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
-
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.
- 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.
-
GABRIELE BASCH, GESA LANGE
UND_NEWS_FROM_NOW_HERE18€ Add to cartBeyond Painting
Gabriele Basch’s (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) cut-outs and Gesa Lange’s (b. 1972, Tongeren, Belgium; lives and works in Hamburg) drawings are meditations on construction and deconstruction as well as doubts and how to overcome them. Both artists expand the range of painting: Basch, with incisions into the medium and a creative handling of the tinged shadows that transform the painted panel into a wall-mounted object; Lange, by embroidering her canvases with colorful threads that open up the pictorial space on all sides. The book presents works by both artists, initiating an animated and dynamic dialogue between their nonrepresentational visual idioms. Gabriele Basch is professor of painting at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Gesa Lange is professor of graphic art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. She has received the Kunsthalle Rostock Prize and other awards.
- temporarily not available
CLARA MOSCH
and early art events in the GDRRead moreThe legendary producer-run gallery Clara Mosch and the artists’ group of the same title that gathered around it were founded in Karl-Marx-Stadt (today’s Chemnitz) in 1977 and existed until 1982. The catchy name was an acronym of the contributors’ last names: CLA = Carlfriedrich Claus, RA = Thomas Ranft and Dagmar Ranft-Schinke, MO = Michael Morgner, SCH = Gregor-Torsten Schade. As the founders of the first producers’ gallery in the GDR and creators of diverse oeuvres, the group’s artists rank among the foremost exponents of avant-garde art in East Germany. The book presents works of art, limited editions, and posters as well as photographs from the Ralf-Rainer Wasse archive in the collections of the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg. One thematic focus is on Clara Mosch’s land-art happenings and plein-air pieces. The unconventional actions attest to the group’s stated objective of building greater awareness of the ongoing devastation of the local environment. Forty years after the fact, Clara Mosch’s work has lost none of its relevance and urgency.
-
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.
-
Jan Zöller
10€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) art has the aura of a jerry-rigged, cosmic, comedic theater. Flames gutter, pant legs and elbows dance, run, and go up in fire. Wells, basins, and tubs are central motifs, symbolizing communal settings, but also the circulation of vital energies, of human and economic interconnections. Zöller’s paintings take fractured or antiquated systems, today’s art world among them, and reforge them into something new. In painting, he reflects on what being an artist means to him, driven by an interest less in a dialogue with art history or other contemporary painters than in the psychosocial relationships and conditions that inform his work. His paintings, sculptures, and installations probe the discrepancy between economic production and the spiritual and magical dimension of art.
-
Rainer Jacob
justICE30€ Add to cartRainer Jacob (b. Jena, 1970; lives and works in Leipzig) has anonymously installed objects made of ice in public settings in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, and Budapest since 2013. He then allows them to dematerialize and records the process in photographs. Radiators, wall outlets, QR codes, and the Duchampian pissoir are among his recurrent motifs. The impermanence of the ice objects builds bridges to street art, Fluxus, and action art. Critical observations on the unequal distribution of resources and political power in contemporary society, his works reflect on our perceptions and question the idea of originality in art while also probing the outer limits of sculpture.
The publication showcases the ice objects of the past ten years, embedding them in a decade that has marked a sea change in the life of humankind: JustICE captures an artist’s distinctive perspective on societal processes.
- temporarily not available
Norbert Bisky
Im FreienRead moreThe beauty of male bodies, hedonism, bold colors—Norbert Bisky (b. Leipzig, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) is widely regarded as the most successful exponent of contemporary figurative painting in Germany. Now the artist has created a series of seventeen works on canvas and paper based on associations sparked by the oeuvre of the Expressionist Max Pechstein (1881–1955). The title “Im Freien” not only refers to the scenes they depict, which play out under the open sky; Bisky—who grew up in East Germany, which is to say, in what he calls “circumstances that were not free”—also grapples with the question of what liberty means to us today and what we do with it. The preoccupation with freedom led both painters to a quest for a personal utopia. Pechstein found it in the South Seas, where he had visited Palau, then a German colony, in 1914; the archipelago seemed paradisiacal to him, an idyll far removed from political and social reality. Bisky, by contrast, focuses less on the exotic landscape than on its residents, whom he stages as individual members of a globalized society.
Norbert Bisky enrolled at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in 1994 to read German literature and art history but switched to the Berlin University of the Arts before year’s end; he studied painting with Georg Baselitz and entered Baselitz’s master class in 1999. He was a visiting professor at the Haute école d’art et de design, Geneva, in 2008–2010 and at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in 2016–2018.
- Out of stock
Ernst Gamperl
Zwiesprache Dialogue34€ Read moreUnique wooden sculptures as the result of a ten‑year process
Ernst Gamperl (b. 1965, Munich; lives and works in Tremosine) is fascinated by the dialogue with living material and the quality of the unpredictable. He creates room-sized wooden objects, into the design of which he incorporates the natural drying process, cracks, and irregularities—a revolutionary technique of woodturning which has led to completely new standards, technically often at the limits of what is feasible. In a ten-year process, Gamperl transformed a roughly 230-year-old uprooted oak into an ensemble of vessels and sculptures. The artist’s book conveys the fascination of the material and the craft, brings us close to the objects, and documents the challenging work process.
-
Irmel Droese. Felix Droese
Die Fruchtbarkeit der Polarität28€ Add to cartA Tribute to the Artist Couple
Irmel Droese (b. 1943, Landsberg an der Warthe) and Felix Droese (b. 1950, Singen/Hohentwiel) first met in 1970, when both were students in Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In a decades-long partnership in life and art, they have built oeuvres that, both each for itself and in dialogue with each other, scrutinize a rapidly changing reality. Irmel Droese creates expressive stage characters, sculptural oil paper figures, and depictions of humans on paper, while Felix Droese’s diverse ensembles and large-format papercuts grapple with money, economic questions, and the rising predominance of commercial considerations. His art gained international renown with his participation in documenta 7 in 1982 and the 43rd Biennale di Venezia in 1988. Designed in close collaboration with the artists, the publication documents their separate and joint oeuvres, drawing attention to societal questions.
-
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.
-
Heike Negenborn
Terra Cognita24€ Add to cartLebensraum of our Time: Contemporary Landscape Painting
The central theme of Heike Negenborn (b. 1964, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler; lives and works in Windesheim) is the seen lebensraum. In reference to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, her works stand in a specific tradition of capturing reality. With her new group of works titled Net-Scape – Landscape in Transition, Negenborn transfers art historical references into contemporary images. The artist is interested in the possibilities of media transfer and the increasing appropriation of analog reality by the digital image. The present volume provides impressive insights into the developments of the landscape painter from 2007 to 2020.
Heike Negenborn studied fine arts at Austin College, Texas, Art Education at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, and Painting and Printmaking at the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz.
-
The Art of Society
1900–194529€ Add to cartThe Collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the last building designed by Mies van der Rohe, has been closed a full six years for refurbishment. To mark its reopening the museum is presenting the highlights of its classical modernist collection under the title The Art of Society, 1900–1945. Visionary, critical, resigned or utopian, the paintings and sculptures bear witness to art’s dialogue with prevailing social conditions – from the German Empire to the First World War, the Weimar Republic and ultimately National Socialism. The catalogue documenting all works in the exhibition traces the major artistic tendencies during the first half of the 20th century in thirteen chapters. The Art of Society, 1900–1945 offers a renewed encounter with works by Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tamara de Lempicka, Lotte Laserstein, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and many others that is as captivating as it is illuminating.
Click here for the German edition.
-
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.
-
Mihai Olos
42€ Add to cartMihai Olos (b. Ariniș, Romania, 1940; d. Endingen am Kaiserstuhl, 2015) ranks among the most fascinating artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His adaptations of the formal vocabulary pioneered by Constantin Brâncuși are unrivaled in their creative originality. His works evince an utterly novel approach to the combination of materials from the culture of rural Romania with the visual strategies of modernism. His formidable oeuvre engages with conceptual and minimal art and comprises paintings, drawings, and sculptures, sometimes in the dimensions of land-art projects, as well as performances and poetry. Despite the constraints imposed by the communist system, his art and travels—during which he also met his kindred spirit Joseph Beuys—were dedicated to the unerring pursuit of his vision of social sculpture and radical utopian architecture.
-
Hofmann’s Ways
Early Drawings (1898-1937)24,80€ Add to cartA Re-Discovery: the Early Graphic Work of Hans Hofmann
A representative of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (b. 1880, Weißenburg; d. 1966, New York) was one of the most important artistic personalities of the 20th century. He began his career as a teacher and artist in the United States in the mid-1930s. The previously unpublished graphic oeuvre presents the highly varied development process that preceded Hans Hofmann’s influential painting of the post-war period.
-
GETA BRĂTESCU
Film and Video 1977–201842€ Add to cartGeta Brătescu (b. Ploiești, 1926; d. Bucharest, 2018) is now widely regarded as one of Eastern Europe’s most important avant-gardists. In the Western art world, however, she was largely obscure until her participation in documenta 14 in 2017 and the Venice Biennale of the same year. Questions of abstraction, the political potential of the image, and the subjective experience of self, memory, and history inform her stylistically diverse oeuvre in a wide range of media, which evolved under the repressive conditions of the Ceaușescu regime yet kept pace with the discourses of the Western avant-gardes. This richly illustrated volume focuses on her collages and drawings as well as her works on film and video from the late 1970s until her death.
-
Martin Krumbholz
Alex, Martin und Ich14€ Add to cart“The Vocation of Saint Matthew”: that is the title that Martin Krug has chosen for his novella, after Caravaggio’s iconic painting at the Church of San Luigi degli Francesi in Rome. The irony is unmistakable—Martin, the protagonist of his narrative, hesitates to accept a promotion: he has been offered the job of his boss, for whose wife, Marion, he has fallen on a shared vacation. Yet Martin’s friend, whom he has asked for advice, proposes a different title: Ghost Story—a key element of the plot is the mysterious Alexander’s disappearance, seemingly forever, in the sea …
Martin’s friend and interlocutor, the novel’s first-person narrator, embeds the novella in a narrative framework that mirrors its motifs: love as passion, eros and sex, loyalty and betrayal, manliness and chivalry, art, film, and music. Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, glamorously adapted for the silver screen by Jean-Luc Godard, is reread and discussed as a MeToo story.
Martin Krumbholz (b. Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, 1954; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a writer and theater critic. His first novel, Eine kleine Passion, came out in 2013.
-
Filip Henin
10€ Add to cartThe events captured in Filip Henin’s (b. Mayen, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are set in a world beyond time and place, as though on an empty stage prepared for a Samuel Beckett production. It is virtually impossible to say whether a picture shows a coastal region or a craggy slope up in the mountains, whether a field of blue represents the sea or a band of open sky. Henin strips landscapes down no less than human figures, subtracting specific features to isolate basic forms that might be found in the hill country around his hometown in western Germany or in Tuscany. His work integrates quotations from antiquity, Romantic landscape painting, and postmodernism as well as Italian Transavanguardia, the mysticism of Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and the figurative painting of the 1990s. Without veering into drama or pathos, he harnesses two utterly antithetical energies: the reflection on painting and the history of art and the need to be simple.
-
MK Kaehne
Π = 3,1415935€ Add to cartThe biography of conceptual artist MK Kaehne (b. Vilnius, 1963; lives and works in Berlin) oscillates between Vilnius, Moscow and Berlin. Influenced by Russian Constructivism, he draws and builds suitcase sculptures with a department store aesthetic, a reversal of the readymade principle. His focus gradually shifted from the formal to the psychological, towards life-size figures such as It’s me (2023): a hyper-realistic replica of himself, lying upside down in the mud, with a garden gnome next to him. Kaehne’s work is strictly analytical, but the results are full of tragedy and irony. Unintentional drawings, in which biographical, Dadaist and political elements merge, accompany his oeuvre. A total work of art that traces personal and social development.
