Etsu Egami
Rainbow
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | ZWEI Wealth and Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts |
| Author(s) | Martin Herb, Beate Scheder |
| Design | BANK™ |
| Size | 18,6 x 23 cm |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Pages | 64 |
| Illustrations | 26 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-210-5 |
What is worth talking about in art eludes language. Aesthetic experience is without words, like a human encounter that touches upon our innermost being. Etsu Egami is interested in the margins of understanding, where the communication of ideas and feelings threatens to fail, where forms become illegible. That is the point on which she homes in with her brush, which she wields in a rough calligraphic style, putting almost translucent oil paints on the canvas. Spectral faces emerge that dissolve into abstraction; abstract forms, beheld from the corner of one’s eye, momentarily coalesce into a likeness. Painting, to Egami, is a physical and performative act, the brush an extension of her arm, bringing a picture into being in sweeping rhythmical motions. As we contemplate her work, that momentum imparts itself to us: first our eyes begin to wander, then we feel our bodies stir, and finally the spirit, too, pulsates in the rhythm of the brush. Gathering Egami’s most outstanding works, this catalogue is a universal invitation to join a peculiar dance, an arc of light the artist traces across all barriers to understanding and that speaks to our senses.
You may also like…
-
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.
More books
-
Louise Hindsgavl
Conversation Pieces68€ Add to cartThe Danish sculptor Louise Hindsgavl (born 1973, lives in Copenhagen) is known for hybrid figurines made of porcelain and glazed stoneware: half animal, half human. Only their material evokes the idealized and kitschy scenes traditionally rendered in porcelain; however, Hindsgavl’s “sculptural collisions” tell of disturbing encounters between tormented beast-like people. For that she draws from brutal folktales of the past as much as from the ubiquitous “fairytales” of today’s social media that normalize violence, sexual abuse, and self-harm. Using one of the most fragile materials, she brings these trends into focus for discussion, calling her sculptures Conversation Pieces—which is also the title of this interesting and provocative book.
-
Kraftwerk
Innovation durch Transformation34€ Add to cartThe power plant in Rottweil, built in 1915 by the architect Paul Bonatz, looks back on a rich and interesting history: until 1976, it provided power to a gunpowder factory and, later, to a rayon manufacturer and at times also to the city of Rottweil. The façade design, the imposing perron leading up to the main entrance, and the tall chimneys still stand as testament to the modernist industrial structure’s erstwhile significance. Twenty years after the plant was taken out of service, the entrepreneurs Thomas Wenger and Mike Wutta with their event agency trend factory took over the dilapidated building with the surrounding premises and restored it, taking care to preserve its architectonic elements and the most important technical installations. (In the course of fifteen years, around 60,000 square feet of floorspace were reopened, with a special emphasis on the distinctive blend of morbid charm and contemporary design.) The power plant now serves the company as its headquarters and, more importantly, as a cutting-edge venue for concerts, congresses, and corporate events that has attracted clients and visitors from all over Baden-Württemberg and beyond.
-
Etsu Egami
Rainbow18€ Add to cartWhat is worth talking about in art eludes language. Aesthetic experience is without words, like a human encounter that touches upon our innermost being. Etsu Egami is interested in the margins of understanding, where the communication of ideas and feelings threatens to fail, where forms become illegible. That is the point on which she homes in with her brush, which she wields in a rough calligraphic style, putting almost translucent oil paints on the canvas. Spectral faces emerge that dissolve into abstraction; abstract forms, beheld from the corner of one’s eye, momentarily coalesce into a likeness. Painting, to Egami, is a physical and performative act, the brush an extension of her arm, bringing a picture into being in sweeping rhythmical motions. As we contemplate her work, that momentum imparts itself to us: first our eyes begin to wander, then we feel our bodies stir, and finally the spirit, too, pulsates in the rhythm of the brush. Gathering Egami’s most outstanding works, this catalogue is a universal invitation to join a peculiar dance, an arc of light the artist traces across all barriers to understanding and that speaks to our senses.
-
Peter Hermann
Skulpturen24€ Add to cartDefying the Classical Canon
The figures of Peter Hermann (b. 1962, Bietigheim; lives and works in Ludwigsburg) stand and gaze. Made of limewood or bronze, his sculptures are precisely crafted in the manner of the old masters and thus stand in opposition to other contemporary positions. Nevertheless, in their static severity, their shortened and slightly caricatured limbs, and with a certain irony that accompanies this, they also defy the classical canon of figurative sculpture. Peter Hermann finds his themes in everyday life and succeeds in letting this apparent everydayness vibrate further in the encounter between the artwork and the viewer.
-
Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia.
-
PULS 20
New Entries in the MNAC Collection36€ Add to cartPULS 20 unites the most valuable finds from a communal treasure hunt. Exponents of the Romanian arts scene and representatives of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest teamed up to review the oeuvres of countless eminent Romanian artists and select works of outstanding quality that reflect the diversity of the country’s creative production over the past fifty years. In time for the celebrations of MNAC’s twentieth anniversary in 2020, the institution acquired the 180 works reproduced in this catalogue. That makes PULS 20 a singular document in two respects: it gathers a selection of key works of Romanian art that is unprecedented in its breadth between the covers of a book; and it is the result of a successful cooperative curatorial process, an organic discourse involving a wide variety of participants, demonstrating that democratic dialogue in art is not just possible but also extraordinarily fruitful and indeed necessary. All in all, this catalogue is the perfect choice both for newcomers to Romanian contemporary art and for specialists.
-
Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst38€ Add to cartContemporary Visual Communication in a Historic Weaving Technique
Margret Eicher’s (b. Viersen, Germany, 1955; lives and works in Berlin) large-format tapestries combine the baroque form of the woven picture with familiar motifs excerpted from contemporary media images. She digitizes her sources and then assembles them in painstaking editing work on the computer. The resulting ‘media tapestries’ occupy the interface between the traditional work of art as a physical object and the electronic noise of the digital realm: two worlds that at first glance would seem to be incompatible yet find themselves in harmonious union in Eicher’s art. In Göttliche Liebe (Divine Love), for example, Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns meets a kissing gay couple from a pro-tolerance campaign in Berlin, while Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is sampled together with a subway station in Frankfurt. In conceptual art production, the creative idea is central and its realization becomes secondary; in a final twist, Lob der Malkunst (Praise of Painting) elects this practice as its artistic lodestar. Eicher installs the painter Martin Kippenberger in the interior of Berlin’s Paris Bar, where he poses as a dandy and presides over a clash between the different tendencies in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
-
John M Armleder
CA. CA.19€ Add to cartCommentaries on our Present Day Realities and the Status of Art
John M Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva; lives and works in Geneva and New York) is one of the most influential contemporary conceptual, performance and object artists. The profound and the banal, control and coincidence, high culture and everyday life coalesce in Armleder’s work to create a unique experience. The works of the Swiss – often humorous or ironically twisted commentaries on contemporary reality – draw on the formal repertoire of Classical Modernism, as well as on video and design. The book focuses on large-scale, site-specific installations and wall pieces, showing in detail the broad spectrum of Armleder’s work.
John M Armleder studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. He represented Switzerland 1986 at the 42nd Biennale di Venezia and participated in documenta 8 one year later. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Belvedere, Vienna, amongst others.
-
Birgitta Thaysen
Amor and Psyche24€ Add to cartAspects of Love
The fine art photographer Birgitta Thaysen (b. Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1962; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and in Nan Hoover’s master class. Her photographic oeuvre encompasses urban motifs as well as likenesses of humans. In black-and-white portrait shots, she revisits the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche; embodiments of the yearning for love and the bafflements of the soul, the title characters have long been vehicles for variegated interpretations in visual art. Thaysen chose to shoot her portraits at Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf, where the tale is present in an adaptation as a lavishly made wallpaper from the nineteenth century. She captured the protagonists lying on the floor, bedded on cushions, their heads upside down, for a vertiginous exploration of states of mind between self-abandonment and doubt.
Birgitta Thaysen studied art with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her conceptual photographic series have been seen by wide audiences in numerous exhibitions.
- Release January 2026
Charles Moore
On painting16€ Add to cartFor On Painting, New York-based art historian and curator Charles Moore, interviewed four women artists about their practice, asking them to reveal their motives and aspirations. This publication consists of four interviews, each containing an introduction by Moore and illustrations of the artist’s works. Danielle Mckinney, who paints exclusively Black women, reflects on her experiences as a woman growing up in the US South. Nicola Staeglich creates subtle layered abstract works to evoke new perspectives and the potential for change. Nirit Takele elaborates on how her Ethiopian Jewish heritage has shaped her painting practice. Jorinde Voigt, who creates complex installations inspired by notation systems, discusses the use of algorithms and the beauty to be found in the unexpected.
-
G. I. Widmann
Retrospektive24€ Add to cartA Tribute to the 100th Birthday. One of the Important Figurative Positions of the Young Federal Republic of Germany
She was an unusual painter who sought to hide her gender behind a pseudonym, while at the same time addressing her own circumstances as an independent artist and single mother in her large-format canvases. Gudrun Irene Widmann (b. 1919, Reutlingen; d. 2011, Reutlingen) created an oeuvre that lays claim to being one of the most important figurative positions of the 1950s and ’60s. This retrospective volume pays testimony to a strong personality and sheds light not only on her self-image as an artist but also on the influences of society and personal contexts — representative of the situation of female artists in general.
Gudrun Irene Widmann studied at the academies in Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, and Vienna during the Second World War. She worked in her own studio in her hometown of Reutlingen until her death.
- Out of stock
Ernst Gamperl
Zwiesprache Dialogue34€ Read moreUnique wooden sculptures as the result of a ten‑year process
Ernst Gamperl (b. 1965, Munich; lives and works in Tremosine) is fascinated by the dialogue with living material and the quality of the unpredictable. He creates room-sized wooden objects, into the design of which he incorporates the natural drying process, cracks, and irregularities—a revolutionary technique of woodturning which has led to completely new standards, technically often at the limits of what is feasible. In a ten-year process, Gamperl transformed a roughly 230-year-old uprooted oak into an ensemble of vessels and sculptures. The artist’s book conveys the fascination of the material and the craft, brings us close to the objects, and documents the challenging work process.
-
Agostino Iacurci
10€ Add to cartAgostino Iacurci’s (b. Foggia, Italy, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings, sculptures, installations, and murals are based on vegetal forms and botanical subjects. Lucid compositions in radiant colors unfurl fantastical ornaments that transcend the division between figuration and abstraction and the hierarchical distinctions of applied art, design, fine art, and folk art. His central theme is the painted garden, in which he stages plants, humans, architecture, geometry, and decoration in a fashionably theatrical landscape. In Iacurci, the interpenetration of nature and civilization is real, integrating mythological motifs from across the history of art and culture, from antiquity to futurism and postmodernism, into his singular style.
Agostino Iacurci studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Since 2009, he has realized numerous large-format murals and installations for public and private institutions. He has also worked with international brands including Apple, Adidas, Hermès, and Starbucks.
-
Dietmar Lutz
Ein Jahr40€ Add to cartDay by Day
For a full year, from August 2020 until August 2021, Dietmar Lutz (b. Ellwangen, 1968; lives and works in Düsseldorf) painted or drew a picture every day in which he rendered a scene or detail from his day-to-day life. All 365 works appear here in chronological sequence, either in reproductions or in photographs showing them in the setting in which they were created. Taken together, the series constitutes a radically subjective review of one year. The paintings capture memories, but although they invariably owe their existence to a particular situation, they do not necessarily frame it as a memorable event. The artist observes himself in his world and defines his role in it. Painting as a daily task seems to structure time rather than the other way around. Each picture opens up a new space in which the different facets of time manifest themselves to the senses.
Dietmar Lutz studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and rose to renown with large-format paintings in which he portrays situations from ordinary life and weaves references to the histories of film and literature. Lutz is a cofounder of the German-British artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, with which he has exhibited at the 1st Athens Biennale; Deitch Projects, New York; Tate Britain, London; and elsewhere.
-
Laura Schawelka
Double Issues24€ Add to cartSales Spaces without Merchandise
In her installations, Laura Schawelka (b. 1988, Munich; lives and works in Berlin) makes use of photography, video, and sculpture in a multilayered dialogue. In her latest works, the artist focuses on the role of photography in the development of modern consumer society. What does it mean if goods are only communicated through other goods, such as computers, cell phones, tablets? If this withholding of the genuine object is precisely what prompts the desire for it? The artist creates sales spaces without merchandise, in which images, photographs, and videos have replaced consumer goods of any kind.
Laura Schawelka studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main as a student of Tobias Rehberger master-class. In 2015, she was awarded the Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and in 2017 she moved to Paris as the recipient of a studio bursary of Hessische Kulturstiftung.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
- Shortlist German Photo Book Award 2019/2020
Arina Dähnick
The MIES Project45€ Add to cartIn the Footsteps of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
In her photographic works, Arina Dähnick (b. 1965, Krefeld; lives and works in Berlin) deals with urbanity, spatial reality and visual perception. She discovered the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 2012, when, after a thunderstorm, she perceived the Neue Nationalgalerie in a both fascinating and paradoxical spatial experience of boundless vastness – and a simultaneous feeling of being held. From then on she photographed the building under various conditions until its closure in 2015, afterwards following in Mies van der Rohe’s footsteps from Berlin to Brno, from Chicago to New York. Dähnick captured his most famous buildings – including the Villa Tugendhat, the Seagram Building, and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments – in impressive photo series, which have been exhibited during the Chicago Architecture Biennial amongst others. The book was awarded the silver medal of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis.
