




Flatland
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Musée Régional d‘Art Contemporain Occitanie, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d'Art Moderne, Grand-Duc-Jean |
| Author(s) | Marianne Derrien, Sarah Ihler-Meyer, Vincent Pécoil, Klaus Speidel |
| Design | Fanette Mellier |
| Size | 15 x 30 cm |
| Pages | 224 |
| Illustrations | 200 |
| Cover | Softcover in Swiss brochure with flaps |
| Language(s) | English, French |
| ISBN | 978-3-942924-21-4 | Out of stock |
Between 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
Out of stock
Out of stock
More books
- Out of stock

Jeff Wall
AppearanceRead moreA New Perspective on the Work of the Photo Artist
The trademark of Jeff Wall (b. 1946, Vancouver; lives and works in Vancouver) are large-scale backlit light boxes, which appear like carefully composed film stills. The art historian ties his works in manifold ways to art history and, due to his elaborate arrangements, is often compared to modern masters. Many pictures by Jeff Wall are inspired by novels or stories and condense into intentional stagings of the everyday. With a special focus on constellations which present the medium photography like a search for traces, the book allows a new perspective on the artist’s works which have up until now rarely been shown in exhibitions.
Jeff Wall studied art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His works are exhibited internationally, for example at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008 he received the Audain-Award for his life work.
-

Emmanuel Bornstein / Lotte Laserstein
Pensée20€ Add to cartHow do artists’ identities and the histories of their families influence their art? Where might a creative affinity sustained by a legacy of trauma take an artist? Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) and Emmanuel Bornstein (b. 1986) are connected by such a bond, tied by Bornstein’s grandmother, a Résistance fighter and, like Lotte Laserstein, a Jew who survived the Nazis. Bornstein discovered Laserstein’s works by coincidence and without knowing of this connection, and he was fascinated right away: “It was actually what I’d been trying to make for years!” There are in fact parallels between their oeuvres—both feature people who are waiting and flower bouquets, and a melancholy aspect and a subtle menace can be felt in both. Yet there are also discrepancies, and the dialogue between their works would be far less inspiring without them: Bornstein’s omnipresent toxic cadmium, which contrasts with Laserstein’s muted tones; the paint application; the brushwork. What the artists have in common, in any case, is that Sweden became their abode in times of danger and painting, their only true home. This catalog celebrates their creative homecoming.
-

Hans Karl Zeisel
Hundred and more34,95€ Add to cartPossibilities of Concrete Art
What is possible without turning away from the cocrete? In the Bauhaus tradition, the typographer, graphic artist, designer and author Hans Karl Zeisel opens up countless design options with basic forms. His wooden cuboids demand a humorous approach to sculpture. They are creativity training, study tools and meditation game all in once. A playful experiment that reveals the diversity of concrete art.
-

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.
-

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.
- Out of stock

Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte 1999 – 2019
29,90€ Read moreDie Geschichte einer neuen Industriekultur
Die Völklinger Hütte gehört zu den wichtigsten Industriedenkmälern der Welt. Mit herausragenden Ausstellungen und Veranstaltungen ist das Kulturprojekt weit über die Grenzen des Saarlands hinaus bekannt geworden. Der Künstler Ottmar Hörl konzipierte hier sein großangelegtes Skulpturenprojekt 100 Arbeiter und Christian Boltanskis Installation in der Sinteranlage wurde zum hochemotionalen Erinnerungsort für die hier verpflichteten Zwangsarbeiter. Noch bis zum Jahr 1986 war die Völklinger Eisenhütte in Betrieb und wurde 1994 als erstes Industriekulturdenkmal aus der Hochphase der Industrialisierung in die renommierte Liste des UNESCO-Weltkulturerbes aufgenommen. Das Buch zum 25. Jubiläum dieser Auszeichnung zeigt die vielfältigen und eindrucksvollen Aufnahmen einer Transformation – vom größten Schrotthaufen Europas zum Begnungszentrum der Menschen mit der Kunst. Es dokumentiert die gelungene Umstrukturierung einer hochproduktiven Eisenverhüttungsstätte zu einem Ort für Kultur im 21. Jahrhundert.
- 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.
-

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.
-

The Power of Wonder – New Materialisms in Contemporary Art
34€ Add to cartFor the longest time, physical matter was seen as no more than a passive and lifeless object. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, however, visual artists and scientists alike have initiated a change of thinking, conceiving matter as active, unruly, and autonomous. The ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn has called it the “willfulness of things,” while the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers has underscored the “power of wonder”—the bracing sense of marvel and surprise instilled by a material world that sometimes defies the attempt to put it into words.
This pioneering publication features six selected artistic positions that highlight the New Materialism’s significance for contemporary art. The artists employ materials that are millions of years old such as rocks from an open-pit mine as well as classic inorganic staples like ceramics and cutting-edge materials like digital products transformed in high-tech procedures into hitherto unseen hybrid objects. Their work lends art a powerful voice in contemporary debates around man’s position vis-à-vis his environment, around sustainability, participation, and justice.
With works by Ilana Halperin, Agata Ingarden, David Jablonowski, Markus Karstieß, Robert Smithson, and SUPERFLEX.
- Release January 2026

Stefan Reiterer
Inflection Point38€ Add to cartThe Austrian artist Stefan Reiterer (born 1988, lives in Vienna) transfers digital maps and satellite images into analog physical space through abstract painting. He manipulates data from sources such as Google Earth or NASA, transforming them into illusory topologies and pseudo-cartographies to challenge our perception. What is recognized, discovered, rejected? Where is the viewer’s location? Andrea Kopranovic writes of Reiterer’s painted emptiness as a “pitting” and projection surface “for glitches, black holes, and abysses” and a metaphor for potential “interpretations, enrichments, and yet unimagined spaces of possibility.” This richly illustrated book documents Reiterer’s 2025 exhibition at the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst in Otterndorf.
-

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.
-

Thomas Lehnerer
Freies Spiel44€ Add to cartThe function of art in human existence
Throughout his short life, the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (1955–1995) did not take the existence of art for granted. In his writings, above all in Methode der Kunst (Methods of Art), he developed a concept of art in the continuation of key texts from the fields of aesthetics, cultural theory, and art history, which can also be found in his own artistic work. The small-format figurative sculptures by Lehnerer, as well as his drawings, watercolors, and early installations, follow theoretical premises and address comprehensive themes of human existence. The present volume documents his examination of human existence, which is deepened by the inclusion of cultural historical figures and idols.
-

Michelle Jezierski
Verge28€ Add to cartHow does a simple line become a horizon? When do we begin to see colors and shapes as a landscape? Michelle Jezierski’s painting homes in on the tipping point at which our perception begins to oscillate between color/surface and space/representation. At that very point, she captures the essence of the landscape as such, which is not a concrete place but a metaphor for inner states of affairs. To get there, Jezierski distills what she sees in her surroundings down to the elements of painting—shapes and colors—which just barely intimate a pictorial space while persistently drifting toward abstraction. The defining feature of her technique is that she layers several pictorial planes and spaces on the canvas in staggered arrangements. “Perpetually discovering new ways to unsettle the visual space,” as she puts it, she engenders ruptures and structures that open up multiple perspectives and a portal for reflection on one’s own perception. Above all, however, the cuts lend her pictures a peculiar rhythm that powerfully pulls in the gaze, making the reader paging through this catalogue forget time and space.
-

Claudia Fährenkemper
Kontextforschung / context research 1980–202268€ Add to cartClaudia Fährenkemper (b. Castrop-Rauxel, 1959; lives in Steinheim/Westfalen) photographs enormous as well as minuscule objects using scanning electron microscopes to produce images that are as fascinating as they are disconcerting. The play with extreme scales yields fantastic visual worlds: American desert and canyon landscapes, the giant industrial machinery of open-pit mines in Germany, insects, plant seeds, crystals, and plankton, plus historic armaments from Europe and Japan. The lavishly designed book is the first to gather works from her entire oeuvre, which now spans four decades. Surveying the most important of Fährenkemper’s conceptual series, it reveals unexpected interconnections between disparate motifs on vastly different scales from nature, technology, science, and cultural history.
Claudia Fährenkemper studied at Fachhochschule Köln, today’s Cologne University of Applied Sciences, where Arno Jansen was her teacher, and with Bernd and Hilla Becher and Nan Hoover at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her photographs are held by numerous museum collections, including at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Margulies Collection, Miami.
- Release January 2026

Valentina Jaffé
Dripping Folds and Melting States23€ Add to cartDripping Folds and Melting States is published in conjunction with the young artist Valentina Jaffé’s most extensive institutional solo exhibition to date. Blending artist’s book and catalogue, the volume gathers works from the past five years by Jaffé, who lives and works in the Rhine–Neckar metropolitan region. Taking an interdisciplinary and inter-media approach, she continually refines the conception of collage that is central to her art. Her creative universe is informed by intersections, imbrications, and the exploration of in-between states—by the concurrence of mutability and constancy.
Created out of long-fibered paper and awash in color, the artist’s visual spaces are transformed with each new environment and have an air of breathing membranes. Her ceramics, meanwhile, play with contrasts of hardness and softness, fragility and stability, coldness and warmth. The book reflects Jaffé’s multifaceted experimentation and is enhanced by scholarly contributions by Carolin Heel and Fedra Benoli, who add depth to her engagement with space, body, and material.
-

Zwischen Freiheit und Moderne
Die Bildhauerin Renée Sintenis29€ Read moreThe Successful Sculptor and Symbol of the “Neue Frau”
Renée Sintenis (b. 1888, Glatz; d. 1965, Berlin) belongs to the first generation of professional female sculptors at the beginning of the twentieth century. She made skillful use of her business relations with her gallerist Alfred Flechtheim, who introduced her to collectors in Paris, London, and New York. The market for, in particular, her lively, small animal sculptures was quite lucrative. These experienced renewed popularity in the 1950s through her Berlin Bear statuette, which has been presented in a small version at the Berlin International Film Festival since 1960. The catalog sheds light on the sculptor’s diverse oeuvre and provides insight into the self-image of one of the most successful women artists of the Weimar Republic, who embodied the type “Neue Frau” (new woman) due to her dazzling appearance.
-

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.
-

Katja Aufleger
Schwindelerregende Höhen30€ Add to cartOn a Razor’s Edge: Evanescent Moments
Katja Aufleger’s (b. Oldenburg, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) works bring instants of suspense and uncertainty into focus in a variety of aesthetic forms. Their nuclei are typically everyday phenomena and physical models, which she combines with a range of concepts from cultural history and psychology. The publication presents several series, some of which capture explosive tensions. Among them are photographs of homemade Molotov cocktails for which the artist set perfume flacons on fire, making this most recent series a probing exploration of the potentials of material aesthetics and emotion. With an introductory essay by Julia Katharina Thiemann.
Katja Aufleger studied visual art the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK), where Andreas Slominski, Matt Mullican, and Michael Diers were her teachers.
-

Emmanuel Bornstein
Wildwechsel25€ Add to cartLike the deer that tests our vigilance by suddenly crossing the road, Emmanuel Bornstein’s (b. Toulouse, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) art, which is rarely winsome and often disturbing, forces us to grapple with reality. In his earlier work, the German-French artist often focused on the Holocaust and the Second World War, creating pictures profoundly informed by his own family’s story. Exploring Berlin, the epicenter of that dark history, inspired searching meditations in series that turned the spotlight on traces of what had happened. More recently, Bornstein has sought to disentangle his art from subjective experience, shifting his focus to the analysis and reconstruction of contemporary events. Wildwechsel retraces the evolution of his oeuvre as reflected in his biography, which exemplifies the cultural exchange between Germany and France.
Emmanuel Bornstein studied painting first at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, then at the Berlin University of the Arts. His works are held in numerous private and institutional collections in New York, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Istanbul.
- Release January 2026

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.


























