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
-
Jagoda Bednarsky
SHADOWLAND ET AL40€ Add to cartJagoda Bednarsky’s (b. Złotoryja, Poland, 1988; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are pop-cultural and nostalgic borrowings that she transfers into the grotesque register, with allusions to stereotyped role models between hypermasculinity and matriarchy. Unfurling pastel-colored hillscapes composed of breasts, breast pumps, vulvas, figures from Greek myth, and motifs from flora and fauna, Bednarsky’s Shadowland series interrogates traditional ideas of femininity and motherhood. The depiction of the female breast serves as a metaphor referring to the titular “Shadowland,” where this part of the body is still perceived as a sexualized object rather than as natural. The title, one might note, is borrowed from a culture magazine first published in New York in 1919 in which the artist spotted Art Deco illustrations that became a vital source of inspiration. Despite the dense aggregation of fraught symbols and referential gestures, the sensual, poetic, and richly imaginative works exude a lightness that stems from their translucency and subtle irony.
The comprehensive volume presents Bednarsky’s works from between 2018 and 2023 and a singular conversation with the artist.
Jagoda Bednarsky studied fine arts, first at Kunsthochschule Kassel (2008–2009), then at HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, with Michael Krebber and Monika Baer (2009–2014).
-
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?
-
Kai Schiemenz
Priel38€ Add to cartTidal creeks are watercourses that crisscross coastal mudflats. Running between sandbars, they flush deposits out into the sea with the falling tide, and when the tide rises, the water flows back in. In other works, tidal creeks are effectively rivers in the sea. Delving into the implications of this idea, the book presents Kai Schiemenz’s (b. Erfurt, 1966; lives and works in Berlin) major works and projects of the past four years. The publication offers insight into the provenance of selected bodies of work and their genesis. Kai Schiemenz’s art examines the city, spaces, and architecture. His small-format sculptures are self-contained creations that combine digital technologies with natural materials like wood or paper. At the same time, they function as models for expansive installations and outdoor and indoor architectures in which Schiemenz orchestrates sight lines to construct spaces whose permeability makes the audience an integral aspect of the work. If his sculptures are architecture, his exhibitions are landscapes in which the visitors encounter one another as they would in a park. Their central question, time and again, concerns the impact of the built environment and urban landscapes on their inhabitants.
-
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.).
-
Barthélémy Toguo
10€ Add to cartBarthélémy Toguo’s art is a call for community and love, but there is nothing naïve about it. His paintings, graphic art, sculptures, performances, and installations explicitly grapple with colonialism, migration, and inequality; he directs our attention to the devastations wrought by humans, to the slow deaths of nature and cultures. But he does not dwell in this abyss. He aspires to something greater: to create work that establishes non-hierarchical connections; to build, as he puts it, a “world of solidarity and generosity” that knows neither ego nor identity, a community of all forms of life that flourish and pass away so that new living beings can sprout from their remains—Endless Blossoms. His choice of words and the aesthetic of the works gathered in this catalogue suggest that he is not alone in this undertaking. He stands with Ellen Gallagher, Wangechi Mutu, Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, and Kiki Smith. With them and with all of us, Toguo envisions a colorful future, a universe of exuberant energy and joie de vivre.
-
Wege in die Abstraktion
Marta Hoepffner und Willi Baumeister24,90€ Add to cartUnknown Influences of Modern Painting and Photography
Marta Hoepffner (b. 1912, Pirmasens; d. 2000, Lindenberg) is considered a pioneer of experimental photography. For the first time, this book compares the artist’s early photographic experiments, portraits, and color photographic studies with the paintings of Willi Baumeister (b. 1889, Stuttgart, d. 1955 Stuttgart). As professor at the Frankfurter Kunstschule – today’s Städelschule – Baumeister had a decisive influence on the development of his student Hoepffner. An extraordinary book that presents more than fifty works from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Marta Hoepffner’s works have been exhibited at, among others, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Willi Baumeister studied at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart and was a member of the influential November Group. He was defamed as “degenerate” during the Nazi regime and is now considered one of the outstanding artists of modernism.
- Out of stock
Soulages
Malerei 1946–201942€ Read more“I paint not with black but with light.”
Pierre Soulages (b. Rodez, France, 1919; lives and works in Paris and Sète, France) is an eminent figure in abstract painting. A member of the Nouvelle École de Paris, he developed his first nonobjective pictures early on, in 1946, putting bars of bold color, typically black, on white grounds. His embrace of total non-representationality, an art that depicts nothing, that stands for nothing but itself, amounted to a radical challenge to the traditional values of painting. In 1979, his work entered a new phase, a painting he calls “outrenoir” or “beyond black.” Soulages now occupies a singular position, and not only by virtue of his choice of materials such as walnut stain and tar and implements like scrubbers, iron hooks, and spatulas. The book documents the arc of his oeuvre from his beginnings after World War II to the present. Illustrating the evolution of his art, it shows how he remained true to his creative vision, a consistency that is doubly imposing given the extraordinary length of his career.
Pierre Soulages studied at the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts, Montpellier, before moving to Paris in 1946. He contributed work to documentas I, II, and III and the 26th Biennale di Venezia. His work has been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; the Musée du Louvre and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier. The Musée Soulages in his native Rodez opened in 2014.
-
Beyond the Box
Dohmen Collection30€ Add to cartBreaking the Mold of Convention
Presenting installations, sculptures, objects, and paintings from Mexico, Cuba, West Africa, Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, rounded out by extraordinary works from the U.S. and Europe, this selection from the Dohmen Collection features artists from countries that did not typically register on “Western” art radars until fifteen years ago. It was the seminal documenta 11 (2002), curated by a team led by Okwui Enwezor, that ushered in a departure from the contemporary art world’s entrenched geopolitical ideas. This book showcases a treasure that has long been ahead of its time yet did not attract public attention: the private collection of Werner Dohmen, a physician in Aachen. It includes works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Wim Delvoye, Jimmie Durham, Diango Hernández, Rodney McMillian, Pavel Pepperstein, Nora Turato, Haegue Yang, and other artists who continue to provoke audiences, ask probing questions, and prompt fresh thinking.
Dr. med. Werner Dohmen has been head of the board of Neuer Aachener Kunstverein since 1988. In addition to building his own collection, he has been a committed supporter of the intercultural project No es arte, which advocates for the return of goldwork of the pre-Colombian Tairona people that was stolen from sacred sites during the colonial conquest of South America.
- Release December 2025
Cahier 002
Silke Wagner. bürgersteig22€ Add to cartBetween 2001 and 2002, a VW bus bearing the inscription “Lufthansa Deportation Class” was on display in various German cities. It was part of the provocative bürgersteig action by Silke Wagner (born 1968, lives in Frankfurt) about Lufthansa providing aircraft for deportation purposes. The bus sparked heated debates and became a vehicle for activist networking and communication among citizens. The participatory art project was groundbreaking at the time in its collaboration with civil justice initiatives. Cahier 002 documents bürgersteig for the first time with all its aspects, disclosing the sources for the action as well as material on the legal conflicts that followed the project.
-
Laura Schawelka
Double Issues24€ Add to cartSales Spaces without Merchandise
In her installations, Laura Schawelka (b. 1988, Munich; lives and works in Berlin) makes use of photography, video, and sculpture in a multilayered dialogue. In her latest works, the artist focuses on the role of photography in the development of modern consumer society. What does it mean if goods are only communicated through other goods, such as computers, cell phones, tablets? If this withholding of the genuine object is precisely what prompts the desire for it? The artist creates sales spaces without merchandise, in which images, photographs, and videos have replaced consumer goods of any kind.
Laura Schawelka studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main as a student of Tobias Rehberger master-class. In 2015, she was awarded the Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and in 2017 she moved to Paris as the recipient of a studio bursary of Hessische Kulturstiftung.
-
Mon Trésor
34€ Add to cartEurope’s Treasure Chamber
What do the torque of the princess of Reinheim, the tableware from the Orient Express, and the radio station Europe 1’s studio building have in common? They are among the treasures of the Saar region. The book presents outstanding archaeological objects and achievements of technology and art dating from the age of the Celts to the present. Drawn from the Saarland and neighboring Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, and Rhineland-Palatinate, the unexpected riches illustrate the cultural and social dimensions of this multinational region in the heart of Europe. The title Mon Trésor describes many of them quite literally: the note a seven-year-old dashed off to his father before his family was evacuated in the first days of World War II; the Roman-era ring that is also a relic, witnessing to flight and danger. All treasures are personal first and foremost, though others may later cherish them as cultural assets.
-
Penny Hes Yassour
Temp-Est24€ Add to cartA Monograph about the Award-Winning Israeli Artist
Penny Hes Yassour (b. 1950, lives and works at kibbutz En-Harod Ihud) tells stories and keeps history alive, explores the boundary between remembering and forgetting. In her installations she combines sound, image, and a multi-part world of objects into narrative mise-en-scènes of great poetic power. Hes Yassour leads the viewer through the Jordan Valley with its many watchtowers, accompanies the transformation of the landscape in a gigantic, stagelike water basin, and documents the flight of bats in a narrow, labyrinthine spatial installation. The book published on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition in Germany provides comprehensive insights into her subtle artistic work.
-
Can Yasar Köklü
CYK55€ Add to cartThe young photographer, graphic designer, and filmmaker Can Yasar Köklü (b. Schwelm, 2003; lives and works in Brooklyn) grew up between Cologne and Istanbul and currently studies at New York’s renowned Pratt Institute. In his first publication CYK—an artist’s book featuring breathtakingly beautiful photographs and personal writings—he explores his experiences growing up, the traditions that inform his art, and his feelings in three different cultures: “Heimat” charts his native Germany, where he spent most of his life; “Memleket” is dedicated to Turkey, where his roots are; and “Home” presents the impressions Köklü gathered during a year in high school in Los Angeles and now in New York, where he continues his education. Driven by a passion for storytelling, he captures singular—fascinating and deeply moving—moments in time.
-
Michael Williams
New Paintings40€ Add to cartAwkward Uncertainty
Michael Williams (b. 1978, Doylestown, Pa.; lives and works in Los Angeles) makes work that interrogates the history of painting, often by dismantling its components into their constituent parts. His pictures employ form to reflect on the complexity and contradictions of modern life. He works on canvas, availing himself of a range of techniques including oil painting, collage, and inkjet prints. In his new works, Williams examines the relationship between painting and photography, transferring the chilly aloofness that is characteristic of the latter onto the former. The photographic “negative” yields a smooth canvas disencumbered of its painterly qualities and the medium’s historic ballast. The book includes several foldout plates that illustrate Williams’s creative approach, and a brief essay by his Austrian fellow painter Tobias Pils.
Michael Williams studied fine arts at Washington University, St. Louis, and has exhibited widely, including at the Wiener Secession, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-
Nobuyuki Tanaka
Primordial Memories25€ Add to cartThe craft of traditional Japanese lacquer finishing in contemporary art
In his extraordinary sculptures, Nobuyuki Tanaka (b. 1971 in Tokyo) combines a lacquer finishing that has been practiced in Japan for centuries with an organic formal language. Tanaka is considered the most important representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art. He uses the material in polished deep black or intense red as a multi-layer coating for large-format sculptures. This results in abstract works with lively, curved, glossy surfaces in which the multi-faceted effect created by the interplay with changing light conditions plays a key role. The lavishly illustrated book includes texts by Britta E. Buhlmann, Beatrice Kromp, Antje Papist-Matsuo, Annette Reich, Atsuhiko Shima, and Nobuyuki Tanaka.
In his extraordinary sculptures, the artist combines a treatment of lacquer practiced for centuries in Japan with an organic language of form.
An exceptional representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art, Tanaka uses the lacquer mostly in polished deep black, sometimes also in intense red, as a multi-layer coating for his large-scale sculptures.
- Release November 2022
X x X
Semjon Contemporary50€ Add to cartFounded by Semjon H. N. Semjon in 2011, the gallery Semjon Contemporary has built a distinctive and singular profile that has earned it an unrivaled position in the art world. It represents international positions in contemporary art that, their divergences notwithstanding, are united by the extraordinary intelligence of their engagement with the material. The result is an unmistakable visual language that permits of no modification of established choices. Despite the considerable differences of material, technique, and expression, the artists’ works enter into dialogue with one another, as parallel solo presentations and special exhibitions showcasing numerous visiting artists have demonstrated.
The book features Colin Ardley, Edward L. Buchanan, Takayuki Daikoku, Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Ute Essig, Experimental Setup (Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager’s collective moniker), Katja Flint, Andreas Fux, Dave Grossmann, Renate Hampke, Marc von der Hocht, Nataly Hocke, Michael Kutschbach, Henrik U. Müller, Cornelia Nagel, Susanne Knaack, Katja Kollowa, Susanne Pomrehn, Thomas Prochnow, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Gerda Schütte, Gil Shachar, Li Silberberg, Karina Spechter, Klaus Steinmann, Stefan Thiel, Hitomi Uchikura, Royden Watson, and Bettina Weiß in dedicated chapters. It is rounded out by statements from collectors including Thomas Lenhart, Cornelie Kunkat, Gabriele Quandt, Roland Schnell, Nobert Fuhr and Klaus Werner, Roswitha and Jürgen König, and Helmut Ließ. Remarks by art critics and scholars and an interview with Semjon by Jan Maruhn provide additional insight into the gallery’s work.
-
Kraftwerk
Innovation durch Transformation34€ Add to cartThe power plant in Rottweil, built in 1915 by the architect Paul Bonatz, looks back on a rich and interesting history: until 1976, it provided power to a gunpowder factory and, later, to a rayon manufacturer and at times also to the city of Rottweil. The façade design, the imposing perron leading up to the main entrance, and the tall chimneys still stand as testament to the modernist industrial structure’s erstwhile significance. Twenty years after the plant was taken out of service, the entrepreneurs Thomas Wenger and Mike Wutta with their event agency trend factory took over the dilapidated building with the surrounding premises and restored it, taking care to preserve its architectonic elements and the most important technical installations. (In the course of fifteen years, around 60,000 square feet of floorspace were reopened, with a special emphasis on the distinctive blend of morbid charm and contemporary design.) The power plant now serves the company as its headquarters and, more importantly, as a cutting-edge venue for concerts, congresses, and corporate events that has attracted clients and visitors from all over Baden-Württemberg and beyond.
-
Stephen Buckley
Close Cousins. Paintings48€ Add to cartThe Artist’s First Publication in more than Thirty Years
For more than forty years Stephen Buckley (b. 1944, Leicester) has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matière of Kurt Schwitters, the dandyism of Francis Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Marcel Duchamp. He takes the two most basic components of a conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), and makes multi-dimensional constructions, joins groups of single canvases together in overlapping structures, makes shaped canvases, cuts a stretcher with a variegated edge, stitches and weaves together strips of canvas, patches pieces of canvas onto another support, and adds cardboard tubing, rope, found objects and cut out shapes. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Buckley saw extended prominence in the art press, starting with the artist being described as “the Punk Rock of contemporary painting” and ending with him gaining the title of “the ubiquitous Stephen Buckley”. There is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Since then, he has made some of his most compelling paintings, lush pop canvases full of symbols and colour, a far cry from the pared-down, industrial feel of some of his early works.
-
Maria Balea & George Crîngașu
The Mythenstein Project18€ Add to cartMaria Balea (b. Sighetu Marmației, 1990; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) and George Crîngașu (b. Focșani, 1988; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca and Rome) are among the youngest members of the School of Cluj, which has attained international renown in Adrian Ghenie, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, and Ciprian Mureșan. The overarching theme in their works in a range of media is the lived reality of today’s young people between a physical world defined by uncertainties and a virtual parallel universe whose boundless possibilities make it a fascinating yet also often deceptive safe haven. Both artists roam this dizzying kaleidoscope of worlds on a quest for beauty: Balea, through a romantically idealized focus on remnants of untouched or deserted nature; Crîngașu, by abandoning himself to the graphical possibilities of the digital realm, where beauty is often bound up with the bending of natural laws and the physical impossibility of architecture. Yet both, the retreat to an ostensibly natural state and the escape into garish artificiality, are overshadowed by a nameless menace.
-
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.
