



Jakob Ganslmeier
Lovely Planet. Polen / Poland
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Ulrike Kremeier |
Author(s) | Jakob Ganslmeier |
Design | Studio Lindhorst-Emme, Berlin |
Size | 20 x 26 cm |
Illustrations | 40 |
Cover | Softcover with flaps |
Language(s) | English, German, Polish |
ISBN | 978-3-947563-13-5 |
An Unconventional and Humorous Guide to a Country of Contrasts
In 2015, the photographer Jakob Ganslmeier (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) went on an extended tour of Poland in search of shots that captured the country’s social realities and way of life at a time of wrenching changes. The title of his project evokes associations with Lonely Planet, one of the world’s best-selling series of travel guides, and the artist took inspiration from the format of the popular books, where recommendations for readers exploring strange lands are grouped by categories. Crisscrossing Poland—he covered over ten thousand kilometers—Ganslmeier encountered widely different people and draws our attention to places that would never make it into a guidebook. His pictures show a country of extremes, between boomtown optimism and decline, consumerism and poverty, gleaming façades and bleak village streets.
Jakob Ganslmeier studied at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin, and at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. His pictures, which have garnered numerous awards, are frequently featured in leading German media and have been shown in exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus, the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, the Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, and the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris.
More books
-
Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia.
-
schneider+schumacher
39€ Add to cartA Review and Prospect of the Work of the Frankfurt‑based Architectural Office on the Occasion of its Thirtieth Anniversary
schneider+schumacher is an internationally operating team of architects with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary they present a book in the shape of a red box, whose chapters “Beauty,” “Endurance,” “Curiosity,” “Land Art,” “Integrating,” “Transitions,” and “Made in Germany” cover issues and values that have determined their work since its founding. Renowned authors shed light on the respective concept and its significance for the history of schneider+schumacher, while the office’s works are presented in large-format illustrations – including the extension to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the Siegerland motorway church, and the new pavilion of the Frankfurt Book Fair. In architectural practice, it becomes clear how Till Schneider and Michael Schumacher and their team implement their thematic and theoretical orientation into their working methods, design approach, and understanding of architecture.
-
André Butzer
Miettinen Collection30€ Add to cartAndré Butzer (b. Stuttgart, 1973; lives in Berlin) rose to renown with pictures he describes as “science fiction expressionism” and iconic characters like the “Peace Siemense,” the “Men of Shame,” or the “Woman” as well as seemingly abstract compositions. Artistic predecessors he admires and emulates include Walt Disney, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Henry Ford. Butzer’s utopian artistic vision is anchored in the fictional place “NASAHEIM”, a kind of pilgrimage destination in outer space. Yet his paintings should not be mistaken for illustrations of narrative structures; they articulate something that could not be said before. Similes of a sort, they embody the forever recurring extremes of history as emblems of human existence.
André Butzer briefly studied at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, before enrolling at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), from which he was expelled after two semesters in 1996. He went on to found the autonomous and anti-institutional Akademie Isotrop (1996–2000), where over twenty artists including Markus Selg, Jonathan Meese, and, in loose association, John Bock trained one another. In 2001, Butzer teamed up with Björn Dahlem to establish the Institute for SDI Dream Research.
-
Mirror
Collaborative Pictures by Merrick d’Arcy–Irvine x Julia Bajanova40€ Add to cartWe humans are social creatures. Without others to reflect our behavior back to us, we lose what defines us—language, culture, the capacity for creative expression. That is why photographer Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine and fashion designer Julia Bajanova are invested in intense encounters: not only with the people who appear in their pictures, but also with each other, as artists and as humans, and between their media and the materials out of which they are made. The materiality and sensual experience of these media in the physical world are the focus of the pictures gathered in this volume, which is why d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova eschewed all digital technologies. Sensuality forges an emotional bond between their creative universes, whose boundaries become permeable, as do the dividing lines between genres. Colors and forms are fused in a shared language of visual art and fashion in which d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova write their messages in light on photographic paper. They speak to what makes us human: creative energies untrammelled by the necessities of everyday life. The pictures in Mirror, then, are reflections of our existence and portals of self-knowledge.
-
Beate Passow
Monkey Business24€ Add to cartDrawing on the Past to Build a Better Future
Beate Passow (b. Stadtoldendorf, Germany, 1945; lives and works in Munich) creates installations, photodocumentaries, and collages that seek to salvage her subjects from oblivion, though as she sees it, her art is an effort to come to terms not so much with the past as with the present. When her compositional inventions touch on painful memories, their objective is not to arrive at new insights. Rather, she aims to uncover visible and verifiable states of affairs and throw them into sharp relief. In her cycle of pictures Monkey Business, the artist unfolds a mysterious fairy-tale world with a political edge. Strange animals and mythical figures populate the large-format black-and-white tableaux, which a closer look reveals to be woven tapestries. The unusual protagonists roam readily identifiable locations: Gibraltar, New York’s Wall Street, Brussels, or the island of Lampedusa. Behind these ostensibly simple facts of geography loom the darker aspects of contemporary European politics: Passow’s work calls for a debate on the systems, economic structures, and political movements that rule the continent.
- 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
“Das Quadrat muss den Raum beherrschen!”
Aurélie Nemours und Zeitgenossen15€ Add to cartDoes everything in the world obey a mathematical logic, can everything be calculated? In our present age of probability, some would say the answer is a straightforward yes, inevitably prompting the question: Even art? Yes, even art, or so the defenders of Concrete Art would respond, a twentieth-century movement that took abstraction as a focus on the “idea of art itself” (W. Kandinsky) to the next level. The act of painting was now to be subject to preconceived organizing principles as though they were laws of nature. One prominent exponent of the genre was Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005), who had a penchant for the square; her credo was that it needed to “rule space.” That is why the equilateral quadrangle is the defining shape in this catalog, which brings Nemours’ oeuvre into focus. Her iconic position is flanked by works by seventeen others that similarly grapple with the square, including pictures and sculptures with square basic forms, grids, or canvases. All these works derive their force from the stern authority of the square: only when art constrains its means can it bring its full potential to bear.
ARTISTS:
JOSEF ALBERS, GÖTZ ARNDT, MAX BILL, AD DEKKERS, HELMUT FEDERLE, GOTTFRIED HONEGGER, KATHRIN KAPS, FRITZ KLINGBEIL, JOHN MEYER, GEROLD MILLER, AURÉLIE NEMOURS, JOHN NIXON, PETER ROEHR, JAN SCHOONHOVEN, ANTON STANKOWSKI, KLAUS STAUDT, HERMAN DE VRIES, GERHARD WITTNER -
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.
- Out of stock
Voré
Stückwerk Mensch18€ Read moreHistorically Anchored Installations with Current Political References
The sculptures by Voré (b. 1941 in Karlsruhe, lives and works in Ettlingen) reflect the artist’s examination of the conditions of human existence and the human state of mind. Finely polished forms, splinters, and rough fractures become a statement of content and at the same time constitute the formal tension of the respective object. The process of creation can be seen in the rough remaining parts and traces of the various tools. Parallel and closely related to this, drawings and collages are created as independent works or as components of installations. Formal impulses of the sculptural concept are taken up, graphically processed, and projected back into the sculptural work. The present volume presents projects from six decades with numerous illustrations.
-
Markus Vater
Objects of Significance32€ Add to cartObjects of Significance is an artist’s book that grew out of a series of photographs and writings which Markus Vater (b. Dusseldorf, 1970; lives and works in London and Dusseldorf) collected over several years. They show and describe what matters to the artist: objects fraught with meaning, questions, relationships, memories. It is a creative and philosophical book, as funny as it is serious, delving into questions like: What do you see when you close your eyes and turn your head toward the sun? Or: How much does a cloud weigh? Vater has interviewed the North Sea for the book and ponders the wind. He sheds light on the conditions in which art comes into being and meditates on what holes are.
-
Africa
in the View of the Photographers19,90€ Add to cartContemporary Photography from Africa
Stereotypes still dominate the Western image of Africa; we tend to know little about cities like Lagos, Porto-Novo, or Kinshasa. The book presents photographs by African artists who tell stories from everyday life in the metropolises, of the unruliness of nature and industry, of traces of the past and pop culture. Osborne Macharia, for example, interweaves Kenya’s cultural identity with fictional Afro-futuristic plots; Yoriyas documents the small moments of life in his native Casablanca in pictures that have been picked up by the New York Times, National Geographic, and Vogue; Alice Mann’s intimate essays in portraiture, meanwhile, explore ideas about the making of pictures as a collaborative act. With additional works by Ilan Godfrey, Fabrice Monteiro, Kibuuka Mukisa Oscar, Léonard Pongo, and Fethi Sahraoui, the book offers a profoundly original survey of African realities.
-
Matthias Dornfeld
danke esslingen42€ Add to cartAt first glance, the paintings of Matthias Dornfeld might strike us as naïve or even primitive. However, his still lifes, flower and animal depictions, and abstracted portraits occur in a compelling discourse with the avant-garde of European art history. Yet the works are equally accessible without that background, namely with their playful and provocative gestures, which tend to push the depictions to the brink of possibilities. After a comprehensive retrospective in the Villa Merkel Esslingen, this book documents the show and includes texts by Friedrich Meschede, Daniela Stöppel, and Christian Gögger. The in-depth essays illuminate Dornfeld’s oeuvre and iconography and furthermore discuss the unconventional hanging of the show as well as its reception.
-
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!
-
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.
-
Roland Schappert
Liebe +–24€ Add to cartRoland Schappert’s Liebe+– is a poetic voyage into the mysterious and paradoxical landscapes of love. Combining an unrelenting eye with lyrical precision, Schappert captures the fragile equilibrium between intimacy and distance, between the longing for union and the need for detachment. The +– in the title is a symbolic shorthand for the ambivalence of love: attraction and repulsion, delight and pain, their constant interplay defining the dynamic of love.
The terse and sometimes aphoristic writings enter into a dialogue with the author’s artful and enigmatic pictures and sculptures—text images sewn out of strings of beads or painted in Champagne chalk that subtly mirror and refract the emotional tension of the poems. Nimbly balancing on the fine line between devotion and disaffection, Schappert’s verses are interspersed with ironic allusions to our digital and urban contemporary world.
By forging a symbiosis of poetry and image, this artist’s book charts a world unto itself in which the boundaries between I and you blur and subject and object are fused in a collective we. It invites us to contemplate love with a fresh eye—as tender touch and fractious idea, as a play of expectation and disappointment that we begin anew every day.
‘Love in the age of social media and dating apps, but not from a Gen Z perspective – but from someone who has known this feeling for much longer. And who brings his experiences – which are certainly representative of many – in ever new combinations of text and images into a form that makes reading and viewing a memorable experience.’ – Wolfgang Ullrich
- Release September 2025
The Magnificent Seven+
Strong Contemporary Female Artists44€ Add to cartWhen The Magnificent Seven hit the silver screen in 1960, heroism was firmly men’s business. Now it is women artists who are redefining the art world with visionary energy. Sebastian C. Strenger portrays outstanding women making art today, including Ingeborg Lüscher, Elfie Semotan, Xenia Hausner, Valérie Favre, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Cristina Lucas. Their works question power structures, play with identity, or deconstruct prevailing narratives. Their art is figurative or abstract, narrative or conceptual, political or introspective. These women are changing the art market and dominate the new canon at international institutions by calling existing structures in question and opening up spaces for fresh thinking.
-
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.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (GERMAN)28€ Add to cartThe sculptor and object artist Liam Gillick (b. Aylesbury, UK, 1964; lives and works in New York) has created an intervention titled Filtered Time for the historic galleries of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Projections of light and color and acoustic effects condense six thousand years of cultural history into an immersive spatial experience. Gillick initiates a conversation between the iconic Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, the monumental sculptures of Tell Halaf, and other exhibits, engendering new layers of meaning across all historical periods. The first joint project of the Vorderasiatisches Museum and the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart makes for a singular visual and sensory experience. Designed by the artist himself, the publication not only documents the richly colorful production, but also provides insight into the eventful history of the museum, which is approaching its centennial.
Liam Gillick studied at the Hertfordshire College of Art in 1983–1984 and at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1984 until 1987. Gillick is a prolific published writer as well, producing essays, reviews, fiction, and theatrical scenarios.