Gabriel Vormstein
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|---|---|
| Author(s) | Gean Moreno |
| Design | Annette Lux, Hit studio |
| Size | 22.5 x 30.4 cm |
| Cover | Bristol board / GardaPat Kiara |
| Pages | 296 |
| Illustrations | 271 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-105-4 |
Gabriel Vormstein (b. Konstanz, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) explores themes of impermanence, temporality, and futility through a unique visual language. He paints using newspapers as a canvas, and creates installations out of tree branches and other organic matter. These “poor” materials subvert a prevailing notion in Western culture that an artwork should be eternally preserved. Through the adaptation of various styles and symbols, Vormstein’s paintings likewise speak to the transience of art historical and cultural trends. Over 300 pages, this richly illustrated book provides an overview of Vormstein’s oeuvre over the past two decades, while also offering an atmospheric glimpse into the artist’s source material and working methods. The publication is enriched by an essay by Gean Moreno, who characterizes Vormstein’s work as follows: “Gabriel Vormstein’s paintings and sculptures (…) announce their condition as withering artifacts, as if no other manner of existing was available to them (and maybe to us, as well).”
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- Release Spring 2026
Jorinde Voigt
Trust42€ Add to cartJorinde Voigt (b. Frankfurt am Main 1977, lives and works in Berlin), declared about the title of the book “Trust is a hybrid of longing for something and the engagement to reach it”. Voigt has thus decided to compile her works, which she realized from May 2019 to spring 2021, under the sign of confidence, connectedness, reliability and integrity. Many of the works presented place themselves in the continuity of those in Immersion, a book that brought together works from the period 2018-2019.
In the extensive volume Trust, sculptures and mobiles are shown alongside the works on paper for which she is known – here immersed in a pigment bath and then worked on with pastel, ink, India ink, oil pastels and gold leaf–.
Jorinde Voigt studied philosophy and modern German literature at the University of Göttingen from 1996. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and studied sociology, philosophy and general and comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin. 1999-2003 she studied art in multimedia at the University of the Arts with Christiane Möbus and visual arts and photography with Katharina Sieverding, whose master student she became in 2004. 2014-2019 she was professor of conceptual drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Since 2019 she is professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.
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Dissonance
Platform GermanyRead moreA Changed Vision—New Painting from Germany
Post-reunification Germany has emerged as an important forum for international painting. The generation of artists born in the 1970s and 1980s eschew alignment with collective tendencies and resist clearly definable influences. Meanwhile, their art has registered the cultural and sociological dislocations and divergences since the fall of the Iron Curtain with seismographic precision.
The editors of Dissonance – Platform Germany present eighty-one of the most significant painters living and working in Germany in the past two decades. They have the courage of strong opinions, turn the spotlight on unsuspected treasures, and tease out the unexpected value in aesthetically thrilling achievements of programmatic pluralism. A vital survey of one of the most exciting chapters in the more recent history of art in Germany.
Some of the presented artists have graciously agreed to allow DCV to release limited editions of their works, which you can find here.
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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.
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ODOR
Immaterial Sculptures40€ Add to cartThe effect of odor is immediate. Smells arouse feelings in us, put us in moods, awaken recollections. They color the other senses and shape our perceptions more profoundly than we are aware. Scents create closeness and distance at the same time. They become imprinted on our memories and consolidate our experiences. And yet their existence in the world of three dimensions remains invisible, and the act of picking up a scent is fleeting.
The publication Odor—Immaterial Sculptures zooms in on the power of smells. Contributions from curators, artists, scientists, and scholars frame a variety of perspectives on this evanescent phenomenon, examining the olfactory sense and the qualities of the immaterial. Full-page plates conceived by the artists provide additional information, imagery, and contexts around the individual works, which put odor as an olfactory and spatial experience at the center of the engagement with art. The works operate between the poles of time and space, individual and community, consciousness and the subconscious, visibility and invisibility, the everyday and the miraculous, the sense of self and the perceptions of others, presence and absence, life and death.
Artists : Jason Dodge, Carsten Höller, Koo Jeong A, Oswaldo Maciá, Teresa Margolles, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sissel Tolaas, Clara Ursitti, Luca Vitone
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James Francis Gill
Catalogue Raisonné of Original Prints, Vol. 139€ Add to cartThe Catalogue Raisonné of the Co-Founder of American Pop Art
James Francis Gill (b. 1935, Tahoka; lives and works in Texas) is one of the most important artists of American Pop Art. His paintings, often based on photographs, provide an unusually personal approach to the icons of the 1950s and 60s. Gill suddenly became Hollywood’s most celebrated artist when his Marilyn Triptych was added to the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962 – even before the works of Andy Warhol. Through friendships with celebrities such as John Wayne, Martin Luther King, and Marlon Brando, Gill became the contemporary artist-witness of an entire generation. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the exuberant Hollywood of the time and surprisingly withdrew in 1972, only to reappear on the art market thirty years later. This catalogue raisonné in two volumes impressively documents his work from the early political motifs to the Pop Art icons of his late work.
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Agostino Iacurci
10€ Add to cartAgostino Iacurci’s (b. Foggia, Italy, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings, sculptures, installations, and murals are based on vegetal forms and botanical subjects. Lucid compositions in radiant colors unfurl fantastical ornaments that transcend the division between figuration and abstraction and the hierarchical distinctions of applied art, design, fine art, and folk art. His central theme is the painted garden, in which he stages plants, humans, architecture, geometry, and decoration in a fashionably theatrical landscape. In Iacurci, the interpenetration of nature and civilization is real, integrating mythological motifs from across the history of art and culture, from antiquity to futurism and postmodernism, into his singular style.
Agostino Iacurci studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Since 2009, he has realized numerous large-format murals and installations for public and private institutions. He has also worked with international brands including Apple, Adidas, Hermès, and Starbucks.
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Lars Breuer
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In The Love of the Gods, Breuer presents 104 C-prints of photographs for which he pointed the camera’s lens into the barrels of disused rifles, pistoles, revolvers, and cannons. The pictures were taken on the artist’s travels to Athens, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Leverkusen, Ingolstadt, Melbourne, New York, Oslo, and Phnom Penh, in museums, palaces, and public squares. Breuer’s conceptual and meticulously sober-minded approach yields almost abstract compositions showing nothing but the round muzzles and the dark interiors of the weapons on a deep-black ground. We see only a ring-shaped ornament until it dawns on us that it is part of a lethal implement. A cruel constant of human existence stares us in the face: humans behind these weapons were perpetrators, humans in front of these weapons were victims. Lars Breuer’s turn the spotlight on what the aura of the ornaments conceals: they have wrought death.
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Female Gaze
From Virtual to Reality25€ Add to cartWorks of Art Take a Stance
The “female gaze” embodies a stance that is the polar opposite of the “male gaze.” The latter term came into use in the movie and advertising industries in the 1970s to describe the fact that women typically appear in films in supporting roles, as accessories to men, rather than as protagonists. The male gaze originated in a patriarchal society that has begun to change. The female gaze champions a modern form of emancipation that challenges men to abandon entrenched structures. Much more importantly, it encourages women to become aware of the strength that lies in their femininity and make it the source of their own creative expression and their own perspective on the world. For many years, the writer Silke Tobeler has visited artists in their studios, collecting the photographs she took there and her conversations with her hosts on her blog, Female Gaze.
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Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst38€ Add to cartContemporary Visual Communication in a Historic Weaving Technique
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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.
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Sabine Hornig
Passage through Presence45€ Add to cartLayered Spacetimes in Large Formats
Sabine Hornig (b. 1964; lives and works in Berlin) has earned international acclaim with sculptures, photographs, and architectural interventions that interweave image, perspective, and space in distinctive ways. Her works feature translucent pictorial planes on glass panes; integrating these sculptural elements into the setting, she creates environments in which meaning unfolds as viewers allow their gazes—and themselves—to wander. For her new works, which engage with architecture, the artist superimposes enormous photographs on entire façades and concourses. This publication is the first to put the focus on Sabine Hornig’s art in three dimensions, detailing her process from the building of sculptural models and the combination with transparent photographic layers to her creation of works in public settings. It showcases her largest installation to date, at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, which she discusses in a conversation with Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator, Public Art Fund, New York.
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Larry Rivers
An American-European Dialogue38€ Add to cartBetween French Modernism and the New York School
The American painter, musician, and filmmaker Larry Rivers (b. 1923, New York; d. 2002, New York) is considered one of the most influential protagonists of the New York art scene in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. He played with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, was a close friend of Frank O’Hara, and pioneered Pop Art. In dealing with contemporary artist colleagues and historical role models, he always strived to making painting visible as a medium of reflection. From an early age, Rivers was preoccupied with French painting of the late nineteenth century. During his stay in Paris in 1961/62, he met Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, whereupon the range of materials he used was extended to wood, cardboard, and electric light. For the first time, the present volume – the first monograph in twenty years – sheds light on Larry Rivers’ idiosyncratic art with a view to the tension between traditional French painting and Abstract Expressionism around Willem de Kooning.
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Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
Special Edition60€ Add to cartSPECIAL EDITION in clothbound slipcase
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.
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Chunqing Huang
Painter’s Portrait II18€ Add to cartThe artist Chunqing Huang’s (b. Heze, China, 1974) Painters’ Portraits are anything but conventional likenesses. The portraits of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger and Imi Knoebel are acts of gestural-expressive abstraction and probing visual studies of the artist’s own recollections. Chunqing Huang paints meditations on art itself, systematically working through the vocabulary of abstract painting from Germany to the United States. The series Painter’s Portrait II features Chunqing Huang’s thirty most recent works from a series the artist has been transferring to canvases measuring 40 x 30 cm since 2016.
Painter’s Portrait II represents Chunqing Huang’s personal reflections on her influences, from Impressionism to expressive tendencies in abstract painting, which now make its début in book form. The catalogue showcases the portraits, each of which is distinguished by its own gestural quality and individual palette.
Chunqing Huang studied painting and interdisciplinary art at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where Wolfgang Tillmans and Peter Angermann were her teachers, and graduated from Hermann Nitsch’s master class. The German-Chinese artist’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. A first selection from the Painter’s Portrait series was on view at Kunsthalle Wiesbaden and Museum Wiesbaden in the summer of 2021; the catalogue Painter’s Portrait II is released in conjunction with her exhibition of the same title at 68projects, Berlin.
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FLATZ
Hitler. Ein Hundeleben18€ Add to cartAn Attempt to Break a Taboo – Trivial and Provocative
A black, pure-bred Great Dane named Hitler accompanied the Austrian performance artist and documenta participant FLATZ (b. 1952, Dornbirn; lives and works in Munich and London) like a shadow through the 1990s. The naming—as well as the subtitles of the photographs created—relates the banal everyday life of the dog to the inglorious life of its namesake, thus opening up an extremely provocative range of possible associations. “Hitler is always with me,” says the artist, “just as we always carry the historical Hitler around with us, because he is part of our history, which—as long as it is suppressed, transfigured, or tabooed—is not overcome.”
With more than 350 illustrations, Hitler. Ein Hundeleben is an extended and revised reprint of the book published in 1992, which has been out of print for a long time.
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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.
- Release September 2025
Andreas Wegner
Wir fahren mit der Schneckenpost, weil sie uns keinen Pfennig kost50€ Add to cartThe art of Andreas Wegner is an inquiry into capitalist urbanity. His interventions explore alternative models for urban interaction, trade, city development, traffic, or the use of public space. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Charles Fourier’s social utopias, Wegner founded, e.g. a cooperative department store in Berlin, a grocery store in Vienna, and conducted real estate business as a form of creative resistance. This monograph illustrates the artist’s most important projects with ample imagery, essays by renowned authors, interviews, and his own texts. Alongside collective initiatives, installations, photography, film, and sculpture, painting remains a constant in Wegner’s oeuvre to this day.
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Emil Nolde
A Critical Approach by Mischa Kuball40€ Add to cartWhat is Visible and What is Not
Mischa Kuball (b. 1959, Düsseldorf; lives and works in Düsseldorf) investigates public and institutional spaces and the social and political discourses that shape them. At the invitation of the Draiflessen Collection and with support from the Nolde Stiftung, the conceptual artist grappled with the life and oeuvre of the painter Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and created a body of work titled Nolde/critique/Kuball. In piece after piece, Kuball drains Nolde’s works of the colors that made the Expressionist famous, challenging the beholder’s preconceptions and examining perception and its constituent processes. Laid out in black and white, the book accordingly directs our attention not only to what a picture shows, but also to how structures and organizing principles emerge into view.
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, and associate professor of media art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM Karlsruhe since 2007.
Note: This publication is released in German, English and Dutch. When ordering, please let us know which edition you would like to receive. Use the annotation box on the checkout page.
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Clemens Krauss
Antidot | Gegengift40€ Add to cartClemens Krauss restlessly shuttles across history; his vehicles are painting, video art, sculpture, and performance. Yet Krauss is not “just” an artist, he is also a psychoanalyst and physician. As such, he has first-hand experience of time as the defining factor of existence, daring him to play with it. The bosom of painting is where he feels safest after his hazardous excursions back into his youth and forward into death. Executed in thick paints, his work is physical, material, which is also to say, it exists in time: everything passes away, even the picture. Evanescent, more than anything, are encounters of the sort Krauss stages as part of his psychoanalytical practice; all that remains is the indelible impression they leave. To be indelible, to recall the past, while also “letting happen what has never happened,” as he puts it, these are the ambitions he pursues in his art. Preserved between the covers of the present catalogue and reproduced in thousands of copies, his works now fan out in an instant to circulate for an indeterminate period of time among countless hands, whence they will effortlessly penetrate the barriers of our inner lives to bring us one step closer to transcendence.
- 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.
