Felix Schramm
Things To Come
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Sebastian Hammerschmidt, Elisabeth Mangini, Anne Vieth, Maria Villa |
| Design | Lai Ping So |
| Size | 24 x 32 cm |
| Cover | 7 booklets glued together |
| Pages | 168 |
| Illustrations | 138 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-177-1 |
Felix Schramm’s (b. Hamburg, 1970; lives and works in Düsseldorf) sculptural oeuvre reflects a probing engagement with space and the body. In works in a variety of media, including installations that intervene into a given setting, sculptures, and collages, the artist creates three-dimensional forms out of classical materials and industrial staples as well as detritus and dust. Deformations, rifts, cracks, or impurities undermine the existing order in his constructed formal ensembles, allowing novel correspondences in space and interconnections across time to emerge. The material and its subjection to form are held in a precarious balance; disintegration, which is an integral element of Schramm’s art, paves the way for artistic assertion and reformulation. The extensive publication gathers works and exhibitions of the past five years. It is Schramm’s first monograph, presenting a cross-section of his entire oeuvre with all bodies of work.
Felix Schramm studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, from 1991 until 1993 and at the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf, where he was in Jannis Kounellis’s master class, from 1994 until 1998. He rounded out his education with residencies in Tokyo in 2000 and at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2008.
More books
-
Sinje Dillenkofer
Archives Vivantes34€ Add to cartSinje Dillenkofer’s (b. Neustadt a.d.W., 1959) body of work ARCHIVES VIVANTES inquires into the idea of the “archive,” harnessing the means of visual art to allow us to see and perceive what the archive does not reveal. With staged photographs that combine conceptual rigor with a wide spectrum of creative techniques and devices, Dillenkofer’s pictorial essay turns the spotlight on specimens, artifacts, graphic art, and writings compiled by the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ornithologist Carlo von Erlanger (1872–1904). Examining the archive as a model of nature and reality as well as a mirror of “human nature,” the artist develops compositional ideas inspired by the peculiar features of the objects in the collections in visual analogies, pictorial spaces, and spatial compositions. Animals and plants that died long ago “in the service of science” are vividly embodied through the distinctive use of light and shadow. The resulting pictures consider the archive in a new context, framed by our complex relationships with nature, humankind, society and its values and ideals, circumstances and constellations of power. The pictures were taken in six German collection archives: at the Museum bei der Kaiserpfalz Ingelheim, the Naturhistorisches Museum Mainz, the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt, the Stadtmuseum Berlin, and the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History. Dillenkofer was the first artist to be invited by the Berlin State Library—Prussian Cultural Heritage to translate Humboldt’s American travel diaries into art.
Sinje Dillenkofer studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and has taught at universities and art academies. Her work is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Berlinische Galerie, among others.
-
Matthew Davis
Kustodiev28€ Add to cartAn Expressive Instant in Painting
The art of Matthew Davis (b. 1969, Colchester, UK; lives and works in Berlin) operates between the micro and macro dimensions, between control and chance. Working with extraordinary precision, the artist applies drops of synthetic resin varnishes and enamel paints to canvases laid flat. The artist’s book Kustodiev showcases a recent innovative turn in Davis’s output, whose latest works were inspired by the lusciously colorful pictures of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev (1878–1927). Kustodiev was manufactured using offset presses and Office Offset, a largely forgotten reproduction process based on miniature offset printing machines. The publication is released in a limited edition of 250 copies.
Matthew Davis studied at the Camberwell College of Arts, London, and the Norwich School of Art and Design. His work has been shown at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven; and other museums and galleries.
-
Isabelle Graw
In einer anderen Welt. Notizen 2014–201726€ Add to cartPersonal Observation as an Analytical Lens on Society
Isabelle Graw (b. 1962, Hamburg; lives in Berlin) is publisher of the magazine Texte zur Kunst and has been professor of art theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2002. In this book, she branches out from her work as an art historian and critic to offer reflections on a wide range of observations from her own life. Never before has Graw addressed her readers more frankly than in these 160 notes.
“She is blindingly frank, addressing the questions that envelop her days: waxing salons, the arrival of Syrian refugees in Germany, exhibitions and grief, electoral and family politics. Subtly, Graw reveals how impressions and beliefs arise out of circumstance.”
Chris Kraus, American filmmaker and author of I Love Dick“In crisp and striking vignettes, this book shows how self-scrutiny and minute observation of the world intermesh and form the dense web of her analysis. This is a unique and original book, literary, psychological and sociological, all at once.”
Eva Illouz, French-Israeli sociologist -
Jan Zöller
Ritual Believer40€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) paintings, sculptures, and installations probe the discrepancy between economic production and the spiritual and magical dimension of art. The artist’s book Ritual Believer surveys the so-called charcoal paintings series, created between 2019 and 2023. For these works, the artist paints directly in charcoal on the unprimed canvas, making it impossible to correct “blunders.” Another distinguishing feature is the virtual absence of color; the austerity of the compositions contrasts with Zöller’s other, often intensely colorful paintings. The motifs that are the hallmark of his oeuvre—birds, running legs—are complemented by writing and text. Another aspect of this shift is that the works’ titles play a central part and almost figure as a creative element in their own right. For the text in the book, the artist sent the titles of the works shown to his brother, who wove them into a story. An appendix presents scanned archival materials. Notebooks and zines Zöller produced between 2015 and 2017 provide interesting insight into how he finds his motifs and his compositional process.
Jan Zöller studied with Marijke van Warmerdam and Leni Hoffmann at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 2012 until 2017 and with Jean-Marc Bustamante and Götz Arndt at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016.
-
Leszek Skurski
Catalogue raisonné Vol. 1: Works from 1990–202459€ Add to cartLeszek Skurski (b. Gdańsk, 1973; lives and works in Fulda and Mallorca) is known for his singular and immediately recognizable white paintings. Small black and gray figures emerge from the white landscapes, always set in relation to one another, in pairs or groups. Exposed on the expansive and boundless-seeming plane, they silently tell a story that remains as open-ended as the pictures. In a few spare brushstrokes or lines drawn with the palette knife, Skurski’s superb neoimpressionism deftly captures the atmosphere that weighs down on his characters and holds his compositions in suspense.
The extensive monograph presents over two thousand works from more than three decades. Essays embed the various bodies of work in their art-historical contexts.
-
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.
-
Nadira Husain
Manzil Monde30€ Add to cartNadira Husain’s (b. Paris, 1980; lives and works in Berlin, Paris, and Hyderabad) work combines figures, symbols, and ornaments from different cultures in complex imageries that reflect her own multicultural experience. To achieve a harmonious, though by no means placid, coexistence of all elements, the artist harnesses painting, drawing, printing processes, traditional artisan practices, and a range of materials including textile and ceramics, recognizing no hierarchy of media or genre. Hybridization and the translocation of motifs serve her to tease out similarities as well as divergences between myth and pop culture: the Indian deity, the cartoon character, and the fashion label appear as equals in the universe of her art.
The book contains several essays that explore Nadira Husain’s oeuvre as a significant contribution to the discourse around postmigration, transculturality, and feminism in contemporary art.
Nadira Husain studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is currently a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-teaches with the Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina.
-
FINALE
DIRECTOR’S CUT25€ Add to cartThe Best Part …
In 1994, Britta Erika Buhlmann took the helm at Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, from which she will retire in the spring of 2022. In her twenty-eight-year tenure, she has enlarged the museum’s art collection and put her personal stamp on it. The classical modernism division was strengthened with the addition of major works by Otto Dix, Hermann Scherrer, and Karl Buchheister, while key pieces by François Morellet, Martin Willing, Werner Pokorny, and others have enriched the museum’s holdings in sculpture. A newly established division of the collection is dedicated to the creations of American artists such as Eric Levin, Kiki Smith, Charles Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart. More than a few artists—the list includes Carmen Herrera, Pierrette Bloch, Eva Jospin, and Nobuyuki Tanaka—made their German or even European début at the mpk.
In this book, members of the mpk’s staff offer their takes on selected works in the collection, unfurling a subjective story of their engagement with works that have earned the museum its reputation as a “place of discoveries.”
-
Wege in die Abstraktion
Marta Hoepffner und Willi Baumeister24,90€ Add to cartUnknown Influences of Modern Painting and Photography
Marta Hoepffner (b. 1912, Pirmasens; d. 2000, Lindenberg) is considered a pioneer of experimental photography. For the first time, this book compares the artist’s early photographic experiments, portraits, and color photographic studies with the paintings of Willi Baumeister (b. 1889, Stuttgart, d. 1955 Stuttgart). As professor at the Frankfurter Kunstschule – today’s Städelschule – Baumeister had a decisive influence on the development of his student Hoepffner. An extraordinary book that presents more than fifty works from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Marta Hoepffner’s works have been exhibited at, among others, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Willi Baumeister studied at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart and was a member of the influential November Group. He was defamed as “degenerate” during the Nazi regime and is now considered one of the outstanding artists of modernism.
-
CHRISTIAN ROTHMANN
The Light Touch45€ Add to cartA Monograph of Curiosity
Christian Rothmann (b. Kędzierzyn, Poland, 1954; lives and works in Berlin) is an artistic jack-of-all-trades, a builder of bridges between cultures, and a restless globetrotter and traveler across time. He takes photographs wherever he goes, especially when he is on the road, gathering documentaries with a creative edge, spontaneous yet powerfully symbolic pictures, or conceptual series. His motifs have included basketball hoops in the most unbelievable places, toys in restaurants and stores, exotic dishes, and—in the sequence Legs of the World—beautiful legs, of real-world women, but also of advertising-poster idols and art objects. He has a special knack for recruiting accomplices from all age groups and across social and cultural differences, as for his series you and me or Mother & Daughter. Fierce large-format paintings and delicate watercolors on small paper formats from Rothmann’s studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg complement his long-term photographic projects. The Light Touch presents the artist’s variegated visual art on almost five hundred pages.
-
Horst Schwitzki (1932–2016)
Eine Werkmonografie38€ Add to cart“I have my place in concrete painting!”
Horst Schwitzki’s (b. Marburg/Lahn, 1932; d. Frankfurt/Main, 2016) talent was recognized early on by renowned painters including Arnold Bode and Fritz Winter. During his studies at the Werkakademie, today’s Kunsthochschule, in Kassel, Schwitzki came into contact with concrete art. The network he built there opened doors for him, leading to exhibitions with prestigious galleries such as Rolf Ricke’s and Rudolf Zwirner’s. By the 1970s, however, he found himself compelled to make a living by working first as a graphic artist for an advertising agency and then as a construction draftsman. Although these day jobs left him little time for painting, he kept working on his art until 2010. This book is the first to present a comprehensive survey of Schwitzki’s oeuvre, which spans almost six decades and shows him continually devising novel creative solutions within the formal repertoire of concretion. The biography, rounded out by statements from contemporaries, colleagues, and friends, offers profound insights into the highs and lows of an artist’s life that stands as a characteristic example of the experiences of the generation born in the 1930s.
-
Secundino Hernández
Miettinen Collection36€ Add to cartSecundino Hernández’s (b. Madrid, 1975; lives and works in Madrid und Berlin) paintings and works on paper blend figuration and abstraction, the linearity of drawing and exuberant color, minimalism and gesture. Slowly and methodically moving across the canvas, Hernández sets down sinuous lines and marks, using a brush or applying the paint straight from the tube before rinsing and scratching off the surfaces. The resulting compositions feel organized yet charged with explosive energy and evince manifold references: a physicality reminiscent of Action Painting, cartoon-style terse figuration, and passages that bring to mind Old Masters and especially the Spaniards El Greco and Velázquez. As Hernández observes, his works “may look like Action Painting or Expressionism, but they represent a profound and painstaking scrutiny of these visual idioms, a way of articulating my own contemporary perspective on certain aesthetic movements.”
Secundino Hernández studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid from 1995 until 2000 and at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2005–2006.
-
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.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe Pop Artist as Master of Watercolor Painting
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is a master of the watercolor. Themes and motifs that also determine the painterly work gain a special expressiveness here: bizarre landscapes and opulent blossoms, fantastic celestial bodies and colorful abstractions. This opulent volume presents this part of Bengston’s oeuvre for the first time in great breadth with roughly 400 works. They demonstrate the skill of an artist who has brought watercolor to extreme precision and enriched it with numerous new aspects.
Billy Al Bengston attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. His works can be found in outstanding permanent collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-
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.
- English edition not available anymore
YAEL BARTANA
THE BOOK OF MALKA GERMANIARead moreShe Is Hope. She Is the Leader. She Is the Messiah. She Is History. She Is Fake.
The video artist Yael Bartana (b. Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, 1970; lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin) makes work that explores the visual language of identity and the politics of commemoration. The critical scrutiny of collective expectations of political or religious salvation is a central concern in her art. In the video installation Malka Germania—Hebrew for “Queen Germany”—Bartana creates alternative realities from the German-Jewish past and present that bring scenes of the collective unconscious to light. The publication follows the epiphany of Malka Germania, a female redeemer figure, in five chapters whose layout is modeled on that of the Talmud, the central text in Rabbinical Judaism. This organization reflects the polyphonic complexity, rich nuance, and ambivalence that the work casts into visuals and underscores that there is no simple answer. The book includes an interview with the artist and contributions by Sami Berdugo, Christina von Braun, Michael Brenner, Max Czollek, and others. It is published on occasion of the exhibition Yael Bartana—Redemption Now at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
Yael Bartana studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, the School of Visual Arts, New York, and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. Her work is held by collections all over the world and has been presented in solo exhibitions at venues including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Moderna Museet, Malmö.
Click here for the German edition.
- Release Spring 2026
Jorinde Voigt
Trust42€ Add to cartJorinde Voigt (b. Frankfurt am Main 1977, lives and works in Berlin), declared about the title of the book “Trust is a hybrid of longing for something and the engagement to reach it”. Voigt has thus decided to compile her works, which she realized from May 2019 to spring 2021, under the sign of confidence, connectedness, reliability and integrity. Many of the works presented place themselves in the continuity of those in Immersion, a book that brought together works from the period 2018-2019.
In the extensive volume Trust, sculptures and mobiles are shown alongside the works on paper for which she is known – here immersed in a pigment bath and then worked on with pastel, ink, India ink, oil pastels and gold leaf–.
Jorinde Voigt studied philosophy and modern German literature at the University of Göttingen from 1996. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and studied sociology, philosophy and general and comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin. 1999-2003 she studied art in multimedia at the University of the Arts with Christiane Möbus and visual arts and photography with Katharina Sieverding, whose master student she became in 2004. 2014-2019 she was professor of conceptual drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Since 2019 she is professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.
-
10 Jahre Württembergische Volksbühne
Reprint der Festschrift von 192915€ Add to cartCentennial Publication of the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen
In 2019, the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen (WLB)—one of the oldest regional theatres in Germany—is celebrating its 100th anniversary. On the occasion of this anniversary, the tenth commemorative publication by the Württembergische Volksbühne from 1929 is being reprinted. The unique document of the time visualizes in a special way the important role that the topics of cultural education and culture in rural areas, which are still relevant today, played in the young Weimar Republic immediately after the First World War. The brochure also documents both the mission and the daily work of the theater. In addition, the reprint is complemented by an essay from Joachim J. Halbekann, the principal of municipal archive of Esslingen, providing—for the first time in the history of the WLB—a comprehensive historical essay that examines the time betweeen 1919 and 1933/34.
-
René Holm
45€ Add to cartRené Holm goes for the big picture, painting the ambivalence of human existence and our relationship with nature. Some of his protagonists are physically naked, and all embody an interior life through their poses. The faceless figures function as screens onto which the beholders can project their own feelings, as symbols of universal human experiences. That is why, Holm notes, people very often recognize themselves in his protagonists. The effect is in part due to the forest, the setting of all pictures in this catalogue, which has been Holm’s studio and preferred backdrop for decades. It is where he finds the twilight that glows in all of our souls: woodlands nourish and menace us, they are home to helpful fairies and nasty demons, one can find life and death alike in them. He translates the sublime of the forest—a central motif in the Romantics—into a contemporary visual idiom. In his pursuit of this endeavor, he has recently ventured a radical aesthetic change: instead of using thick paints as before, he now applies the pigments to the canvas in thinner and drier layers. The book illustrates this spectacular fresh start, carrying us off into the depths of the soul and mysterious woodlands.
-
João Onofre
Untitled (in awe of)25€ Add to cartJoão Onofre’s works are tributes to art history and pop. He gleans what is in danger of being lost right now, realigns it, and translates it into something sublime. His art encourages the beholders to reconsider a past that has faded in collective memory with a critical eye and make peace with it. His creative process is guided by the material and a clearly defined concept that nonetheless does not restrict a work’s finding its own way. That is why he does not commit to a particular medium, making videos, performances, installations, and much more. What all his works have in common is that they probe the limitations of their medium and our perceptive capacities in novel ways. This catalogue presents three recent works in which the essence of Onofre’s art becomes manifest: he molds myths and symbols into awe-inspiring images, sounds, and forms—not for nothing have critics labeled him an alchemist. In the catalogue, his tangible compressions of cultural history are rendered in imposing pictures and flanked by an ambitious essay that places them in their context.
