Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | David MacDougall |
| Design | Cristina Paoli · Periferia |
| Size | 18,5 x 11,5 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 208 |
| Illustrations | 90 |
| Language(s) | English, Dutch |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-072-9 |
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
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.
-
Tobias Rehberger
1993–202244€ Add to cartIn his sculptural work, Tobias Rehberger (b. Esslingen, 1966; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main) connects strategies from different, also non-art disciplines. His interiors meant to be taken into service have established him as one of the most influential artists of his generation. In 2022, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart will honor Rehberger with a grand exhibition that will feature some of the most important bodies of work from the past three decades. The accompanying book makes a signal contribution to the ongoing critical engagement with his art.
Tobias Rehberger studied with Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1987 until 1992 and later returned to his alma mater as a professor. He has had numerous solo shows in Germany and abroad and, in 2009, furnished the central cafeteria at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which won him a Golden Lion.
-
Judit Reigl
Kraftfelder / Centers of Dominance28€ Add to cartBeginning in the 1950s, Judit Reigl (b. Kapuvár, Hungary, 1923; d. Marcoussis, France, 2020) builds a singular creative oeuvre between abstraction and figuration, between Surrealism and gestural painting. After studying art in Budapest, Reigl flees Hungary in 1950; arriving in Paris, she is introduced to André Breton, who organizes her first exhibition in 1954. Under the influence of the École de Paris, she branches out into écriture automatique, then shifts toward free expression. Like her contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler in New York, she lays out ever larger unprimed canvases on the floor and works them with a brush, her fingers, or other instruments. After 1966, bodily shapes emerge from her abstractions, and figures reappear in the pictures.
On occasion of Reigl’s centenary and the gift of three major works, the Neue Nationalgalerie mounts the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Germany. The book surveys the oeuvre of one of the most important protagonists of European art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Judit Reigl studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1942 until 1945 and was a fellow at the Hungarian Academy in Rome in 1947–48. From 1950 onwards, she lived and worked in France.
-
Olaf Breuning
Paintings37€ Add to cartThe multimedia artist Olaf Breuning (b. Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970; lives and works in Upstate New York) has built a multifaceted oeuvre in installation art, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and performance that questions contemporary reality. In a recent series of paintings, he playfully grapples with pressing concerns such as global warming. Like his earlier work, the new ensemble manifests his unorthodox approach. Breuning devised a unique painterly technique involving large-format wooden stamps with which he presses paint onto the canvas. The result is unconventional and fresh.
The publication—the first book dedicated exclusively to Breuning’s paintings—presents two dozen pictures as well documentation of the production process in the form of wooden stamps and sculptures. A dialogue between Katharina Beisiegel, director of the Kirchner Museum, Davos, and Gianni Jetzer, designated director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, delves into parallels and differences between the oeuvres of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Olaf Breuning.
Breuning trained as a photographer in Winterthur from 1988 until 1993 and completed a master class in photography from 1992 until 1995. In 1995–1996, he was enrolled in a postgraduate program at today’s Zurich University of the Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne. He participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has had work in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthalle Zürich; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
-
Martin Noël
The Retrospective38€ Add to cartThe Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut
The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.
Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
-
Michael Bielicky
Perpetuum mobile54€ Add to cartContemporary Media Art
The German-Czech artist Michael Bielicky (b. Prague, 1954; lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been an innovator in the fields of photography, video, and web-based installation art for over four decades. In an ongoing dialogue with emerging technological developments, his works probe the history of his media from the deepest strata to the magical mathematical practices of the medieval Cabalists: idiosyncratic hybrids that straddle the boundary between the analog and digital worlds. Operating on the interfaces between real and virtual spaces, his media art prompts a critical reflection on the nature of technology, its material and immaterial significations, and the ways in which it informs our perceptions and actions. The book Perpetuum mobile is the first to offer a comprehensive survey of Bielicky’s rich and diverse oeuvre. The layout, designed by the artist himself, integrates the experimental images into a graphic “stream of consciousness.”
Michael Bielicky moved to Germany in 1969 and initially studied medicine. After an extended stay in New York, he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1984 until 1990, first with Bernd Becher and then in Nam June Paik’s master class. He was made professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague in 1991, then professor of new media at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 2006. Bielicky participated in numerous major exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (1987); Videonale, Bonn (1988, 1990, 1992); Ars Electronica, Linz (1992, 1994, 1995); and the Havana Biennial (2012).
-
Francesca Martí
Passage and Presence42€ Add to cartFrancesca Martí’s (b. Sóller, Mallorca; lives in Mallorca and Stockholm) art revolves around themes like transformation, communication, and deformation, the power of self-determination, the instability of memory, and the effects of the chaos caused by migration and the migration prompted by chaos. In a collaborative process, a multitude of performers, dancers, and musicians help make her vision a reality. The book presents performances, sculptures, and visual works from Francesca Martí’s most important exhibitions in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and China. The portraits of the various series the artist has developed over the past ten years, including Cocoon, Planet of Fusions, Migrant Angel, Dreamers & Believers, Copper and Flux, are rounded out by her drawings, photographs, and making-of shots from her studio in Mallorca.
- Release July 2025
Tim David Trillsam
Willkommen im Panoptikum38€ Add to cartWith his idiosyncratic figurative bronze sculptures Tim David Trillsam (born 1985 in the Swabian Alb) has hit a nerve. The artist’s “self memorials” ask the viewer to remember the transience and illusion of this very self. Although Trillsam employs a loaded material that evokes many great sculptors before him, his own sculptures resist the past. His figures are tangibly protagonist of the present and they provoke with their exaggerated sensuality, twisted bodies, and oversized hands and feet. “The oversizing is programmatic. As is the skeptical approach to the human species. Trillsam proceeds as a thoughtful questioner with doubt yet also irritation,” writes Dorothee Baer-Bogenschütze. Her in-depth art-historical analysis is part of this forthcoming book about Trillsam’s oeuvre since 2012.
-
Adrian Schiess
The Song Element68€ Add to cartThe Renowned Swiss Artist and His Work in Its Architectural Setting
Smoothly painted panels laid out on the floor have earned Adrian Schiess (b. 1959, Zurich; lives and works in Mouans-Sartoux, France) international renown. His objects, which may be placed in a room as desired, are conceived as platforms of creative engagement with the appearance and disappearance of painting. They have become integral components of buildings by world-famous architects including Norman Foster and Herzog & de Meuron. For this book, Schiess has compiled spectacular series of photographs and extensive conversations that probe the peculiar quality of his work: hybrid and fluctuating and yet always utterly distinctive. It is the first publication to put the focus on this essential aspect of his output, documenting works created between 1993 and 2018.
Adrian Schiess studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich and trained as a graphic designer. His works were on display at the 44th Biennale di Venezia and at documenta IX.
-
Ann Wolff
Observations and Reflections44€ Add to cart“Art is coming from my inside. I am working as its servant.—I let it out not thinking too much—using my hands and gesture—choosing a material to put it on place. I do not use the art. It is using me.“
Ann Wolff (b. Lübeck, 1937; lives and works in Visby and Kyllaj, Sweden) has ranked among the most significant and most influential glass artists on the international scene for over five decades. Yet she has also worked in bronze, aluminum, nickel silver, and concrete, creating abstract as well as figurative sculptures, and produced a sizable oeuvre on paper: pastels, drawings, and fine art prints. Ann Wolff enrolled at the legendary Ulm School of Design in the 1950s to study visual communication with Otl Aicher. From 1993 until 1998, she was professor of “materials-related design” at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg. Her works, which have garnered an array of prizes, have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and are held by renowned public and private collections all over the world.
-
Vera Mercer
New Works28€ Add to cartBeauty and Melancholy, Joie de Vivre and Vanity
The American photographer Vera Mercer’s (b. Berlin, 1936; lives and works in Omaha and Paris) oeuvre defies easy summary. She started taking pictures in Paris in the 1960s, making portraits of her then husband Daniel Spoerri—who, like she, was initially training as a dancer—and other members of the Fluxus group and Nouveaux Réalistes, including Emmett Williams and Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé. Around the same time, she also photographed Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp for various magazines; her friends Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle were among her favorite sitters.
In the 1970s, she took a long creative hiatus: after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, she poured all her energy into starting a number of restaurants and developing an entire downtown neighborhood. But then, in the early years of the new millennium, she returned to photography, capturing breathtaking neo-baroque still lifes featuring flowers, fruits, freshly killed game, antique glasses, and illuminating candles in large formats.
Vera Mercer’s fourth monograph presents her most recent opulent still lifes in color, as well as a novelty in her oeuvre: restrained black-and-white flower pictures and portraits realized as small-format platinum prints.
-
Ivonne Thein
TECHNO BODIES28€ Add to cartIn her multidisciplinary work, Ivonne Thein (born 1979 in Meiningen, lives and works in Berlin) addresses the current body images of a digital culture that is undergoing fundamental change due to extensive technologization. Today, new technologies are profoundly shaping both the physical body and its virtual representations in the visual culture of our time. Thein works with AI systems for her installations and places the question of the problem of imitating nature, and thus the relationship between art, technology and body, at the center of her artistic work. To do this, she combines digital techniques with sculptures that she creates by hand from silicone. Thein thereby evokes an intrusive closeness in the exhibition space, as the images generated with the AI no longer remain just a pure data set on the screen. The book presents works from 2020–2023.
-
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.
- Release April 2025
Charles Moore
On painting16€ Add to cartFor On Painting, New York-based art historian and curator Charles Moore, interviewed four women artists about their practice, asking them to reveal their motives and aspirations. This publication consists of four interviews, each containing an introduction by Moore and illustrations of the artist’s works. Danielle Mckinney, who paints exclusively Black women, reflects on her experiences as a woman growing up in the US South. Nicola Staeglich creates subtle layered abstract works to evoke new perspectives and the potential for change. Nirit Takele elaborates on how her Ethiopian Jewish heritage has shaped her painting practice. Jorinde Voigt, who creates complex installations inspired by notation systems, discusses the use of algorithms and the beauty to be found in the unexpected.
-
Chiharu Shiota
The Unsettled Soul48€ Add to cartWidely acclaimed for her distinctive visual language, which combines drawing, performance, sculpture, and installation art, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972 in Osaka, lives and works in Berlin) addresses fundamental human concerns. Creating large-scale thread installations that incorporate a variety of everyday objects and memorabilia, she forms powerful environments that evoke a sense of nostalgia, personal history, and collective memory. The catalog accompanies the exhibition The Unsettled Soul, the first presentation of the artist in the Czech Republic. In addition to extensive photographic documentation of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha, the publication features an essay by Jason Waite discussing Shiota’s early works as well as an interview with the artist conducted by the editor, Christelle Havranek, about her key themes and the creation of the Prague exhibition.
-
Cudelice Brazelton IV
Mortal Surface35€ Add to cartCudelice Brazelton IV’s works are magnets. He uses them to glean what he finds in the urban landscape, in the street, in factories and studios: fabric, leather, metal, cardboard, and all sorts of implements. He arranges these materials and things atop one another and side by side in collages, assemblages, and sculptures, staging encounters also between the contexts in which they originated and what he calls their “undercurrents,” their subtexts. Such frames of reference, including that of the exhibition space, play a key role in his art, an aspect he will occasionally engage quite explicitly, creating site-specific works for some settings. This makes the space the context and a part of the piece, sometimes physically so, as when Brazelton works directly on the walls. The recent works gathered in this catalogue were displayed in a former railcar repair workshop. It is hard to imagine a more industrial, “metallic” environment. There, as between the covers of this catalogue, Brazelton’s works appear to their fullest advantage, becoming veritable magnets drawing the gaze.
- temporarily not available
David Hockney: Insights
Reflecting the Tate CollectionRead moreDavid Hockney (born 1937 in Bradford) is one of the most influential and technically versatile artists living today. This new publication gathers some of his most defining work from the 1960s to the present, including major works in the Tate collection. From early graphic cycles, double portraits and iconic pool paintings through to his photo collages, plein air landscapes, iPad drawings, and multimedia installations, the volume documents central themes and genres in Hockney’s oeuvre, as well as his constant experimentation.
Original essays by renowned critics and commentators illuminate the artist’s search for new forms of expression, the topographical and biographical reference points of his work, the technical innovation of his painting and printmaking, as well as his approach to new media.
-
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.
-
Nobuyuki Tanaka
Primordial Memories25€ Add to cartThe craft of traditional Japanese lacquer finishing in contemporary art
In his extraordinary sculptures, Nobuyuki Tanaka (b. 1971 in Tokyo) combines a lacquer finishing that has been practiced in Japan for centuries with an organic formal language. Tanaka is considered the most important representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art. He uses the material in polished deep black or intense red as a multi-layer coating for large-format sculptures. This results in abstract works with lively, curved, glossy surfaces in which the multi-faceted effect created by the interplay with changing light conditions plays a key role. The lavishly illustrated book includes texts by Britta E. Buhlmann, Beatrice Kromp, Antje Papist-Matsuo, Annette Reich, Atsuhiko Shima, and Nobuyuki Tanaka.
In his extraordinary sculptures, the artist combines a treatment of lacquer practiced for centuries in Japan with an organic language of form.
An exceptional representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art, Tanaka uses the lacquer mostly in polished deep black, sometimes also in intense red, as a multi-layer coating for his large-scale sculptures.
-
Art in a Conflicted World
34€ Add to cartTrans-European Perspectives in the Age of Cultural Fragmentation
Since the turn of the millennium, much of the world has become an increasingly unstable and dissonant place. Sharp disruptions define many aspects of our social, cultural, and political relations. Art in a Conflicted World addresses this evolving reality, featuring critical positions articulated by visual artists and writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Great Britain—regions embroiled in extraordinary strife and upheaval. The publication takes a frank look at these multifaceted states of social dissonance and reflects them in diverse artistic and literary inquiries and responses. The contributions are the fruits of an interdisciplinary fellowship program at Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf that offers the participants an opportunity to gain fresh creative and cultural insights, test ways of engaging with complexity, and develop models for the future that transcend national boundaries.
The publication presents works by Sarah Dobai, Nikita Kadan, Ali Eisa, and Sebastian Lloyd Rees (Lloyd Corporation) as well as writings by Alisa Ganieva and Tanya Zaharchenko.
The project was mentored by Wolfgang Tillmans, Tom McCarthy, Katharina Raabe, and Mark Gisbourne and received funding support from the German Federal Foreign Office.
