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
- Release November 2025
Fidel Martínez
Todesfuge. Das Leben des Dichters Paul Celan26€ Add to cartThe Spanish graphic artist Fidel Martínez Nadal’s (b. Seville, 1979) graphic novel Todesfuge recounts the life of Paul Celan (1920–1970), one of the most eminent lyric poets of the twentieth century. The narrative interweaves biographical and literary aspects of Celan’s life, including his Jewish identity, his lifelong trauma as a Holocaust survivor, and his acclaimed poem Todesfuge. Martínez’s expressive and somber illustrations visualize Celan’s struggles with feelings of guilt, memory, and his creative efforts to find words for the unspeakable. An artistically brilliant homage to Paul Celan’s oeuvre, Todesfuge is an impressive contribution to the engagement with the Shoah in the medium of the graphic novel pioneered by Art Spiegelman.
-
Verena Issel
Yellow Pages. Installations and their individual components45€ Add to cartVerena Issel’s installations feel friendly and inviting, they are soft, round, colorful—we cannot but smile when we look at them. The sculptures and pictures she makes for them are replicas, sometimes laced with irony, of familiar objects from nature and culture—palm trees, ancient columns, and more—which she manufactures out of materials that surround us in everyday life and the domestic sphere such as an old bag, foamed plastic fragments, or a drainpipe. They are awkward giants, monochrome, simplified, two- and three-dimensional forms that wish us no ill. Taking a closer look, we realize that they embody what has been lost, that they are a plastic version of what we are destroying or have destroyed already: nature, obviously, but also ourselves and our cultural and social achievements. Their merriment and sympathy are tinged with melancholy, and the loss is doubly painful when we consider that the sculptures and graphic art are filled with no more than an imitation of life, and an exaggerated one. This catalogue presents a survey of Issel’s diverse and sprawling oeuvre. Expertly choreographed shots of the colorful works convey vivid impressions of her installations.
-
Shara Hughes
58€ Add to cartBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
-
Roland Schappert & Wolfgang Ullrich
Aktualitätsjetzt16€ Add to cartPhilistinism, climate change, legitimation discourses—in a tour de force sustained by profound knowledge of the phenomena in question, AKTUALITÄTSJETZT blazes trails through the jungle of contemporary art and its current debates. Over the course of two years, the art scholar and author Wolfgang Ullrich initiated 14 dialogues on Schappert’s word paintings, murals, and interventions. Their distinctive formal features and conceptual and substantial dimensions inspired illuminating conversations that range far beyond the specific works to explore today’s art world and questions of the philosophy of art and the sociology of culture. The best volume of dialogues on art since David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.
-
HALBwertsZeit
Zum Umgang mit ‚abgelaufenen‘ Sammlungen28€ Add to cartDo collections have an expiration date? Shifting interests, evolving social contexts, and discursive developments influence when a collection or its presentation is said to be outdated and what that implies for the constraints on, or options for, the actions to be taken in response. The revision or reorientation of a collection presuppose a critical engagement with the criteria regarded as valid at the time, which concern the origins, composition, objectives, and significance of a collection, among other aspects.
The contributions to this volume intertwine historical case studies with contemporary questions about the reasons and circumstances that give rise to the assessment that a collection has outlived its shelf life.
-
Pensive Images
16 Artists in Dialogue with W. G. Sebald35€ Add to cartOn Memories and Temporalities
Pensive Images examines the complex and invariably singular relationships through which images and memories are inextricably linked. The book relates to the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald (b. 1944, Wertach; d. 2011, Norfolk), especially to four fictional stories he published between 1990 and 2001, in which he inserted non-captioned blackand- white photographs of uncertain provenance and nature into the text like memories punctuating ways reminiscent of his writing. It brings together 16 artists who, in ways reminiscent of Sebald’s approach, explored the realms of memory and past from the perspective of experience and intertwining temporalities.
With works by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Dove Allouche, Lonnie van Brummelen / Siebren de Haan, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Jason Dodge, Félix González-Torres, Ian Kiaer, Jochen Lempert, Zoe Leonard, Helen Mirra, Dominique Petitgand, John Stezaker, Danh Vo and Tris Vonna-Michell.
-
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.
-
Julius Hofmann
Western Philosophies35€ Add to cartJulius Hofmann (b. Göttingen, 1983; lives and works near Göttingen) has mastered the traditional aspects of painting and commands a broad repertoire of creative techniques. This expertise enables him to call conventional painting in question by combining it with the aesthetic of 1990s computer graphics. The simple and often grotesque symbolism of the imperfect digital imagery contrasts with a perfectionistic figurative painting. This approach lends his pictures a disconcerting and unexpected quality.
Western Philosophies is an episode in Hofmann’s ongoing work confronting consumerist society with its dark secrets and its indifference. Meanwhile, his creative process is also an exploration of the artist’s personal fears and frustrations. In depicting his figures, landscapes, and machines, he draws our attention to the painterly originality of structures and surfaces. The protagonists, to his mind, play a subordinate role, typically serving him as vehicles—he is more interested in the “how” than in the “what.”
Julius Hofmann studied painting with Neo Rauch and Heribert C. Ottersbach at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) from 2005 until 2011. His work is represented in international collections and institutions.
-
Fahar Al-Salih
Beyond Fairy Tales39€ Add to cartBridges between East and West
The protection and sense of belonging one feels where one is at home, and what it is like to lose both of them: these are central concerns in the art of Fahar Al-Salih (b. Belgrade, 1964; lives and works in Karlsruhe). Having grown up in Kuwait, where a classical education in visual art was inconceivable, Al-Salih came late to his métier; Markus Lüpertz was among his teachers, and he completed his education in Hermann Nitsch’s master class. Seeing himself as a “bridge-builder” between the cultures of the Arab world and Europe, Al-Salih probes the different lived realities in which his itinerant biography has been set. No more linear than his path through life, his oeuvre is defined by subjects to which he keeps returning in a kind of cyclical motion. This publication offers unprecedented insight into Al-Salih’s creative approach and his articulations of individual yearnings, the comforts of safety, and political and social upheavals. His work achieves a deft interweaving of global perspectives and migrant realities.
- Release October 2025
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Monograph (EN)68€ 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.
-
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.
-
Austin Eddy
Selected poems40€ Add to cartSince 2018, the American painter and sculptor Austin Eddy (b. Boston, 1986; lives and works in Brooklyn) has probed the manifestations of modern painting in a world between abstraction and figuration. As a child and teenager, Eddy immersed himself in the imageries of comics, cartoons, and record covers. In the early 2010s, he studied in Chicago with Barbara Rossi, who had been one of the Chicago Imagists in the 1960s. The deconstruction of everyday objects into innumerable forms and hues became his central theme. Eddy’s works play with luminous colors, overlaid textures, animated bird motifs, and abstract planes of light while grappling with a human existence defined by loss and the passage of time. Situated on the margins of reality, his paintings and sculptures are like visual poems, celebrating the evanescent instant that exists only for a second before fading into the past.
Austin Eddy completed a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.
- 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.
-
Can Yasar Köklü
CYK55€ Add to cartThe young photographer, graphic designer, and filmmaker Can Yasar Köklü (b. Schwelm, 2003; lives and works in Brooklyn) grew up between Cologne and Istanbul and currently studies at New York’s renowned Pratt Institute. In his first publication CYK—an artist’s book featuring breathtakingly beautiful photographs and personal writings—he explores his experiences growing up, the traditions that inform his art, and his feelings in three different cultures: “Heimat” charts his native Germany, where he spent most of his life; “Memleket” is dedicated to Turkey, where his roots are; and “Home” presents the impressions Köklü gathered during a year in high school in Los Angeles and now in New York, where he continues his education. Driven by a passion for storytelling, he captures singular—fascinating and deeply moving—moments in time.
- 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.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (GERMAN)28€ Add to cartThe sculptor and object artist Liam Gillick (b. Aylesbury, UK, 1964; lives and works in New York) has created an intervention titled Filtered Time for the historic galleries of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Projections of light and color and acoustic effects condense six thousand years of cultural history into an immersive spatial experience. Gillick initiates a conversation between the iconic Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, the monumental sculptures of Tell Halaf, and other exhibits, engendering new layers of meaning across all historical periods. The first joint project of the Vorderasiatisches Museum and the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart makes for a singular visual and sensory experience. Designed by the artist himself, the publication not only documents the richly colorful production, but also provides insight into the eventful history of the museum, which is approaching its centennial.
Liam Gillick studied at the Hertfordshire College of Art in 1983–1984 and at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1984 until 1987. Gillick is a prolific published writer as well, producing essays, reviews, fiction, and theatrical scenarios.
-
nolde/kritik/documenta (German)
42€ Add to cartEmil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
- Out of stock
Kurt Weidemann
Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt49,95€ Read moreSignierte Sonderauflage
Kurt Weidemanns Ansichten über Schrift und Typografie ist das beeindruckende Ergebnis eines über Jahrzehnte erlebten und reflektierten Berufslebens als Schriftsetzer, Typograf, Autor, Lehrer und Berater. Das Buch schildert die persönlichen, philosophischen und fachlichen Ansichten seines Metiers.
-
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.
-
Silke Eva Kästner
Panta Rhei36€ Add to cartSilke Eva Kästner (lives and works in Berlin and Uckermark) developed her creative approach while traveling in India, New York, and Japan. She creates temporary on-site paintings as well as conceptual pieces in which the viewer comes upon prepared materials and becomes part of—or even alters—the picture. Kästner documents these encounters in photographs or filmic traces out of which she compiles films in the editing suite. Probing the potentials of painting as communication, she foregrounds the active intervention and process. In the gallery no less than the urban scene, Kästner places painting in relation to architecture in order to frame it in varying perspectives.
The monograph offers insight into the foci of Kästner’s art; the works are grouped in chapters rather than arranged in chronological sequence. This structure makes the book a space of experience that gives the reader a vivid sense of her ephemeral creations.
After studying with Katharina Grosse at the Weißensee School of Art and Design Berlin, Silke Eva Kästner won the Mart Stam Prize; she honed her craft in India on a NaFöG fellowship and in New York on a yearlong DAAD fellowship. Funding support from the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) enabled her to initiate an ongoing exchange project between Kashmir and Berlin. Her work has been on view at numerous institutions including the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Devi Art Foundation, Delhi; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
