Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Monographie
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung |
| Author(s) | Siegfried Gohr |
| Design | Andy Schmidt |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover with dust jacket |
| Size | 25 x 31 cm |
| Pages | 320 |
| Illustrations | 250 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-033-0 | Release April 2025 |
The Great German Artist’s Imposing Oeuvre
Ernst Wilhelm Nay (b. Berlin, 1902; d. Cologne, 1968) was one of the most interesting painters of European modernism. Spanning the decades from the 1930s to his death in Cologne in 1968, his output encompasses paintings as well as an abundance of works on paper. The new monograph surveys all periods in Nay’s oeuvre, from the “Fishermen paintings” to the striking late pictures, which leave no doubt about the artist’s outstanding gift for color. Nay’s evolution is embedded in the history and ideas of his time, on which he reflected in lectures, writings, and notes. The volume unlocks a wide spectrum of fresh insights into Nay’s life and art.
Release April 2025
More books
- Out of stock
Luxus?!
34€ Read moreWhat is luxury today? How do designers perform the magic of transforming a utilitarian object into a must-have? Where does consumerism shade into obsession? When does more-is-more give way to less-is-more?
Luxury means breaking with convention, and this book showcases—and spawns—a cornucopia of ideas, products, and positions around luxury, featuring influential thinkers from the worlds of design, science, art, and society. The cultural theorists Wolfgang Ullrich and Lambert Wiesing exchange letters on the concept of luxury; Montblanc’s creative director Zaim Kamal lays out future strategies; the artist Jonathan Meese pens a gold manifesto; and Bazon Brock inquires into the asceticism of luxury. We live in a world full of things that resemble one another so closely that the only difference is how they are marketed. What might the precious objects of the future look like? The book presents examples from aspiring designers such as the fashion student Victoria Reize, whose collection counters luxury with arch defiance. Design, we learn, is not just about creating supreme values. Luxury is limitation and longevity, scarcity and refinement, yearning and sensuality.
With works by Assemble, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Daniel Chodowiecki, Kai Löffelbein, Jonathan Meese, Olaf Nicolai, Marcel Odenbach, Tobias Rehberger and Anna Skladmann.
-
Arantxa Etcheverria
Doors38€ Add to cartThe Mythical Power of Grids
Arantxa Etcheverria’s (b. 1975, France; lives and works in Bucharest) creative practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Since 2006, she has been especially interested in modernist architecture, a ubiquitous sight in her adopted country, Romania. Blending rationalism with speculation, the artist draws on historical references including post-Communist turbo architecture, Op art, and minimalism for works that balance between figuration and abstraction, construction and deconstruction. This book documents Etcheverria’s more recent panel paintings and installations, seen in interaction with actors in monochrome costumes. With essays by the Paris-based Romanian curator and critic Ami Barak and the art historian and curator Alina Şerban.
Arantxa Etcheverria studied fine arts at Villa Arson, Nice, and stage design at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg.
-
Heike Negenborn
Terra Cognita24€ Add to cartLebensraum of our Time: Contemporary Landscape Painting
The central theme of Heike Negenborn (b. 1964, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler; lives and works in Windesheim) is the seen lebensraum. In reference to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, her works stand in a specific tradition of capturing reality. With her new group of works titled Net-Scape – Landscape in Transition, Negenborn transfers art historical references into contemporary images. The artist is interested in the possibilities of media transfer and the increasing appropriation of analog reality by the digital image. The present volume provides impressive insights into the developments of the landscape painter from 2007 to 2020.
Heike Negenborn studied fine arts at Austin College, Texas, Art Education at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, and Painting and Printmaking at the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz.
- Out of stock
Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte 1999 – 2019
29,90€ Read moreDie Geschichte einer neuen Industriekultur
Die Völklinger Hütte gehört zu den wichtigsten Industriedenkmälern der Welt. Mit herausragenden Ausstellungen und Veranstaltungen ist das Kulturprojekt weit über die Grenzen des Saarlands hinaus bekannt geworden. Der Künstler Ottmar Hörl konzipierte hier sein großangelegtes Skulpturenprojekt 100 Arbeiter und Christian Boltanskis Installation in der Sinteranlage wurde zum hochemotionalen Erinnerungsort für die hier verpflichteten Zwangsarbeiter. Noch bis zum Jahr 1986 war die Völklinger Eisenhütte in Betrieb und wurde 1994 als erstes Industriekulturdenkmal aus der Hochphase der Industrialisierung in die renommierte Liste des UNESCO-Weltkulturerbes aufgenommen. Das Buch zum 25. Jubiläum dieser Auszeichnung zeigt die vielfältigen und eindrucksvollen Aufnahmen einer Transformation – vom größten Schrotthaufen Europas zum Begnungszentrum der Menschen mit der Kunst. Es dokumentiert die gelungene Umstrukturierung einer hochproduktiven Eisenverhüttungsstätte zu einem Ort für Kultur im 21. Jahrhundert.
-
Filip Henin
10€ Add to cartThe events captured in Filip Henin’s (b. Mayen, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are set in a world beyond time and place, as though on an empty stage prepared for a Samuel Beckett production. It is virtually impossible to say whether a picture shows a coastal region or a craggy slope up in the mountains, whether a field of blue represents the sea or a band of open sky. Henin strips landscapes down no less than human figures, subtracting specific features to isolate basic forms that might be found in the hill country around his hometown in western Germany or in Tuscany. His work integrates quotations from antiquity, Romantic landscape painting, and postmodernism as well as Italian Transavanguardia, the mysticism of Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and the figurative painting of the 1990s. Without veering into drama or pathos, he harnesses two utterly antithetical energies: the reflection on painting and the history of art and the need to be simple.
-
Anders Goldfarb
Passed Remains35€ Add to cartAbandoned Gas Stations and Burned-Out Buildings
In 1986 when Anders Goldfarb (b. 1954 in Brooklyn, lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY) moved to Greenpoint, he was a young photographer with a master of fine arts degree from State University of New York at New Paltz. In moving to Williamsburg, he joined a growing number of young artists seeking the low rents of what was then a declining neighborhood of light industrial buildings and working-class residences. Working with black and white film, and a medium format Rolleiflex camera, Goldfarb began photographing in 1987 in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, riding his bike around the area and looking for the peculiar beauty of sidings, peeling paint and razor wire. Goldfarb’s photographs provide a valuable historical record of these neighborhoods prior to their demolition and gentrification. His subjects are metaphors for loss and vulnerability and distill moments in time that are destined for demise.
-
Gabriel Vormstein
40€ Add to cartGabriel Vormstein (b. Konstanz, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) explores themes of impermanence, temporality, and futility through a unique visual language. He paints using newspapers as a canvas, and creates installations out of tree branches and other organic matter. These “poor” materials subvert a prevailing notion in Western culture that an artwork should be eternally preserved. Through the adaptation of various styles and symbols, Vormstein’s paintings likewise speak to the transience of art historical and cultural trends. Over 300 pages, this richly illustrated book provides an overview of Vormstein’s oeuvre over the past two decades, while also offering an atmospheric glimpse into the artist’s source material and working methods. The publication is enriched by an essay by Gean Moreno, who characterizes Vormstein’s work as follows: “Gabriel Vormstein’s paintings and sculptures (…) announce their condition as withering artifacts, as if no other manner of existing was available to them (and maybe to us, as well).”
-
Alexander Ruthner
Cour: Sommer36€ Add to cartContemplating Nature in a Reduced-Mobility Environment
“The events of the year 2021, which was defined by lockdowns, the pandemic, and restrictions, has brought out the resonance in my pictures of Gustave Courbet’s realism,” Alexander Ruthner (b. Vienna, 1982; lives and works in Vienna) says about his most recent works: oil paintings featuring lush green vegetation and veritable down comforters painted all-over in saturated color gradients. The works will make their public début as the publication is released in the summer of 2021, hence the word “Sommer” in the title. The other word, “Cour,” is a nod to the first syllable of the French painter’s name as well as French for “court,” a term the artist creatively reinterprets as a synonym for the solitary “castle of the mind” to which we have retreated under pandemic conditions. Ruthner, who studied with Peter Kogler, Daniel Richter, and Albert Oehlen, revisits the boscage and pasture painting of past eras in new works that propose a distinctive personal interpretation of that tradition’s charm.
Alexander Ruthner’s work has been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Montenegro, among other venues.
-
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.
- Out of stock
Thomas Lehnerer
Freies Spiel44€ Read moreThe function of art in human existence
Throughout his short life, the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (1955–1995) did not take the existence of art for granted. In his writings, above all in Methode der Kunst (Methods of Art), he developed a concept of art in the continuation of key texts from the fields of aesthetics, cultural theory, and art history, which can also be found in his own artistic work. The small-format figurative sculptures by Lehnerer, as well as his drawings, watercolors, and early installations, follow theoretical premises and address comprehensive themes of human existence. The present volume documents his examination of human existence, which is deepened by the inclusion of cultural historical figures and idols.
-
Austin Eddy
Selected poems40€ Add to cartSince 2018, the American painter and sculptor Austin Eddy (b. Boston, 1986; lives and works in Brooklyn) has probed the manifestations of modern painting in a world between abstraction and figuration. As a child and teenager, Eddy immersed himself in the imageries of comics, cartoons, and record covers. In the early 2010s, he studied in Chicago with Barbara Rossi, who had been one of the Chicago Imagists in the 1960s. The deconstruction of everyday objects into innumerable forms and hues became his central theme. Eddy’s works play with luminous colors, overlaid textures, animated bird motifs, and abstract planes of light while grappling with a human existence defined by loss and the passage of time. Situated on the margins of reality, his paintings and sculptures are like visual poems, celebrating the evanescent instant that exists only for a second before fading into the past.
Austin Eddy completed a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.
- Out of stock
Idee – Entwurf – Konzept
48€ Read moreArt in the Preliminary and Provisional Stage
In this sumptuous volume, Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg, the association of visual artists in Baden-Württemberg, puts the focus on visualizations of inchoate impulses, spontaneous flashes of inspiration, and the euphoria of that first spark rather than the painstaking process of hammering out a work. Structured as a complex compendium comprising contributions by more than 240 artists, the book highlights the experimental circumstances in which the individual creative mind experiences the nascency of ideas—without regard for the specialized skills and technical accomplishment that distinguish the finished work. Perfunctory sketches, doodles, drawings, notes and material collages, photographs and other media images provide insight into very intimate stages of the creative process that are not usually revealed to visitors to an exhibition of contemporary art.
-
Ingo Mittelstaedt
Courtesy15€ Add to cartPerception and Comprehension in Photography
Ingo Mittelstaedt (b. 1978, Berlin; lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg) creates staged photographs, combining and contrasting them with diverse objects in expansive installations. His pictorial arrangements probe a variety of concerns and imageries that he sources from museum settings or the modes of representation in ordinary advertising brochures. Gestures of showing, pointing, bringing out, and uncovering are leitmotifs in Mittelstaedt’s canny and subtly humorous exploration of the potentials and limitations of the photographic medium.
Ingo Mittelstaedt studied fine arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and received numerous emerging-artist awards, including the New York fellowship of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung. His work has been shown at Kunstverein Hannover, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Marta Herford, and elsewhere.
-
Anna Leonhardt
Touching Space34€ Add to cartAnna Leonhardt’s (b. Pforzheim, 1981; lives and works in New York and Leipzig) paintings probe her own experiences and moods, while also referencing works of literature and quoting phenomena in the history of her craft. Abstract surfaces composed of numerous layers that break the two-dimensional bounds of the canvas engender a physical and imagined space that is further expanded by the interrelations between the pictorial elements, an imaginary communication with other works of art, and the beholders. The publication Touching Space presents Anna Leonhardt’s most recent works. A compendium of writings on the subject of space by the phenomenologist Franz Xaver Baier and the artist’s correspondence with the curator Sophia Pietryga complement the imposing illustrations. The book is released in conjunction with the eponymous solo exhibition at Galerie She BAM! Laetitia Gorsy, Leipzig.
Anna Leonhardt studied painting and graphic art at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK) from 2002–2008, completing her education with postgraduate training with Ralf Kerbach until 2010.
-
Spaces Embodied (ENGLISH)
Draiflessen Collection32€ Add to cartWe live in spaces that we shape in accordance with our own ideas. Our everyday lives leave traces in them that speak to our habits. Spaces promise shelter and belonging, but they can also instill a sense of constraint. We grow into the spaces we inhabit—and they in turn become expressions of our personalities. Conversely, spaces, depending on their architecture and location, inform our existence. RÄUME HAUTNAH gathers works of art that, rather than conceiving of the human sphere and the spatial domain as separate, comprehend them in their complex entanglements: in bodily experience, emotional dependency, or the instinctive need for protection. An essay by Olesja Nein, the project’s curator, offers an introduction to the exhibition and takes the reader on a tour, describing each artist’s space of activity and supplying helpful information. Philipp Zitzlsperger, meanwhile, zooms in on a key aspect of the art in the exhibition, the imprint as an artistic technique with a distinctive aura, and illuminates its origins and significance since the dawn of modernism.
Artists: Absalon, Shannon Bool, Heidi Bucher, Eileen Gray, Do Ho Suh, Mary Mattingly, Tracey Snelling, Francesca Woodman
-
Sebastian Stöhrer
Residents40€ Add to cartIf there’s an artist whose oeuvre merits the title “creation,” it is Sebastian Stöhrer. Shaping clay—essentially, soil—he molds his “residents”: colorful and friendly-looking sculptural beings, some of them enhanced with sticks or branches reminiscent of limbs. Despite their air of levity and humor, they are not the products of mere momentary inspiration or a whim. It takes decades of dedicated experimentation with the kiln based on the millennia-old art of ceramics as well as expert knowledge of chemistry and physics to create such colors and shapes. Stöhrer has been called an alchemist, and indeed he has made it his mission to vindicate this researcher’s craft, an ancestor of the natural sciences. Alchemy, like Stöhrer’s oeuvre, combines pure rationality with coincidence and a scintilla of magic. The artist plays an intuitive and sensual game with his clay and the virtually incalculable chromaticity of the glazes—chaos, anarchy, and irrepressible urges being an integral dimension of all creation. In Stöhrer’s “residents,” we encounter the embodiments of that creation: likenesses of ourselves and perhaps also heralds of a future more good-natured version.
-
Karlheinz Bux
über Linie …15€ Add to cartClarity, Complexity, and Linearity
The defining artistic means in the work of Karlheinz Bux (b. 1952 in Ulm, lives and works in Karlsruhe) is the line. As edges and folds, they determine vertically oriented sculptures, which simultaneously convey compactness and openness, dynamism and repose. In Bux’s pencil drawings and photo-based works, they form the subject of the image in the form of complex linear structures. This present book documents the artist’s large-format works and provides insight into his oeuvre, with texts by Michael Hübl, Christine Reeh-Peters, and Carmela Thiele.
Karlheinz Bux studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe and taught as a lecturer at Pforzheim University and as a visiting professor at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences. His works are represented in private and public collections, including the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Hurrle Collection, and the Würth Collection.
- Out of stock
Supernatural
Sculptural Visions of the BodyRead moreThe future of human corporeality in the Anthropocene era
Given the technological development in biogenetics, humans will be able to make existential modifications to all living things, Nature, the animal world and human likenesses in future. What will bodies of the future look like? Who or what will we be? Supernatural offers us some answers in its hyperrealistic and realistic sculptures. These visionary works not only exemplify the impact of the digital revolution and genetic engineering on “posthumans” and the environment, but also illustrate, including in their own hybrid creations, how increasingly blurred the line between nature and culture is now becoming. Technological innovations are also having more and more effects on trends in the latest hyperrealistic sculptures. In using 3D printing to perfect their creation processes and pushing sculptural boundaries to encompass robotics and synthetic biology, artists are opening the door to new design possibilities in artefact, biology and technology for themselves as well.
The book presents works by Anne Carnein, Isa Genzken, Glaser/Kunz, Thomas Grünfeld, Sam Jinks, Josh Kline, Krištof Kintera, Reiner Maria Matysik, Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, Fabien Mérelle, Patricia Piccinini amongst others.
-
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.
-
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.
