FINALE
DIRECTOR’S CUT
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Sören Fischer, Svenja Kriebel, Andrea Löschnig, Annette Reich als Geschenk an Britta E. Buhlmann |
| Author(s) | Hanna G. Diedrichs gen. Thormann, Sören Fischer, Svenja Kriebel, Andrea Löschnig, Annette Reich, Britta E. Buhlmann |
| Design | Studio SÜD |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Size | 29 x 28 cm |
| Pages | 160 |
| Illustrations | 100 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-043-9 |
The 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.”
More books
-
Beate Passow
Monkey Business24€ Add to cartDrawing on the Past to Build a Better Future
Beate Passow (b. Stadtoldendorf, Germany, 1945; lives and works in Munich) creates installations, photodocumentaries, and collages that seek to salvage her subjects from oblivion, though as she sees it, her art is an effort to come to terms not so much with the past as with the present. When her compositional inventions touch on painful memories, their objective is not to arrive at new insights. Rather, she aims to uncover visible and verifiable states of affairs and throw them into sharp relief. In her cycle of pictures Monkey Business, the artist unfolds a mysterious fairy-tale world with a political edge. Strange animals and mythical figures populate the large-format black-and-white tableaux, which a closer look reveals to be woven tapestries. The unusual protagonists roam readily identifiable locations: Gibraltar, New York’s Wall Street, Brussels, or the island of Lampedusa. Behind these ostensibly simple facts of geography loom the darker aspects of contemporary European politics: Passow’s work calls for a debate on the systems, economic structures, and political movements that rule the continent.
-
Erich Hörtnagl
to be a man38€ Add to cart“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” The witty remark, attributed to Diane Arbus, succinctly captures the twofold code at work in Erich Hörtnagl’s (b. Innsbruck, 1950) pictures. Aesthetically appealing photographs, mostly in black and white, show men (and women) in a wide variety of cultural, social, and religious contexts: from Swedish bikers and drag queens to monks in Myanmar, from Turkish belly dancers to Tyrolean performers in traditional attire. What looks at first glance like a conventional photobook soon reveals itself to be a brilliantly staged interactive riddle around clichéd notions of masculinity with positive and negative connotations, around gender roles and persistent stereotypes. With the deftly composed visual meta-narrative in to be a man, Hörtnagl, a seasoned theater and film director, lures us into a trap, and the only way out is by taking the challenge head-on: by engaging in self-reflection and questioning our own prejudices and ideas.
-
Thomas Lehnerer
Grott18€ Add to cartA Facsimile by the Theologian and Artist
The genesis of images is a central aspect of the work of the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (b. Munich, 1955; d. ibid., 1995). In drawings and sculptures, as well as in spatial and conceptual works, the production of images creates a counter-world to our own lives. By transferring fundamental experiences of human existence into art, Lehnerer creates an equivocal, anthropological space for observation and reflection. The artist’s book Grott, published in 1986, contains ambiguous elements. All drawings are positioned on the right page. In the not yet dried state, a double image was formed on the left side, which relativizes the “primary image.” The depictions of animals, people, and the environment were drawn nearly without interruption from a single line. In this style of continuous movement, the overall image can be traced back to its beginning. For Lehnerer, it was important to understand human (self-)consciousness from the perspective of the history of evolution, since there are countless models of thought and belief within this narrative. Grott refers in the title, as well as in the drawings, to the charged relationship between the earthly and the spiritual.
- With socks designed by the artist and augmented reality
JOHN BOCK
AURAAROMA-Ω-BEULE42€ Add to cartThe Augmented Reality Book for John Bock
John Bock (b. 1965 in Gribbohm, lives in Berlin) is one of the most important contemporary performance and video artists. In his works characterized by humor and absurdity, the artist places language, human bodies, everyday objects, and spaces in peculiar relationships to each other. He attained international recognition with the installation LiquidityAuraAromaPortfolio at the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. Together with his work Voll die Beule from 2013, it is now included in the collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim. The present augmented reality book not only contextualizes his work, but also immerses the viewer/reader directly in his performances, in which the artist’s head emerges and a filled rubber glove leaks out. A completely new approach to the works of John Bock, packaged in a pair of socks designed by the artist.
John Bock studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and since 2004 has taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe as Professor of Sculpture. He has participated in the 55th Biennale di Venezia, and his works have been featured worldwide in solo exhibitions at, among others, the Berlinische Galerie, the Contemporary Austin, Texas, the Barbican Centre, London, and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
-
Angelika J. Trojnarski
Noble Earth38€ Add to cartAngelika J. Trojnarski (born 1979 in Mrągowo/Polen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) examines facets of nature through an ecological, scientific, poetic study of their phenomena. Through a process centered on painting, her art articulates allegorical relationships between some of the most significant contentions of our time: humans and nature, strength and fragility, crisis and hope. She expresses a desire to understand nature by reproducing its workings, pointing to its incredible might while underscoring its increasing fragility. Trojnarski overlays raw canvases with paper fragments, employing brushwork and collage to apply materials like graphite or soot, generating a source of energy and suspense through color and contrast. The monograph offers an overview of the last decade of Trojnarski’s work.
Angelika J. Trojnarski 2006–2013 studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. 2006–2009 Painting with Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and Herbert Brandl, from 2010 Free Art with Andreas Gursky.
-
Ottmar Hörl
Second Life – 100 Arbeiter14,80€ Add to cartThe Workman Sculptures at Völklinger Hütte Steelworks
Sculptures on topics of everyday life are at the center of the work of Ottmar Hörl (b. 1950, Nauheim; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main and Wertheim). His major projects gained international recognition, they are based on the artist’s concept of art as a communication model. For the Völklingen Ironworks World Heritage Site, Hörl conceived the sculpture project Second Life, which features 100 figures modeled on the Völklingen ironworker with helmet and work clothes. The book documents the impressive project that focuses on the universal theme of the Völklingen Ironworks: work and the working people.
- Out of stock
Flatland
35€ Read moreBetween the Dimensions
The title of this book quotes a literary work by Edwin A. Abbott that was first published in 1884 and gradually gained considerable fame: an allegorical satire whose protagonists are geometric figures, narrated by a square that relates its discovery of a three-dimensional world. Flatland examines the ways in which artists have found inspiration in the formal vocabularies of abstraction since the 1960s. The lavishly designed book gathers works from the past six decades that challenge orthodox interpretations of abstraction.
Contributing artists: Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Francis Baudevin, Philippe Decrauzat, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Hoël Duret, Sylvie Fanchon, Liam Gillick, Mark Hagen, Christian Hidaka, Sonia Kacem, Tarik Kiswanson, Vera Kox, Sarah Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Damián Navarro, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Bruno Peinado, Julien Prévieux, Eva Taulois, John Tremblay, Pierre Vadi, Elsa Werth, Raphaël Zarka
-
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.
-
Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
-
Larissa Kikol
Neue abstrakte Malerei26€ Add to cartAbstract painting has reinvented itself: rid of political and ideological burdens, it now stands for pure creative autonomy. From the Abstract Expressionism of the postwar era to today’s expansive ease—in essays and conversations, Larissa Kikol sheds light on how this art form broke free of the narratives that attended its emergence and performed a “great reset.” From the seminal innovations of Katharina Grosse or Albert Oehlen and radically subjectivist approaches in Cecily Brown or André Butzer to cutting-edge tendencies like Dirty Minimalism and Post Vandalism, the book presents thrilling insights into a painting that puts emotion, color, and shapes center stage. An inspiring look at the renaissance of abstract art in the 21st century and a must-have reference work for all art lovers.
Artists: Frederic Anderson, Karla Black, Frank Bowling, Andreas Breunig, Jenny Brosinski, Cecily Brown, André Butzer, Diamonds Crew, Willehad Eilers, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Antwan Horfee, Aneta Kajzer, Joan Mitchell, Michael Müller, Oscar Murillo, NEU, NUG, Albert Oehlen, David Ostrowski, Over, Daisy Parris, Marco Pariani, Jackson Pollock, Christopher Wool
-
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.
-
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt – Wie eine Spinne im Netz
38€ Add to cartRuth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. Wurzen, Germany, 1932; lives in Berlin) is one the few East German female artists who devoted themselves to graphic art produced on the typewriter. Working on her trusty “Erika,” she arranged letters, digits, commas, and plus signs to compose imaginative visual creations. Under her hands, the black and red characters were transformed into poetic verbal images, gently undulating waves, serial patterns, and architectonic or figurative formations. Sometimes verging on concrete poetry, these typewritings also evince unmistakable affinities with conceptual and minimalist art. In the 1980s, the artist expanded on them in collages that recall Hannah Höch’s Dadaist visual montages. With her graphic work, Wolf-Rehfeldt was also an active participant in the GDR’s mail-art program: she sent the typewritings to artists beyond the impassable borders of her country, building an extensive network of correspondences that spanned the globe.
The richly illustrated monograph underscores the diversity and contemporary relevance of Wolf-Rehfeldt’s works, which were created in the shadow of the Cold War and address the fragility of peace as well as early manifestations of the environmental devastation wrought by the industrial age.
-
Franziska Windisch
Walk with a wire14€ Add to cartThe interweaving of traces, sounds, and movements in an impressive work of sound art
The narrow brown magnetic tape of an audio cassette runs through a half-opened hand, slides through the fingers, is palpated in constant motion, and finally falls to the ground. The hand and its touching, particles of sand and small stones leave their traces and, when the tape is played, generate a multi-layered soundscape with crackling and background noises.
In her performative action in the ruins of the city of Messene in the Peloponnese region of Greece, Franziska Windisch (b. 1983) thematizes aspects of repetition and recording. Her artistic examination of the vestiges of the ancient urban space, the reciprocal transition from traces to writing in her video documentation, and the graphic element of the line visible on the ground lead to a reflection on temporality, dissolution, and decay. -
Jenny Michel
Doors, Windows and Cells38€ Add to cartThe Detritus of Our Society
For around two decades, the artist Jenny Michel (b. Worms, 1975; lives and works in Berlin) has devoted herself to minute particles such as dust, cobwebs, and electromagnetic fields in space. Her fascination with orders of knowledge, symbolism, and utopian visions is reflected by installations, drawings, prints, and sculptures that she exhibits in carefully composed sprawling ensembles. Aggregating fantastic fragments of the world manufactured from paper, adhesive tape, staples, and other industrially made small parts, Michel builds disconcertingly dense structures—human knowledge is transformed into the debris of civilization, its legibility lost beneath palimpsestic layers of meanings and resignifications. The extensive monograph surveys major series in the artist’s oeuvre and presents new works on paper.
Jenny Michel studied at Kunsthochschule Kassel and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been on view at Museum Wiesbaden, the Draiflessen Collection, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and Berlinische Galerie, among other venues. In 2010, Michel was honored with the HAP Grieshaber Prize.
-
Sabrina Fritsch
syntaxerror28€ Add to cartSabrina Fritsch’s (b. Neunkirchen/Saar, 1979; lives and works in Cologne) paintings explore the potentials of the compositional process and the mechanisms of perception. Many of them feature coarse structures, textile surfaces, and delicate superimpositions. In this publication, Fritsch, who was recently appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, presents a résumé of the painterly oeuvre she has developed since her graduation from the same school in 2008. It encompasses two related books, each of which undertakes a structured study of a major strand in Fritsch’s art. One offers a chronological survey of a representative selection of works created between 2008 and 2019 that illustrate her playful and experimental engagement with the constituents of the painted picture: the picture-as-object, the organization of pictorial space, and the phenomenology of physical color. In addition to works on canvas boasting a wide variety of applications of materials and paint, it also covers serial variations in prints. The other showcases three exhibitions and bodies of work dating from 2020 and 2021 that are dedicated to the three color systems RGB, black-and-white (BAW), and CMYK.
- 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.
-
Joanna Pousette-Dart
32€ Read more„A kind of Dialogue between Myself and the Horizon.“
The works of Joanna Pousette-Dart (b. 1947, New York; lives and works in New York) are deeply rooted in the vast expanse of the American desert landscape, without ever committing themselves to a strict objectivity. As early as the 1970s, the artist abandoned the rectangular form of her canvas in favor of dynamically balanced panels that open out to the respective space. This volume presents her fascinating paintings from 2004 till 2019, which oscillate between landscape and abstraction, line and form. Born in New York to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, Joanna Pousette-Dart’s experience as a painter rises from rich tradition. Her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others.
-
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 -
Michel Majerus 2022
49€ Add to cartMichel Majerus (1967–2002) ranks among the most interesting painters of his generation and left a singular and multifaceted oeuvre that still speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns. His works quote phenomena of everyday culture such as comic strips, advertisements, and videogames as well as sources of inspiration from art history ranging from minimalism to Pop Art. Decontextualizing the different elements of pictures, he integrated them into novel contexts of meaning by, for instance, setting them on a par with art-historical references.
Twenty years after his death, a series of exhibitions throughout Germany showcase different periods and aspects of his creative output. Five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate, and Galerie neugerriemschneider, Berlin, pay tribute to Michel Majerus’s art in unprecedented breadth.
Concurrently, thirteen museums mount presentations of works by Michel Majerus from their collections: Ludwig Forum Aachen; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum Hannover; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Saarlandmuseum—Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
The extensive publication accompanying the exhibition series Michel Majerus 2022 includes three essays and two artists’ contributions as well as visual documentation of the exhibitions and presentations from the collections. It is rounded out by a biographical sketch of Michel Majerus, a history of exhibitions of his work, and archival photographs.
-
Jan Muche
Agora42€ Add to cartTracing the Wear of the Life of Labor
The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century’s ideologies – Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche’s roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear’s “heroes of labor” into focus.
Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin.
