


Gabriel Vormstein
![]() | |
|---|---|
| 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).”
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.
-

WORLD FRAMED
Zeitgenössische Zeichenkunst der Sammlung Schering Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett38€ Add to cartIn 2008, the Schering Stiftung began acquiring outstanding contemporary works on paper for the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) in Berlin. The collection, which has since grown to 130 nonfigurative drawings and a small number of prints, emphasizes the close conjunction of art and science. The holdings also reflect central tendencies in the art of drawing: in addition to exploring the line and its multifaceted formulation, artists shed light on the bounds of their medium and its expansions and undertake forays into inter-media art within drawing. The lavishly designed publication WORLD FRAME—the title is borrowed from a work by the artist Matt Mullican—presents the works acquired thanks to this partnership. It inquires into how artists translate their perceptions of their world into pictures and which contexts and discourses inform those pictures. Which perspectives, which ideas frame the segment of reality an artist observes?
“World Framed,” exhibition, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, July 7–October 8, 2023
-

Stephan Kaluza & Dieter Nuhr
Transit42€ Add to cartLandscapes in a Dialogue between Painting and Photography
At first glance, Stephan Kaluza’s (b. 1964, Bad Iburg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) photorealist paintings might be still lifes, portraits of pristine nature. Yet they actually show battlefields and other scenes of past horrors. The idyll in his pictures positively appeals to our vigilance to resist the impression of profound peace. The same ambiguity lies at the heart of the photographs of Dieter Nuhr (b. 1960, Wesel; lives and works in Ratingen). Nuhr, who is also widely known as a comedian, has contributed pictures that are carefully focused renditions of seemingly serendipitous discoveries from his travels in Nepal, Bolivia, India, and Sudan. In their timelessness, Nuhr’s photographs are akin to the locales in Kaluza’s works, which, disburdened of the heavy weight of their histories, reemerge as straightforward natural landscapes. The lavishly illustrated two-volume edition presents the fruits of a collaboration between two artists united by their shared preoccupation with the dialectic of ephemerality and permanence.
-

Gabriel Vormstein
40€ Add to cartGabriel 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).”
-

Yes To All
Die Schenkung Paul Maenz Gerd Vries42€ Add to cartThe catalog accompanying the exhibition YES TO ALL offers profound insight into a collection of over nine hundred works on paper—from postcards and drawings to photographs and posters—that was gifted to the Kupferstichkabinett in 2022, with subsequent additions over the years until 2025. The donors are Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, who ran a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne until 1990 and chaperoned the evolution of avant-garde art from the conceptualism of the late 1960s to the neo-expressive painting of the 1980s. The most recent works in the collection date from 2024. Several essays and a conversation with the donors invite the reader to experience the stylistic and thematic polyphony of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in new ways.
EXHIBITION:
YES TO ALL. THE GIFTS OF PAUL MAENZ GERD DE VRIES TO THE KUPFERSTICHKABINETT
KUPFERSTICHKABINETT, STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -

Robbie Cornelissen
Terra Nova28€ Add to cartFuturistic / Fantastic
The Dutch artist Robbie Cornelissen’s (b. Utrecht, 1954; lives and works in Utrecht) oeuvre is endowed with unusual narrative power. His architectonic drawings in enormous formats, which often exude a futuristic aura, typically show deserted libraries, waiting halls, factory floors, or other oversized spaces. In alternation with his work on paper, the artist creates animated films out of thousands of drawings. This publication presents 250 drawings from Cornelissen’s new film Terra Nova, which explores an urgent contemporary concern: humanity’s responsibility for the earth and the open question of its long-term survival on the planet.
Robbie Cornelissen studied biology and ecology at Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht and at Vrije Akademie, Den Haag, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. His work has been shown at Centraal Museum Utrecht, Hamburger Kunsthalle, the 11th Biennale de Lyon, and elsewhere.
-

Sibylle Springer
Ferne Spiegel / Distant Mirrors35€ Add to cartThe paintings of Sibylle Springer (born 1975, lives in Bremen) focus on the role of women in the art world of the digital age. For her portrait series Feed, she has painted 40 female artists to date, based on staged photographs from their Instagram feeds. “Is social media an instrument of emancipation, or does it even lead to new forms of objectification?” (Kohout) In Wait for It, Springer copied pop stars from the internet, but used a silver paint that oxidizes the canvases, thus aging the eternally youthful icons before our eyes—precisely what digital image control seeks to prevent. In her more recent textile objects, Springer interweaves female artists of the past and present. This informative book accompanies her exhibition at the Kunstverein Bremen.
Die Malerei von Sibylle Springer (geb. 1975, lebt in Bremen) widmet sich der Rolle von Frauen in der Kunstwelt des digitalen Zeitalters. Für ihre Portraitserie Feed malte sie bisher 40 Künstlerinnen, basierend auf fotografischen Selbstinszenierungen aus deren Instagram-Feeds. “Sind Soziale Medien Instrumente der Emanzipation oder führen sie gar zu neuen Formen der Objektifizierung?” (Kohout) Für Wait for It kopierte Springer Popstars aus dem Netz, aber benutzte ein die Leinwände oxidierendes Silber, das die ewig-jungen Ikonen vor unseren Augen altern lässt, gerade das, was digitale Imagekontrolle zu verhindern sucht. In neueren, textilen Objekten verknüpft Springer Künstlerinnen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Dieses informative Buch begleitet ihre Ausstellung im Kunstverein Bremen.
FERNE SPIEGEL / DISTANT MIRRORS
KUNSTHALLE BREMEN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -

Ugo Rondinone
winter, spring, summer, fall20€ Add to cartUgo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media—painting, sculpture, film, and installation art—his work is rooted in the transformation of outward reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres that capture the contemporary mood.
This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone’s work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a lightbulb . winter at theSørlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light . summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath, Vienna.
-

Leszek Skurski
Catalogue raisonné Vol. 1: Works from 1990–202459€ Add to cartLeszek Skurski (b. Gdańsk, 1973; lives and works in Fulda and Mallorca) is known for his singular and immediately recognizable white paintings. Small black and gray figures emerge from the white landscapes, always set in relation to one another, in pairs or groups. Exposed on the expansive and boundless-seeming plane, they silently tell a story that remains as open-ended as the pictures. In a few spare brushstrokes or lines drawn with the palette knife, Skurski’s superb neoimpressionism deftly captures the atmosphere that weighs down on his characters and holds his compositions in suspense.
The extensive monograph presents over two thousand works from more than three decades. Essays embed the various bodies of work in their art-historical contexts.
-

Matthias Dornfeld
danke esslingen42€ Add to cartAt first glance, the paintings of Matthias Dornfeld might strike us as naïve or even primitive. However, his still lifes, flower and animal depictions, and abstracted portraits occur in a compelling discourse with the avant-garde of European art history. Yet the works are equally accessible without that background, namely with their playful and provocative gestures, which tend to push the depictions to the brink of possibilities. After a comprehensive retrospective in the Villa Merkel Esslingen, this book documents the show and includes texts by Friedrich Meschede, Daniela Stöppel, and Christian Gögger. The in-depth essays illuminate Dornfeld’s oeuvre and iconography and furthermore discuss the unconventional hanging of the show as well as its reception.
-

Cornelia Baltes
Dingbats44€ Add to cartCornelia Baltes’s (b. Mönchengladbach, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) paintings and installation straddle the divide between abstraction and figuration. Her pictures are inspired by observations of mundane details—apparel, body parts, or facial expressions—that she pares down to simple lines and shapes. Rendered in vibrant colors and gestural fields, they hint at a narrative in the pictorial space. Baltes works with steadily modulated color gradients, on which she places thick and assertive marks. She often interrogates the painted picture’s function, by painting on the wall beyond the rectangle of the canvas, by hanging a picture in the middle of the room as an object in its own right or laying it out on the floor. Her works blend Pop Art and minimalism with an intensity and dynamic energy—and, sometimes, unmistakable flashes of humor—that cannot fail to captivate the beholder.
This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s oeuvre.
Cornelia Baltes studied at Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2000–2003 and at Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, in 2003–2006, before rounding out her education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2009–2011.
-

Considering Finland
14€ Add to cartContemporary Art from Finland
With fourteen artistic positions from the fields of photography, video, and installation, Considering Finland offers fascinating insight into the Finnish art scene. The themes of the artists from one of the least populated and most densely forested countries in Europe is the relationship between humankind and nature, as well as the political, social, and economic implications of this. Their works point to cultural dispositions and standardizations of the individual within a society based on unattainable maxims, such as permanent success, lasting recognition, and limitless growth. Pictorial traditions, geographical structures, and socio-political and infrastructural factors are the bases of a mental construction that summarizes their artistic work under a national heading. With works by Kenneth Bamberg, Elina Brotherus, Ville Lenkkeri, Aurora Reinhard, Iiu Susiraja, Nestori Syrjälä, and Pilvi Takala.
- Out of stock

Karsten Födinger
Toward a Radical Sculpture42€ Read moreHarnessing the Formative Power of Gravity
Typically made of basic construction materials, the works of Karsten Födinger (b. Mönchengladbach, Germany, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) bridge the divide between architecture and sculpture. Ideas relating to the durability and load-bearing capacity of structures are a key interest in his creative process. Besides large sculptures destined for interior settings, Födinger makes striking sculptural interventions in public spaces that take inspiration from the specific site and always engage with its historical and cultural context. Untainted by romanticism, his sculptures symbolize the approach to a foreseeable end that is hastened by the uncontrolled exploitation of the earth’s resources. With numerous illustrations and essays, this first extensive monograph on the artist presents a comprehensive survey of his sizable oeuvre.
Födinger’s works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Antenna Space, Shanghai, and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2012, he was awarded the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel Statements.
-

Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
-

Gregor Hildebrandt
A Blink of an Eye and the Years are Behind us48€ Add to cartFor the past two decades, Gregor Hildebrandt (b. Bad Homburg, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) has transformed analog audiotapes, cassettes, and records into collages, sculptures, panel paintings, and installations. Melding visual art with music, he has charted a complex creative vision crossing boundaries of medium and genre that he continually refines. Before using a tape, he records selected music—typically a single song—on it, whose lyrics he quotes in the work’s title. The artist’s output draws on his personal repertoire of bands that share a romantic narrative of loneliness and a melancholy keynote. The same attitude toward life is reflected in Hildebrandt’s work. The book offers insight into all periods of the artist’s oeuvre and is rounded out by archival materials from Hildebrandt’s studio, his project space Grzegorzki Shows, and the music label Grzegorzki Records that illustrate his creative process.
Gregor Hildebrandt studied at Kunsthochschule Mainz from 1995 until 1999 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1999 until 2002. He was a fellow of the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice in 2003 and worked in Vienna on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2005–06. He has been professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2015.
- temporarily not available

Andreas Eriksson
Read moreAll is related, from the outside in. Look what’s behind it.
Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975 in Björsäter, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden) is one of Sweden’s most notable contemporary artists. His artistic practice is based on a traditional painterly language, but he constantly expands this field to also encompass a vast production of textile works. He examines different histories through conceptual twists and turns in sculpture and prints. This monograph, the artist’s first, seeks to explain and illustrate Eriksson’s development and thoughts behind the meandering array of works he produces. It is a close look behind the canvas.
Andreas Eriksson studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1993 to 1998 and represented Sweden with the Nordic Pavilion at the 54. Biennale di Venezia. His most comprehensive solo exhibition to date took place in 2014 at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.
-

John M Armleder
CA. CA.19€ Add to cartCommentaries on our Present Day Realities and the Status of Art
John M Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva; lives and works in Geneva and New York) is one of the most influential contemporary conceptual, performance and object artists. The profound and the banal, control and coincidence, high culture and everyday life coalesce in Armleder’s work to create a unique experience. The works of the Swiss – often humorous or ironically twisted commentaries on contemporary reality – draw on the formal repertoire of Classical Modernism, as well as on video and design. The book focuses on large-scale, site-specific installations and wall pieces, showing in detail the broad spectrum of Armleder’s work.
John M Armleder studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. He represented Switzerland 1986 at the 42nd Biennale di Venezia and participated in documenta 8 one year later. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Belvedere, Vienna, amongst others.
-

Stephan Grunenberg
10€ Add to cartStephan Grunenberg (b. 1954) paints peculiar portraits: not heads or sitting and reclining figures but seemingly independent feet, legs, trousers, socks or soles of shoes. These and other under-appreciated motives are playfully arranged in captivating compositions which take issue with our hierarchical habits while looking at art. “Leaving out the ‘civilized’, educated head and centering on neglected parts such as the legs, including the lower abdomen—which is either eroticized or made taboo—is the artist’s point”, writes Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in an essay that accompanies the images inside this small and attractive new book. The paintings reproduced in this volume were all exhibited in Grunenberg’s latest exhibition in 2024, which was titled tongue-in-cheek „Representatives Regional To Earth.”
-

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.
-

Tobias Pils
Drawings55€ Add to cartDrawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils’s (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms—the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces—constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils’s visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He—his art—remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils’s drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).
Tobias Pils studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1990 until 1994. His works have been displayed in museums around the world, including at the mumok, Vienna (2021); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); the Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2018); the Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010). In 2020, he executed a large wall painting at the École normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay.






















