


Hans Hofmann
Chimbote
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Britta E. Buhlmann, Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern |
Author(s) | Britta E. Buhlmann |
Design | Claudia Ott, Düsseldorf |
Cover | Hardcover |
Size | 20 x 28 cm |
Pages | 88 |
Illustrations | 52 |
Language(s) | German, English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-046-0 |
Expressive Forms between Art and Architecture
As an exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (b. Weißenburg, Germany, 1880; d. New York, USA, 1966) ranks among the preeminent artists of the twentieth century. As a teacher at his Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, which he founded in 1933 after emigrating to the United States, he exerted a formative influence over a generation of young painters. With Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others, he was a member of the illustrious New York School, a loose association of visual artists. In 1950 he was spending time in Europe and collaborated with the architects Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener on designs for colorful wall paintings to be executed on buildings in Chimbote, Peru. The urban masterplan they developed for the city’s post-World War II expansion was never realized, and so Hofmann’s intensely colorful works in large formats have been known only to specialists. The selection gathered in this book together with drawings and a city plan provides focused insight into a visionary project.
More books
-
GOTT&GILZ
Supernatural Beings54€ Add to cartGOTT&GILZ clothe provocative nudity into the guise of art-historical classics
The female nude is a constant of art history whose vicissitudes illustrate changing forms of representation and the wild swings of public morality. Many a nude was initially condemned as smut only to be reclassified a few years later as beautiful and becoming and inducted into the hallowed halls (the opposite has also happened). GOTT&GILZ’s photographic paintings build on this long tradition of depictions of naked women by men—theirs is the proverbial “male gaze.” It is a debt they are quick to acknowledge, with nods to Klimt, Schiele, Pollock, et al. No wonder some have responded to their work with kneejerk indignation. Unlike in those art-historical references, then, the impudence lies not in the shattering of traditional norms of representation but in quoting them: the past as affront. The women in the pictures as well as the artists themselves flaunt their desires, shamelessly and relentlessly confronting us with the historic roots of our social and psychological realities.
Freedom is the key idea in the two artists’ oeuvre: the freedom to be authentic and express oneself without shame. Their subtly provocative play with aesthetic conventions and taboos has not only made a splash on the arts scene, it has also prompted vital discussions about gender roles, body images, and the right to sexual self-determination.
By letting it all hang out, they allow us to see ourselves as we are instead of presenting a picture of what we (supposedly) should be like. The insolence of it!
- Out of stock
Thomas Lehnerer
Grott18€ Read moreA Facsimile by the Theologian and Artist
The genesis of images is a central aspect of the work of the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (b. Munich, 1955; d. ibid., 1995). In drawings and sculptures, as well as in spatial and conceptual works, the production of images creates a counter-world to our own lives. By transferring fundamental experiences of human existence into art, Lehnerer creates an equivocal, anthropological space for observation and reflection. The artist’s book Grott, published in 1986, contains ambiguous elements. All drawings are positioned on the right page. In the not yet dried state, a double image was formed on the left side, which relativizes the “primary image.” The depictions of animals, people, and the environment were drawn nearly without interruption from a single line. In this style of continuous movement, the overall image can be traced back to its beginning. For Lehnerer, it was important to understand human (self-)consciousness from the perspective of the history of evolution, since there are countless models of thought and belief within this narrative. Grott refers in the title, as well as in the drawings, to the charged relationship between the earthly and the spiritual.
-
Aline Schwibbe
Now It’s Dark28€ Add to cartAline Schwibbe (b. Hamm 1988; lives and works in Berlin) studied both psychology and art and her interest lies in observing the cyclical nature of events and experiences—in memory, in dreams and in the reality of the present. Her films and her photographic and mixed-media sequences often appear like fragments of occurrences snatched from the dark and exposed multiple times in an attempt to make them visible.
The artist’s first monograph is published on the occasion of her solo exhibition Now It‘s Dark at the EIGEN+ART Lab Berlin. The book introduces Schwibbe’s extensive multidisciplinary practice, which besides drawing, photography and video also includes sculpture, animation, sound installations, and textile projects.
-
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.
-
Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
-
100 Windows
Site-specific art installations at Berlin-Weekly project space28€ Add to cartEstablished in 2010 by Stefanie Seidl in a former gateway for horse-drawn carriages that is now enclosed by glazing at both ends, the project space BERLIN-WEEKLY offers the narrow yet exceptionally tall display space to artists as a highly visible public stage for installations that respond to the setting or site. Its unilateral orientation toward the street makes BERLIN-WEEKLY a creative intervention into the urban fabric that harnesses the shopwindow format. The book presents 100 selected window installations to illustrate the widely diverse ways in which individual artists have engaged with the venue, time and again transforming the unusually shaped small space.
With works by: Menno Aden, Alexandra Baumgartner, Isabelle Borges, Astrid Busch, Simon Faithfull, Moritz Frei, Max Frisinger, Wolfgang Flad, Dagmara Genda, Andreas Greiner & Armin Keplinger, Sabine Groß, Marc van der Hocht, Sabine Hornig, Irène Hug, Bettina Khano, Julia Kissina, Nikolaus List, Ulrike Mohr, Virginie Mosse, Piotr Nathan, Katja Pudor, Philip Topolovac, Inken Reinert, Sophia Schama, Geerten Verheus, Sinta Werner, Barbara Wille, and others
-
Winston Roeth
Speed of Light32€ Add to cartColor Is Light
Intense monochrome areas of color, radiant pigments, and multifaceted surfaces are the characteristics of the art of Winston Roeth (b. Chicago, 1945; lives and works in Beacon, New York, and Waldoboro, Maine). He has devoted himself to abstract color field painting since the 1970s, with the grid as a leitmotif running through his oeuvre; both are fraught with painterly memories of light, “a light that can jump out and grasp the beholders, a color saturation that throbs with a deep glow,” as the artist himself puts it. It emanates from the strata of paint in his pictures, encountering the light that, falling upon his works, molds their chromatic effect. Roeth experiments with pure pigments, which he mixes by hand to make paints he applies in layers to diverse media including paper, aluminum, honeycomb, slate, and wood panels. The book documents a tour of an exhibition, presenting works dating from between the early 1990s and 2020.
- Release May 2025
Antonia Hirsch
Phenomenal Fracture24€ Add to cartIn a probing engagement with the screen, an omnipresent object in contemporary life, Antonia Hirsch charts the gulf between the digital and the analog, the two spheres of which our perceived reality is composed. In provocative installations and objects, the artist conceives the distinctions between screen, mirror, and blade as less than sharply defined. Her works show rigidly geometric shapes made of hard and shimmering glass and steel; they encounter eerily somatic and perishable-looking cardboard or soft foamed-plastic components that recall the bodies they perhaps once served. Reflective surfaces mirror our gaze, but the less classy materials, too, await recognition by the beholder’s body. The book accompanies Hirsch’s solo exhibition “Phenomenal Fracture” at Kunsthalle Lingen; photographs and writings convey extensive and sustained impressions that run the gamut from the uncanny to the darkly humorous.
- 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.
-
Gabriele Basch
fortuna24€ Add to cartPaper and Foil Cut‑Outs in an Innovative Language of Forms: An Overview of the Works of Gabriele Basch from 2008 to 2019
Since the 1990s, Gabriele Basch (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) has been working with cut-outs and translating the age-old tradition of silhouettes into an idiosyncratic and innovative language of forms. The artist interweaves creation and destruction, planning and chance into a complex, multi-layered reality and makes views into the spatial environment an integral part of her work. In her paper and foil cut-outs, foreground and background, materiality and void combine to form a whole that oscillates between painting and drawing, as well as between urban structures and hints of the biomorphic – in delicate color gradients, swirling structures, spontaneous gestures, and stenciled surfaces. The generously illustrated monograph offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work from 2008 to 2019.
-
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.
-
Anders Goldfarb
Passed Remains35€ Add to cartAbandoned Gas Stations and Burned-Out Buildings
In 1986 when Anders Goldfarb (b. 1954 in Brooklyn, lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY) moved to Greenpoint, he was a young photographer with a master of fine arts degree from State University of New York at New Paltz. In moving to Williamsburg, he joined a growing number of young artists seeking the low rents of what was then a declining neighborhood of light industrial buildings and working-class residences. Working with black and white film, and a medium format Rolleiflex camera, Goldfarb began photographing in 1987 in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, riding his bike around the area and looking for the peculiar beauty of sidings, peeling paint and razor wire. Goldfarb’s photographs provide a valuable historical record of these neighborhoods prior to their demolition and gentrification. His subjects are metaphors for loss and vulnerability and distill moments in time that are destined for demise.
-
Karin Hochstatter
gegengerade20€ Add to cartA Provocation of Vision between Surface and Depth
In her sculptural works, Karin Hochstatter (b. 1960, Cologne; lives and works in Cologne) deals with forms and their dissolution, as well as the perceptual mechanisms that arise from this. Everyday materials from high-tech production processes, such as construction products and foils, become fragile and expansive structures that question both our way of seeing and our notion of sculpture. The book documents her more recent works since 2012, which always exist as singular events in space and never appear a second time in the same way.
Karin Hochstatter studied Visual Art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Philosophy at Heinrich-Heine- Universität Düsseldorf. Since 1998, she has been a visiting professor and lecturer at universities in Germany and the USA.
-
Bilder des Wohnens
18€ Add to cartThe Cognitive Registers of Photography
All over the world, housing shortages and living conditions are urgent concerns of political and academic debates. Scholars at the FH Bielefeld conducted a three-year research project on Bilder des Wohnens. Architekturen im Bild, focusing on questions of the representation of space and hybrid forms of visualization between documentation and staging as well as photography as an archive of architectural knowledge and tool in the planning process. The book draws on studies of twentieth-century social utopias such as Tashkent, Uzbekistan, an embodiment of the urban-planning ideal of Soviet modernism, and explorations of social and cultural spaces along the coasts of northern Morocco and southern Spain, as well as a photographic typology of urban fabrics in Germany and other sociocultural studies that grapple with the significance of living spaces today.
-
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.
-
Sonja Yakovleva
Soaplands50€ Add to cartSonja Yakovleva’s (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) silhouettes are informed by her sex-positive feminist views. They mix and match pornography with art-historical references, folkloristic motifs, fairy tales, and myths that have served to ingrain misogynistic, racist, and homophobic ideologies in the collective consciousness since the Middle Ages. The dissemination of such materials was facilitated by the paper cut, a medium that encouraged simplified graphical representations and was seen as domestic and appropriate for women. Yakovleva’s intentions in adopting it, however, are contrarian: her iridescent silhouettes grapple with women’s stories, precarious gray areas, power relations, representation, sexuality, and violence in novel ways.
Soaplands, the title of Sonja Yakovleva’s first monograph, is a nod to Japanese bathhouses where men receive personal care, massages, and sexual services. Most recently, a number of soaplands have opened that cater to women with male prostitutes. Similarly, in the paper cuts in the book, which were created between 2018 and 2023, women have seized sexual power and conquered the patriarchal system. Unchecked by shame, they use men as objects to satisfy their desires.
-
Freeters
HELP! Artistic Intelligence38€ Add to cartFREETERS stands for an artist collective that designs, creates, transforms and plays with spaces, for and with the people who experience their time there. The artistic intelligence used in the process transforms into spaces for thinking, working, living, playing and learning, creating identity, emotion and inspiration.
This book is about the mediation of artistic thinking and artistic action in processes. The artistic practice of Freeters is characterized by strategies of thought and action that are needed in a society with constantly changing conditions, in a working world that overturns itself in its dynamics. The necessity of shaping the present through artistic thought and action can no longer be limited to the art context.
FREETERS’ AI approach should be understood less as a scientific methodology and more as a call not to reduce our intelligence to only rational thought processes with a utility maxim. Of course, AI has already made impressive progress in many areas of our public services via the hard components of machine learning. However, it is doubtful whether this approach alone can really give rise to a superintelligence that will one day create a resource-saving paradise on earth. Nor is it guaranteed that we as Homo Sapiens will be assigned a place in this paradise by such a unilaterally gifted superintelligence. Cognitively, this machine will be superior to us in any case – only the necessary feeling of happiness of a consensual coexistence does not seem quite conceivable.
-
Nicola Staeglich – Farbe schwebend / Color floating
22€ Add to cart“The more slowly one approaches Staeglich’s works, the more they reveal.” Stephan Berg
Nicola Staeglich transforms color and traces of the act of painting into complex pictorial spaces that exude light and make time visible. Using an extra-wide brush, she applies luminous oil paints to (semi-) transparent foils and solid support media made from acrylic glass. Each movement of her body leaves a distinct mark on the paintings. Once the works are placed in the exhibition space, they absorb their environment and ambient light as well as the eye. The artist’s experimental approach generates a rich dynamic: paint hovers in mid-air, disembodied, while a constant oscillation between color and surface, between pictorial body and setting unlocks novel dimensions in space and time. The picture continually coalesces in the eye of the beholder, metamorphosing as the angle of incidence shifts and the mind parses the traces and strata of paint. Even in printed form, Staeglich’s works convey a rousing vitality.
The catalogue accompanies Staeglich’s solo exhibition at Städtische Galerie Waldkraiburg.
-
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.
-
Feuer und Farbe
Gemälde und Grafiken von Walter Jacob35€ Add to cartWalter Jacob (1893-1964) was a painter whose oeuvre and life reflected the discontinuities of the twentieth century in condensed form. Contemplative natural scenes and the self-portraits were constants to which he hewed throughout his career; in stylistic terms, however, his oeuvre could hardly be more contradictory. Working first in the Impressionist, then in the Expressionist style, he eventually forged a form of expression tending toward abstraction, although he rejected modernist painting throughout his life. The Nazis considered his early work “degenerate,” which led him—a committed National Socialist and active member of the SA—to adapt not just his ideological convictions, but also his aesthetics to the new era: starting in the mid-1930s, he produced naturalistic depictions, sometimes suggestive of the New Objectivity, of “popular” motifs like landscapes, animals, soldiers, and more. Tellingly, though, the backs of some of his canvases are taken up by works that suggest the pleasure he took in experimenting with color and form. The same tension is palpable in the abstract landscapes of his late oeuvre. This catalog gathers works to retrace Jacob’s checkered career, complemented by (art) historical essays that embed his output in its context.