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
-
Michelle Jezierski
Simultaneous Spaces34€ Add to cartMichelle Jezierski’s (b. Berlin, 1981; lives and works in Berlin) paintings unfurl simultaneous spaces that are awash in light. Contrasts between bright and dark and muted as well as lucent hues engender a singular atmosphere characterized by depth and dynamism. The artist is as invested in the perception of these constructed spaces as in the capaciousness of natural landscapes. In her paintings, luminous colors and geometric disturbances achieve shifting balances between the extremes of order and chaos, light and shadow, interior and exterior, structure and flux. Simultaneous Spaces, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, presents forty-five works painted between 2017 and 2022.
Michelle Jezierski studied with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of Arts and graduated from Valérie Favre’s class in 2008. She also received a fellowship for a semester abroad at Cooper Union, New York, where she studied with Amy Sillman.
-
Harte Zeiten
Ciężkie Czasy34€ Add to cartIncreasingly pressing global political and societal challenges are always also rewarding subjects of creative engagement, and sometimes artists devise anticipative approaches to real-world problems.
Harte Zeiten—Ciężkie Czasy is a cooperative venture launched by Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg; Port25—Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Mannheim; and Galeria Miejska bwa, Bydgoszcz, Poland. It showcases works by altogether ten Polish and ten German contemporary artists. Putting the principle that art knows no boundaries into practice, the publication, with statements from Wolfgang Ullrich, Joanna Kiliszek, Schamma Schahadat, and others as well as documentation of the symposium held in September 2021, inspires forward-looking reflections on the conditions in which cultures thrive and similarities and differences between the two countries and beyond.
-
Born in the Woods
Jems Koko Bi & HAP Grieshaber24€ Add to cartThe Political Substance of Wood
Jems Koko Bi (b. Sinfra, Côte d’Ivoire, 1966; lives and works in Kaarst, Germany, Dakar, and Abidjan) is world-renowned for the monumental wood sculptures he creates using a machine saw. This book juxtaposes his most recent body of works with the large-format woodcuts of HAP Grieshaber (b. Rot an der Rot, Germany, 1909; d. Eningen unter Achalm, 1981). Although the two artists never met, their oeuvres are characterized by similar themes, values, and materials. The central concern is the fate of the forests and its momentous political and social implications: Grieshaber’s woodcuts articulate his principled opposition to the predatory exploitation of nature in the 1970s—an issue that is more relevant than ever today in light of the climate crisis and the Fridays for Future movement. Koko Bi’s figural groups bring this tradition of political art into our time, making a global and universally compelling case for a sustainable husbandry of our resources.
Jems Koko Bi studied at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts et de l’Action Culturelle (INSAAC), Abidjan, and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; at documenta 13; the Havana Biennial; and several Venice Biennials and Dakar Biennials. In 2019, he founded the forest biennial Abidjan Green Arts.
HAP Grieshaber studied advertising art at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart. His work is regarded as a signal contribution to the renewal of the woodcut medium in the twentieth century. He participated in documentas I, II, and III, held a professorship at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, and was honored with numerous awards and retrospectives.
-
Larry Rivers
An American-European Dialogue38€ Add to cartBetween French Modernism and the New York School
The American painter, musician, and filmmaker Larry Rivers (b. 1923, New York; d. 2002, New York) is considered one of the most influential protagonists of the New York art scene in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. He played with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, was a close friend of Frank O’Hara, and pioneered Pop Art. In dealing with contemporary artist colleagues and historical role models, he always strived to making painting visible as a medium of reflection. From an early age, Rivers was preoccupied with French painting of the late nineteenth century. During his stay in Paris in 1961/62, he met Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, whereupon the range of materials he used was extended to wood, cardboard, and electric light. For the first time, the present volume – the first monograph in twenty years – sheds light on Larry Rivers’ idiosyncratic art with a view to the tension between traditional French painting and Abstract Expressionism around Willem de Kooning.
-
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.
-
Maxim Gunga
10€ Add to cartThe painter Maxim Gunga is utterly unafraid of physicality. His canvas is a riot of oil paints huddling up against one another, fusing like the beasts, the humans, and the urban landscape of Berlin that serve him as motifs. Body and soul, animal nature and architecture, the profane and the sacred, subculture and mass culture—everything interpenetrates in Gunga’s paintings in large formats, melded into hybrid bodies. The result is an ecstatic intimacy, a flowing of colors and more or less abstracted dynamic forms toward their primal state, toward the matrix, toward pure energy: eternal transformation. It makes sense, then, that his pictures also amalgamate diverse styles and periods in the history of painting. He borrows from (Neo-)Expressionism, from Art Brut, from Baselitz, Lüpertz, the Neue Wilde, from modernism and Fauvism, from van Gogh and Matisse. His pinpoint brushwork, which reveals his extensive training, interweaves art history with our contemporary lifeworld and our affects. All the specters of the past and the present come to meet us in the pictures gathered in this catalogue, in a frenzy of the senses, in the primordial soup of Berlin, into which we dive with joyful abandon.
-
Anna Bogouchevskaia
Shouldn’t Be Gone25€ Add to cartAnna Bogouchevskaia (b. Moscow, 1966; lives and works in Berlin) sees her work in sculpture as a geopolitical engagement with concerns on the intersection between figuration and abstraction. Macroscopic aluminum drops, bizarre bronze flowers, fog and snow made of silver—the artist, a committed environmentalist, has created a peculiar and fascinating world of evanescent natural phenomena. Focusing on two molecules—carbon dioxide and water—in their various states of aggregation, she draws attention to the threats posed by climate change.
The publication Shouldn’t be gone presents Bogouchevskaia’s most recent works since 2019: an urgent message of warning from an artist whose sculptural oeuvre even today has the air of a monument to a world in demise.
- Release November 2025
Bettina Buck
Finding Form45€ Add to cartThe German sculptor Bettina Buck (1974-2017) called attention to herself with her “performative sculptures,” which she often presented vis-à-vis museal objects. Buck’s preferred materials came from the hardware store: corrugated cardboard, ceramic tiles, pressed foam, or plastic foil, which are all not meant to last. Out of these materials she created a kind of changeable and transient “protagonists,” who didn’t have a final form but rather emphasized the actual process of finding form (as well as losing form). In a provocative action in 2015, Buck dragged an oversized foam bloc through a museum collection and let it rest next to famous artworks, which gained a new dynamic in this interplay. Buck herself said once that her works were meant to “simultaneously attract and alienate the viewer.” In the exhibition space the objects should “create a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with its surroundings.”
Finding Form, a posthumous monograph presents Bucks complete sculptural works on over 300 pages and contains texts by Phyllida Barlow, Paolo Icaro, Cecilia Canziani, and Andrea Maria Popelka. The book was conceived and published by the artist’s estate, Bureau Bettina Buck.
- Release October 2025
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Monographie68€ Add to cartThe 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.
-
Steven Shearer
Working from Life58€ Add to cart“Today’s images are echoes of how people have always been depicted.”
Steven Shearer (b. New Westminster, BC, 1968; lives and works in Vancouver) works in a range of media including printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collages of found photographs. His portraits of individuals in decorated settings earned Shearer international acclaim. They show heroes from the past—protagonists of musical subcultures or the history of art. The archetypal creative minds in their studios appear together with their works; the interiors surrounding them reflect their psychological constitution. Shearer paints them in the style of Symbolism, the German Romantics, or the Fauves. Imitating the perspective painting of the Renaissance, he virtually pulls the beholder into his pictures.
Steven Shearer participated in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design New York Summer Studio Programme in 1992 and studied at the Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver, in 1992. In 2011, he represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale.
-
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
READ48€ Add to cartThroughout 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.
- temporarily not available
Der tanzende Blick
Roman Novitzkys Stuttgarter BallettRead moreWeightlessness, Grace, Emotions
The photographs by Roman Novitzky (b. 1984 in Bratislava) reveal the entire vocabulary of dance—and yet convey much more than this. With his camera, the first soloist of the Stuttgart Ballet not only captures hidden moments in rehearsal or from the side stage, but also opens the door to his own cosmos for the viewer. He depicts sweat and tension, doubt and euphoria, and gives the audience intimate insight behind the scenes of the Stuttgart Ballet. Roman Novitzky’s first monograph comprises more than sixty photographs of the ballet hall, the cloakroom, and guest performances. It not only stands for his two passions, dance and photography, but also describes his photographic approach, shaped by years of dance experience, which gives the viewer familiar insights into his everyday surroundings.
-
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.
-
Logan T. Sibrel
But I’m Different50€ Add to cartLogan T. Sibrel’s (born 1986 in Jasper, IN, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) paintings and drawings depict moments of great joy and beauty, but also fear, sadness, desire and aggression. Frequently only part of the mostly male figures is depicted. Sibrel’s cropping can feel simultaneously intimate and alienating—fragmentary stories are told that touch you through their authenticity and vulnerability. Sibrel’s artistic maneuvers include overlapping, shifted perspectives, and text fragments that appear like snippets of overheard conversations and thus create a collage effect.
This book is the artist’s first comprehensive publication with works from the last twenty months. While the first part presents the artist’s paintings, the second part presents his drawings with the edges of the backing paper digitally removed so that it looks as if the images were drawn directly into the book.
Logan T. Sibrel completed his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington in 2009 and his master’s degree at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2011. His most recent solo exhibitions include In Another Life and Galerie Thomas Fuchs (Stuttgart, DE) and Brake For Your Sweetheart at Auxier Kline (New York, NY).
- Release October 2025
Werner Hahn
Kailas. Berg und Gott72€ Add to cartKailas is far more than just a mountain—it is a symbol of spiritual quest, transcendence, and enlightenment. In this book, the painter and photographer Werner Hahn (b. Karlsbad, now Czech Republic, 1944) approaches the holiest peak in Asia from a unique perspective: as an artist, traveler, and profound connoisseur of its cultural history. This book interweaves art, mythology, and historical accounts from Buddhism and Hinduism. Hahn’s personal travel experiences, complemented by reflections on Western travel literature and spiritual sources, enter into a dialogue with ancient traditions, revealing Kailas as a place of both deep personal experience and artistic contemplation. A visual pilgrimage to one of the most significant mountains in the world.
-
Candida Höfer
Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn35€ Add to cartThe Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Yesterday and Today
The imposing presence of architecture captured in the absence of humans: that is the defining characteristic of the photographs with which Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde; lives and works in Cologne) has risen to international renown. In 1992, she captured the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in ten analogue black-and-white pictures that have not been on public display. In 2020, Höfer returned to the institute to take more pictures using a digital camera. The two series now make their public début in the institute’s halls and are gathered in this book. Undertaking a historically and aesthetically captivating comparison, Höfer probes the ways in which university life has changed over almost three decades.
Candida Höfer was a member of Bernd Becher’s inaugural photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works were shown at documenta 11 in 2002, and in 2003, she and Martin Kippenberger represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.
- Release September 2025
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.
-
André Butzer
Miettinen Collection30€ Add to cartAndré Butzer (b. Stuttgart, 1973; lives in Berlin) rose to renown with pictures he describes as “science fiction expressionism” and iconic characters like the “Peace Siemense,” the “Men of Shame,” or the “Woman” as well as seemingly abstract compositions. Artistic predecessors he admires and emulates include Walt Disney, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Henry Ford. Butzer’s utopian artistic vision is anchored in the fictional place “NASAHEIM”, a kind of pilgrimage destination in outer space. Yet his paintings should not be mistaken for illustrations of narrative structures; they articulate something that could not be said before. Similes of a sort, they embody the forever recurring extremes of history as emblems of human existence.
André Butzer briefly studied at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, before enrolling at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), from which he was expelled after two semesters in 1996. He went on to found the autonomous and anti-institutional Akademie Isotrop (1996–2000), where over twenty artists including Markus Selg, Jonathan Meese, and, in loose association, John Bock trained one another. In 2001, Butzer teamed up with Björn Dahlem to establish the Institute for SDI Dream Research.
-
Simone Haack – Untangling the Strands / Démêler les Fils
24€ Add to cartSimone Haack’s (b. Rotenburg/Wümme, 1978; lives in Berlin) most recent body of work delves into the theme of hair as a parameter of identity straddling the division between nature and culture. Her second publication with DCV is released on the occasion of two exhibitions: Untangling the Strands at Berlin’s Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik, a collection of casts of ancient sculpture, which are seen in dialogue with her hair pictures; and Helix of Realism at Galerie Droste, Paris, which is part of the official program of events around the grand Surrealism exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in celebration of the Surrealist Manifesto’s centennial. The new book is the first to shed light on the aspect of the surreal in the artist’s oeuvre and uncovers a major source of her visual inspiration: the dream diaries that Haack has kept since she was seventeen and the interest in the unconscious they reflect. It is above all the logic of the dream as well as feelings and moods that inform her paintings.
Haack: “My goal is to use the means of realism to visualize what cannot be seen. To get into an automatism that lets the unconscious speak in order to infuse the pictures with a life of their own. To shed light on the domain where the myths originate.”
-
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.
