Ingo Mittelstaedt
Courtesy
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Julia Katharina Thiemann |
| Author(s) | Julia Katharina Thiemann, Renè Zechlin |
| Design | Fides Sigeneger |
| Cover | Paperback in an envelope with 5 picture panels |
| Size | 24 x 32 cm |
| Pages | 50 |
| Illustrations | 29 color illustrations with 5 picture panels in a bag |
| Language(s) | English, German |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-09-8 |
Perception and Comprehension in Photography
Ingo Mittelstaedt (b. 1978, Berlin; lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg) creates staged photographs, combining and contrasting them with diverse objects in expansive installations. His pictorial arrangements probe a variety of concerns and imageries that he sources from museum settings or the modes of representation in ordinary advertising brochures. Gestures of showing, pointing, bringing out, and uncovering are leitmotifs in Mittelstaedt’s canny and subtly humorous exploration of the potentials and limitations of the photographic medium.
Ingo Mittelstaedt studied fine arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and received numerous emerging-artist awards, including the New York fellowship of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung. His work has been shown at Kunstverein Hannover, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Marta Herford, and elsewhere.
More books
-
Katharina Arndt
While waiting for Death38€ Add to cartLife for the most part consists of banalities. What to make of it? Katharina Arndt has decided to dip thick brushes into luminous bold acrylic paints, which she applies expansively without regard for the ostensible gray areas of life. Every stroke is valid, there’s no remorse or trepidation, everything is foreground, all elements of a picture are equipollent. The people in Arndt’s paintings from 2022–23 gathered in this catalog are simply there, for the moment, gaping into their cell phones, stuffing themselves with burgers. Nothing more. That makes her works distorted depictions of our hedonistic society with its craving for sensuality, even as we always have one eye riveted on the virtual. The harder, then, to face up to physical reality; with all photo filters off, its imperfections are unmistakable. And so, although we clearly delight in these gaudy colors, the pictures contain intimations of melancholy and death, too. Knowing that the hour of farewell is near, Arndt’s figures stimulate their senses. They kill time down to the very end with jarring trivia, agitated Sisyphuses wallowing in their glittering inadequacy.
-
Secundino Hernández
Miettinen Collection36€ Add to cartSecundino Hernández’s (b. Madrid, 1975; lives and works in Madrid und Berlin) paintings and works on paper blend figuration and abstraction, the linearity of drawing and exuberant color, minimalism and gesture. Slowly and methodically moving across the canvas, Hernández sets down sinuous lines and marks, using a brush or applying the paint straight from the tube before rinsing and scratching off the surfaces. The resulting compositions feel organized yet charged with explosive energy and evince manifold references: a physicality reminiscent of Action Painting, cartoon-style terse figuration, and passages that bring to mind Old Masters and especially the Spaniards El Greco and Velázquez. As Hernández observes, his works “may look like Action Painting or Expressionism, but they represent a profound and painstaking scrutiny of these visual idioms, a way of articulating my own contemporary perspective on certain aesthetic movements.”
Secundino Hernández studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid from 1995 until 2000 and at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2005–2006.
-
Sprache/Text/Bild
32€ Add to cartSpoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change—that we share responsibility for them.
Artists: John Baldessari, Maria Bartuszová, Alice Bidault, Alejandro Cesarco, Ayşe Erkmen, Nadine Fecht, Gary Hill, Janice Kerbel, Gabriel Kladek, Gordon Parks, The National AIDS Memorial, Markus Vater, Gillian Wearing
-
Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur14€ Add to cartThe Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
-
Urban Art! Biennale® 2019
27,50€ Add to cartThe World’s Most Important Exhibition of Urban Art — Presented for the Fifth Time in 2019
Its themes are the city and urban lifestyle, its can-vases walls, doors, or windows, its artists cosmo-politan. Since the turn of the millennium, Urban Art has developed out of the non-commercial, often illegal art forms of graffiti and street art. Although it makes use of the same stylistic means — spraying, tagging, the deliberate inclusion of drips, the use of graffiti scripts, etc. — it transports these as commis-sioned works into the legal space of the museum, gallery, or architecture. The Urban Art Biennial at the World Cultural Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte is the largest international exhibition of its kind. Fifty individual works and twenty-five installations by one hundred artists shed light on the latest developments and positions from Western metropolises, as well as from current hot spots around the globe.
- 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.
-
On Trickling Away
Concepts of Time in Contemporary Art30€ Add to cartTime, like space, is one of the key coordinates of human existence. The great mysteries of our lives revolve around it, only to remain unresolved when death inevitably ends our days. What is time’s role in art? The vanitas, a genre that was popular with painters in the seventeenth century, is hardly the earliest form that artists have devised to grapple with it. Holger Kube Ventura’s book On Trickling Away. Concepts of Time in Contemporary Art presents the ideas of contemporary artists who approach time from diverse angles. In the twenty-first century, their interest appears to have shifted from visualizations of future raptures to visions of slowness, of the distension, repetition, and standstill of moments in time. Bernard Aubertin (FR), Inge Dick (AT), Rom Gaastra (NL), Gosbert Gottmann (DE), Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen (FI), Manuela Kasemir (DE), Timo Klos (DE), Dimitry Orlac (FR), George Rickey (US), Patrik Söderlund & Visa Suonpää (FI), and John Woodman (UK) hone our awareness of how subjective the passage of time is and convey vivid experiences of its trickling away.
-
Anna Bogouchevskaia
Shouldn’t Be Gone25€ Add to cartAnna Bogouchevskaia (b. Moscow, 1966; lives and works in Berlin) sees her work in sculpture as a geopolitical engagement with concerns on the intersection between figuration and abstraction. Macroscopic aluminum drops, bizarre bronze flowers, fog and snow made of silver—the artist, a committed environmentalist, has created a peculiar and fascinating world of evanescent natural phenomena. Focusing on two molecules—carbon dioxide and water—in their various states of aggregation, she draws attention to the threats posed by climate change.
The publication Shouldn’t be gone presents Bogouchevskaia’s most recent works since 2019: an urgent message of warning from an artist whose sculptural oeuvre even today has the air of a monument to a world in demise.
-
Ion Bitzan
48€ Add to cartThe painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country’s isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceaușescu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and São Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.
-
Gerhard Neumaier
Die Lust an der Macht des Malens zwischen Mythos und Trivialität32€ Add to cartEin Spiel mit den Ambivalenzen
Offenkundig Mythologisches gerät bei Gerhard Neumaier (geb. 1950 in Freiburg, lebt und arbeitet in Baden-Baden) ebenso zur trivialen Episode, wie scheinbar Triviales legendäre Ikonik entfaltet. Dabei bricht sein unvoreingenommener Umgang mit Klassikern wie etwa in der Duchamp-Persiflage „Hokuspokus mit Fokus Lokus“ semantische Vorurteile in den Sehgewohnheiten auf und bietet dem Betrachter neuartige Interpretationen. In der perfomativen Bewegtheit seiner Rakelbilder legt er eine haptische Sinnlichkeit an den Tag, die Cora von Pape in ihrer Einleitung dazu bringt, den Künstler zu zitieren: „Ich male, was ich weiß, damit ich sehe, was ich fühle.“
-
Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte27,50€ Add to cartErinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
-
Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
-
Călin Dan
POLLIO34€ Add to cartThe oeuvre of the Romanian artist Călin Dan (b. Arad, Romania, 1955; lives and works in Bucharest) shows the influences of conceptual and minimal art. His book Pollio surveys his creative practice of the past decade, which straddles the media of installation and performance art, film, photography, and sculpture and is enriched by his work as an art historian, writer, and curator. In addition to the titular body of work, which wrestles with the Roman historian Gaius Asinius Pollio, the volume also documents the exhibition Alzheimer (2017). Călin Dan is a founding member of the artists’ group subREAL. His work was showcased at the Istanbul (1993), Venice (1993, 1999, 2001), São Paulo (1994), and Sydney Biennales (2006). He has been director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest since 2014.
-
What is Vienna Actionism?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
-
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.
-
Pharaonengold
3.000 Jahre altägyptische Hochkultur27,50€ Add to cartThe Mysterious World of the Pharaohs and their Magical Relationship to Gold
Hardly any other culture fascinates as much as the high culture of ancient Egypt. At its center were the pharaohs, those legendary kings who, according to the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, descended directly from the gods. Gold was ascribed a special symbolic and religious power; it stood for eternity and indestructibility and, as the “flesh of the gods,” was a sacred metal. The book brings together 150 exhibits from pharaonic tombs from the Old Kingdom of the Third Dynasty (circa 2680 B.C.E.) and the oldest gold statue of an Egyptian pharaoh to Tutankhamun and Horemheb (circa 1330–1310 B.C.E.).
-
nolde/kritik/documenta (English)
42€ Add to cartEmil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
-
Erich Hörtnagl
Unforgettable – Unforgotten48€ Add to cartHow can a life be remembered—what remains, what vanishes?
In Unforgettable | Unforgotten, Erich Hörtnagl brings together photographic fragments that are more than just memories: they are symbols of lived time. Roland Barthes’ concept of the “punctum” experience—that instant when a detail in an image pierces the heart—provides a key to Hörtnagl’s photographic gaze. It is not the spectacular events but the quiet and incidental things that move us. The seemingly insignificant becomes a projection screen for memory, loss, and emotion. The focus is not on what is staged, but on what eludes creative control.
Accompanied by insightful writings by Alois Schöpf and Kurt Höretzeder, a quiet monologue emerges about happiness and missed opportunities, about what we receive—and what we give. A book that doesn’t provide answers but asks questions: What makes a life worth living? What remains unforgettable or unforgotten?
-
Kay Rosen
NOW AND THEN35€ Add to cartKay Rosen (b. Corpus Christi, TX, 1943; lives in New York City and Gary, IN) has made art out of language since the 1970s. She garnered international acclaim with wall pieces spelling individual words, phrases, or strings of letters, often on a vast scale. Her works combine minimalist form, aesthetic force, and clever ideas in compelling ways. By modulating their arrangement and typographic and color design, the artist puts irritating twists on everyday terms and expressions. Subtle alterations often yield striking effects. Through punning, reframing, and onomatopoeic exploration, Rosen continually unearths unexpected layers of meaning. Released on occasion of the artist’s eightieth birthday, the publication presents wall pieces, paintings, drawings, prints, and video stills, inviting readers to discover or rediscover a multifaceted oeuvre that blends lightness and humor with analytical acumen in singular fashion.
Kay Rosen obtained a B.A. in linguistics, Spanish, and French at Tulane University’s Newcomb College in New Orleans, LA, in 1965. She then taught Spanish at Indiana University in Gary while attending studio classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she subsequently taught for twenty-four years.
-
Shara Hughes
58€ Read moreBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
