTICHKABINETT, STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -
Fritz Overbeck und Hermine Overbeck-Rohte
Der Briefwechsel38€ Add to cartIntimate Glimpses from the Marriage of Two Worpswede Artists
In the final years of the nineteenth century, numerous painters settled in the village at the foot of Weyerberg hill, followed by young women who took classes with the local artists. Fritz Overbeck (b. Bremen, 1869; d. Bröcken near Vegesack, 1909) and Hermine Overbeck-Rohte (b. Walsrode, 1869; d. Bremen, 1937) became one of Worpswede’s husband-and-wife creative duos, though their union has been less celebrated than those of Otto Modersohn and Paula Becker or Rainer Maria Rilke and Clara Westhoff. Like the stories of their more famous neighbors, theirs exemplifies life and work in the artists’ colony, but also the dogged struggle for equality in the creative professions. Yet unlike those other relationships, theirs did not break up over the conflict between art and marital life; it lasted until Fritz Overbeck’s tragic early death. In a first, this book contains virtually the entire extant correspondence between the Overbeck-Rohtes in unabridged form and with numerous annotations. Offering fresh and nuanced insight into the lives and oeuvres of its protagonists, it makes for moving and entertaining reading.
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Anna Virnich
10€ Add to cartAnna Virnich’s (b. Berlin, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) works resemble a speculative narrative. The artist has collected fabrics, garments, and bedspreads since her childhood, which she cuts up, exposes to the elements, dyes, and sometimes paints on to construct pictures and spaces. Her works are paintings and objects at once and defined by a powerful physical presence in conjunction with a ghostly emptiness. They recall Helen Frankenthaler’s liquefied chromatic landscapes, Paul Thek’s post-minimalist physicality, and the silver-foil transcendence of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Everything in Virnich’s art is a shell or membrane through which something filters in or out, “a part of emerging networks and an exchange of substances, technology, bodies, imageries, of the light of the eyes,” as Baptist Ohrtmann writes. Gathered, the textiles unfold an abstract tale of becoming and passing away, of painting, birth, artificiality, and science fiction.
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Maria Balea & George Crîngașu
The Mythenstein Project18€ Add to cartMaria Balea (b. Sighetu Marmației, 1990; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) and George Crîngașu (b. Focșani, 1988; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca and Rome) are among the youngest members of the School of Cluj, which has attained international renown in Adrian Ghenie, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, and Ciprian Mureșan. The overarching theme in their works in a range of media is the lived reality of today’s young people between a physical world defined by uncertainties and a virtual parallel universe whose boundless possibilities make it a fascinating yet also often deceptive safe haven. Both artists roam this dizzying kaleidoscope of worlds on a quest for beauty: Balea, through a romantically idealized focus on remnants of untouched or deserted nature; Crîngașu, by abandoning himself to the graphical possibilities of the digital realm, where beauty is often bound up with the bending of natural laws and the physical impossibility of architecture. Yet both, the retreat to an ostensibly natural state and the escape into garish artificiality, are overshadowed by a nameless menace.
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Art in a Conflicted World
34€ Add to cartTrans-European Perspectives in the Age of Cultural Fragmentation
Since the turn of the millennium, much of the world has become an increasingly unstable and dissonant place. Sharp disruptions define many aspects of our social, cultural, and political relations. Art in a Conflicted World addresses this evolving reality, featuring critical positions articulated by visual artists and writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Great Britain—regions embroiled in extraordinary strife and upheaval. The publication takes a frank look at these multifaceted states of social dissonance and reflects them in diverse artistic and literary inquiries and responses. The contributions are the fruits of an interdisciplinary fellowship program at Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf that offers the participants an opportunity to gain fresh creative and cultural insights, test ways of engaging with complexity, and develop models for the future that transcend national boundaries.
The publication presents works by Sarah Dobai, Nikita Kadan, Ali Eisa, and Sebastian Lloyd Rees (Lloyd Corporation) as well as writings by Alisa Ganieva and Tanya Zaharchenko.
The project was mentored by Wolfgang Tillmans, Tom McCarthy, Katharina Raabe, and Mark Gisbourne and received funding support from the German Federal Foreign Office.
