



Irmel Droese. Felix Droese
Die Fruchtbarkeit der Polarität
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Wiebke Siever |
| Author(s) | Anne Rodler |
| Design | Wiebke Muth |
| Size | 21 x 25 cm |
| Pages | 96 |
| Illustrations | 78 color, 3 b/w |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-94-4 |
A 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.
More books
-

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.
-

Cahier #1
Heinz Gappmayr22€ Add to cartDo we think in images or in language? Can writing visualize time? Heinz Gappmayr (1925-2010) was interested in text as a spatial event and in letters as architecture. Although his works were often presented in the context of Visual Poetry, Gappmayr himself preferred the more neutral term text to lyricism. His understanding of written language as a conceptual medium and typography as an indicator of physicality was closer to Lawrence Weiner’s approach than to that of the Concrete Poets. This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Tiroler Landesmuseum and includes Gappmayer’s most important art-in-architecture projects, as well as a complete notebook from 1961, with commentary by Gaby Gappmayr, the artist’s daughter. A conversation with her provides valuable philosophical insights into her father’s work.
-

Pokorny
25€ Add to cart“Abstraction means the omission of the irrelevant and the unnecessary in order to find more substantial content and form.”—Werner Pokorny
His often monumental sculptures can be found in many places in Germany and abroad, including Aachen, Berlin, Busan (South Korea), Frankfurt am Main, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Riehen, Saarbrücken, and Stuttgart. Werner Pokorny works (b. 1949, Mosbach; lives and works in Ettlingen) exclusively with Corten steel for his outdoor sculptures and with wood, steel, and bronze for his indoor works. Well-known basic forms such as bowls, spheres, cuboids, and houses serve as points of departure and reference, which are abstracted by reduction, rotation, tilting, or combination with other elements. The artistic field of tension characteristic of Pokorny’s impressive sculptural oeuvre is due to the oscillation between form and abstraction, figure and reduction, hard edges and soft curves.
-

Brandon Lipchik
10€ Add to cartIn recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.
-

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.
-

Wyatt Kahn
Paintings and Sculptures36€ Add to cartWyatt Kahn’s (b. New York, 1983; lives and works in New York) work hovers between two and three dimensions, reviving aspects of American 1960s Minimal Art. In the tradition of minimalist abstraction, his multipart paintings seem devoid of content, but their construction is a sophisticated choreography of geometric shapes. Instead of delineating them on the canvas itself, he transforms them into physical elements composed of canvas stretched over strips of wood that he mounts on the wall as reliefs, making the latter an integral part of the composition. Working on the interface between painting and sculpture, the artist also references Ellsworth Kelly’s single and multiple shaped canvases.
Wyatt Kahn’s works are held by major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
-

Kensise Anders
10€ Add to cartKensise Anders’s work grapples with the reality of Black people’s lives. Born in Haiti, she was adopted by a German family when she was two. After a difficult childhood, with stints in a psychiatric institution and a boarding school, she eventually found art as a medium that lets her work through her experiences. She uses the crochet needle to create masks with which she ironically appropriates white identities and play carpets that show the world of her childhood—apartment blocks, streets; the “hole,” as she calls this environment. She also arranges crocheted threads on the canvas as though they were brushstrokes. One series of pictures is dedicated to a Black doll; another, to naked female bodies, including the artist’s own, with references to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866). The works are acts of resistance to the prudishness of whites. Black dolls became popular in this country during the colonial era and never quite went away, like the racism in our society and in our heads. Anders’s weapon against that racism is the crochet needle, which she wields patiently and with flair as well as the necessary radicalism.
-

FLATZ
Hitler. Ein Hundeleben18€ Add to cartAn Attempt to Break a Taboo – Trivial and Provocative
A black, pure-bred Great Dane named Hitler accompanied the Austrian performance artist and documenta participant FLATZ (b. 1952, Dornbirn; lives and works in Munich and London) like a shadow through the 1990s. The naming—as well as the subtitles of the photographs created—relates the banal everyday life of the dog to the inglorious life of its namesake, thus opening up an extremely provocative range of possible associations. “Hitler is always with me,” says the artist, “just as we always carry the historical Hitler around with us, because he is part of our history, which—as long as it is suppressed, transfigured, or tabooed—is not overcome.”
With more than 350 illustrations, Hitler. Ein Hundeleben is an extended and revised reprint of the book published in 1992, which has been out of print for a long time.
-

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.
-

Billy Al Bengston
Paintings & Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe First Monograph on the Californian Pop Artist Since More Than Thirty Years
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is the very personification of the cheerful, carefree attitude towards life in California – with his work as well as his person: a former surfer and motorcycle racer, an extravagant artist and key figure of West Coast Pop Art. After studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the Otis Art Institute, he exhibited at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957 and was the central figure among a group of artists that included Frank Gehry, Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, and Ken Price. BAB, as he apostrophizes himself, inserts car and motorcycle parts as motifs into his otherwise abstract paintings, using lacquer and spray paint instead of oil, and aluminum panels with at times dented surfaces instead of the traditional canvas. Art and lifestyle combine to create the individual “Bengston iconography” of California Cool.
-

Jan Zöller
Ritual Believer40€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) paintings, sculptures, and installations probe the discrepancy between economic production and the spiritual and magical dimension of art. The artist’s book Ritual Believer surveys the so-called charcoal paintings series, created between 2019 and 2023. For these works, the artist paints directly in charcoal on the unprimed canvas, making it impossible to correct “blunders.” Another distinguishing feature is the virtual absence of color; the austerity of the compositions contrasts with Zöller’s other, often intensely colorful paintings. The motifs that are the hallmark of his oeuvre—birds, running legs—are complemented by writing and text. Another aspect of this shift is that the works’ titles play a central part and almost figure as a creative element in their own right. For the text in the book, the artist sent the titles of the works shown to his brother, who wove them into a story. An appendix presents scanned archival materials. Notebooks and zines Zöller produced between 2015 and 2017 provide interesting insight into how he finds his motifs and his compositional process.
Jan Zöller studied with Marijke van Warmerdam and Leni Hoffmann at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 2012 until 2017 and with Jean-Marc Bustamante and Götz Arndt at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016.
-

Francesca Martí
Passage and Presence42€ Add to cartFrancesca Martí’s (b. Sóller, Mallorca; lives in Mallorca and Stockholm) art revolves around themes like transformation, communication, and deformation, the power of self-determination, the instability of memory, and the effects of the chaos caused by migration and the migration prompted by chaos. In a collaborative process, a multitude of performers, dancers, and musicians help make her vision a reality. The book presents performances, sculptures, and visual works from Francesca Martí’s most important exhibitions in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and China. The portraits of the various series the artist has developed over the past ten years, including Cocoon, Planet of Fusions, Migrant Angel, Dreamers & Believers, Copper and Flux, are rounded out by her drawings, photographs, and making-of shots from her studio in Mallorca.
-

Taube
18€ Add to cartHuman, City, Pigeon
Public perceptions of the pigeon have shifted drastically over the past centuries. In the 1700s, it was welcomed as a guest who commanded humans’ unfailing solicitude; today, by contrast, it is often perceived as a nuisance. It has become an animal that defaces squares and buildings. Why does the pigeon in the settings of our daily lives prompt feelings of loathing and fascination, but also indifference? Jens Gerber’s photographs undertake an expedition into the city of the pigeons. Rounded out by essays by Marina Rüdiger and Laurens Schlicht, the book illuminates the subject of the city pigeon from the perspectives of photography, science, and literature, and explores the question of how pigeons shape the built environment and how the latter informs their behavior in turn.
-

Steven Shearer
Working from Life58€ Add to cart“Today’s images are echoes of how people have always been depicted.”
Steven Shearer (b. New Westminster, BC, 1968; lives and works in Vancouver) works in a range of media including printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collages of found photographs. His portraits of individuals in decorated settings earned Shearer international acclaim. They show heroes from the past—protagonists of musical subcultures or the history of art. The archetypal creative minds in their studios appear together with their works; the interiors surrounding them reflect their psychological constitution. Shearer paints them in the style of Symbolism, the German Romantics, or the Fauves. Imitating the perspective painting of the Renaissance, he virtually pulls the beholder into his pictures.
Steven Shearer participated in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design New York Summer Studio Programme in 1992 and studied at the Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver, in 1992. In 2011, he represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale.
-

Ute Bartel
mansionaticum25€ Add to cartAn unreal view of reality
In her works, Ute Bartel (b. 1961, Halle; lives and works in Cologne) deals with everyday circumstances, the “mansionaticum.” A term which at first glance seems epochal, but etymologically simply means “belonging to the household.” In a concrete confrontation with particular places and situations, she is interested in things in and of themselves, in their formal characteristics, such as their forms, colors, and structures. Using analog and digital techniques, she creates collages, objects, and works that project into the respective space. This generously illustrated monograph presents structures of familiar and yet unknown realities marked by highly pronounced forms and bold colors and provides comprehensive insight into one of the focal points of the artist’s oeuvre.
Ute Bartel studied at the Kunstakademie Münster, where she was a master student of Reiner Ruthenbeck. Her works have been widely exhibited at, among others, the Kunstverein Speyer, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster.
-

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.
- With socks designed by the artist and augmented reality

JOHN BOCK
AURAAROMA-Ω-BEULE42€ Add to cartThe Augmented Reality Book for John Bock
John Bock (b. 1965 in Gribbohm, lives in Berlin) is one of the most important contemporary performance and video artists. In his works characterized by humor and absurdity, the artist places language, human bodies, everyday objects, and spaces in peculiar relationships to each other. He attained international recognition with the installation LiquidityAuraAromaPortfolio at the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. Together with his work Voll die Beule from 2013, it is now included in the collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim. The present augmented reality book not only contextualizes his work, but also immerses the viewer/reader directly in his performances, in which the artist’s head emerges and a filled rubber glove leaks out. A completely new approach to the works of John Bock, packaged in a pair of socks designed by the artist.
John Bock studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and since 2004 has taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe as Professor of Sculpture. He has participated in the 55th Biennale di Venezia, and his works have been featured worldwide in solo exhibitions at, among others, the Berlinische Galerie, the Contemporary Austin, Texas, the Barbican Centre, London, and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
-

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.
-

Ottmar Hörl
Second Life – 100 Arbeiter14,80€ Add to cartThe Workman Sculptures at Völklinger Hütte Steelworks
Sculptures on topics of everyday life are at the center of the work of Ottmar Hörl (b. 1950, Nauheim; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main and Wertheim). His major projects gained international recognition, they are based on the artist’s concept of art as a communication model. For the Völklingen Ironworks World Heritage Site, Hörl conceived the sculpture project Second Life, which features 100 figures modeled on the Völklingen ironworker with helmet and work clothes. The book documents the impressive project that focuses on the universal theme of the Völklingen Ironworks: work and the working people.
-

Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
with free download link on the inside
You’ve read right, and you’re going to hear it: a bureaucratic document—we’re all familiar with it, for a new one arrives every year—is the subject of this inspired collaboration between the graphic artist Philip Loersch and the virtuoso vocalist Johannes Steck.
The “Renteninformation”—an official letter on cheap paper informing the recipient about their expected future retirement benefits—makes many cultural workers, and others, crack up or break out in tears: arriving unexpectedly, it launches us on an emotional roller coaster between excitement, fascination, resignation, and sheer madness.
The manuscript for this audiobook is Loersch’s actual Renteninformation for 2022. Its intonation is the culmination of a series of works the artist has pursued since 2016. Every year, he has produced a naturalist colored-pencil drawing of his Renteninformation, embedding it in idyllic scenes—in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid autumn foliage, or on a frozen lake, delicately and accurately executed down to the smallest leaf of grass and the tiniest letter.
“Renteninformation 2022” is the ideal gift for all vinyl lovers who need to close a “pension gap” in their collections and a stunning audio experience that redefines what the satire of reality itself and conceptual art can do.
Philip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980) is best known for his unconventional drawings. His works combine painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst, and helped initiate the exhibition series “Drawing Wow.”
Johannes Steck (b. Würzburg, 1966) is one of Germany’s best-known audiobook narrators, having sold over four million copies, including of books by Simon Beckett and Ken Follett, in a three-decade career. Television viewers also know his voice from trailers on Kabel 1 and DMAX and documentaries on ZDF, BR, and Sky. His work has garnered awards including the 2012 HörKules.





















