





Jean-Marie Biwer
D’après nature
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d'Art Moderne, Grand-Duc-Jean |
| Author(s) | Claude Moyen, Jean-Marie Biwer, Nelly Taravel, René Kockelkorn, Christophe Gallois |
| Design | Jean Sampaio |
| Size | 21 x 26 cm |
| Pages | 184 |
| Illustrations | 300 |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover with dustjacket |
| Language(s) | English, French |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-83-8 |
Painterly Investigations of the Present
For over four decades, Jean-Marie Biwer (b. 1957, Dudelange, Luxembourg; lives and works in Basbellain, Luxembourg) has made art that records his fine-grained observations. Grappling with the grand themes of art history – the landscape, the human figure, the still life – Biwer consistently questions the role painting can play in a world shaped by a deluge of images and information. Responding to the omnipresence of the latter and reacting to the increasingly frantic pace of our lives, he creates paintings that allow the intensity of the present moment to unfold. The richly illustrated book gathers his most important works since 2005.
“These things are there, we just need to look at them. They are simple, but today they have the power to bring so much to people.”—Jean-Marie Biwer
Jean-Marie Biwer’s work has been shown throughout Europe and in 1993 he represented Luxembourg at the 45th Biennale di Venezia. His works can be found in the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, IKOB, Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc-Jean amongst others.
More books
-

Jean-Marie Biwer
D’après nature42€ Add to cartPainterly Investigations of the Present
For over four decades, Jean-Marie Biwer (b. 1957, Dudelange, Luxembourg; lives and works in Basbellain, Luxembourg) has made art that records his fine-grained observations. Grappling with the grand themes of art history – the landscape, the human figure, the still life – Biwer consistently questions the role painting can play in a world shaped by a deluge of images and information. Responding to the omnipresence of the latter and reacting to the increasingly frantic pace of our lives, he creates paintings that allow the intensity of the present moment to unfold. The richly illustrated book gathers his most important works since 2005.
“These things are there, we just need to look at them. They are simple, but today they have the power to bring so much to people.”—Jean-Marie Biwer
Jean-Marie Biwer’s work has been shown throughout Europe and in 1993 he represented Luxembourg at the 45th Biennale di Venezia. His works can be found in the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, IKOB, Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc-Jean amongst others.
- 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.
-

Larissa Fassler
Building Worlds20€ Add to cartThe drawings and sculptures of Larissa Fassler (born 1975 in Canada, lives in Berlin) both document and question the modern metropolis, its public squares, train stations, and functional buildings. Fassler researches her chosen locations extensively in city archives and online. She tracks trends such as economic disparity, gentrification, homelessness, or drug consumption. She supplements these statistical facts with her own subjective survey methods, such as repeatedly visiting and observing the sites. All of the information gathered finds its way into Fassler’s complex cartographic drawings and sculptures, which reflect the socioeconomic and geopolitical challenges of our time. This book accompanies Fassler’s exhibition at the Kunstverein Lingen.
-

Peter Zimmermann
abstractness26€ Add to cartTreading the Limits of Originality
Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956, Freiburg; lives and works in Cologne) is one of the most important conceptual media artists. With his work, he consistently experiments with visual reproduction techniques and gained international recognition in the late 1980s with his Book Cover Paintings: motifs from book covers such as that of the Diercke Weltatlas or the Polyglott travel guides, which Zimmermann transfers to the canvas with oil and epoxy resins. The relationship between original and copy is the central theme of his work, with which he addresses the ambivalence of artistic and digital authorship. This monograph brings together early works and a selection of current productions.
Peter Zimmermann studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and was professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne, from 2002 to 2007.
-

Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur14€ Add to cartThe Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
-

Justine Otto
New Traditionalists38€ Add to cartJustine Otto (b. Zabrze, Poland, 1974; lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin) is one of the most promising artists on the contemporary painting scene. An aficionado of the absurd, she unfolds a metaphysical-psychedelic and often gaudily lustrous cosmos in pictures in which representation clashes with abstraction. In her early work, girls, women, and animals were here preferred subjects; more recently, she has painted heroes—the protagonists in myths of masculinity. After generals, officers, and strategists, she has now turned her attention to cowboys, who appear on horseback or resting under a tree, musical instrument in hand.
Justine Otto studied fine art and painting with Peter Angermann and Michael Krebber at the State Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main and obtained an MFA in 2003. She also worked as a scene designer at Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, the city’s municipal theater company. Her paintings are held by collections including the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt; Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, Switzerland; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
-

Anna Leonhardt
Touching Space34€ Add to cartAnna Leonhardt’s (b. Pforzheim, 1981; lives and works in New York and Leipzig) paintings probe her own experiences and moods, while also referencing works of literature and quoting phenomena in the history of her craft. Abstract surfaces composed of numerous layers that break the two-dimensional bounds of the canvas engender a physical and imagined space that is further expanded by the interrelations between the pictorial elements, an imaginary communication with other works of art, and the beholders. The publication Touching Space presents Anna Leonhardt’s most recent works. A compendium of writings on the subject of space by the phenomenologist Franz Xaver Baier and the artist’s correspondence with the curator Sophia Pietryga complement the imposing illustrations. The book is released in conjunction with the eponymous solo exhibition at Galerie She BAM! Laetitia Gorsy, Leipzig.
Anna Leonhardt studied painting and graphic art at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK) from 2002–2008, completing her education with postgraduate training with Ralf Kerbach until 2010.
-

Membrane
38€ Add to cartMembrane documents an eponymous exhibition at the Neue Galerie Gladeck as well as the gallery’s architectural extension. The works of the 7 invited artists are engaged to explore skin in a broader sense—membrane also encompasses clothing, veiling, and masking from various cultural perspectives. Well-known portraits by Thomas Ruff, Shirin Neshat, and Cindy Sherman appear in a new light alongside Helena Parade Kim’s exploration of iconographic and ceremonial fashion codes, Daniel Buetti’s critique of the commercialized body, and Nicola Samorì’s exploration of skin in historical masterpieces. The membrane concept also inspired the exterior and interior surfaces of the new gallery building, and an interesting text by the architect reveals his approach.
Artists: Daniele Buetti, Sławomir Elsner, Shirin Neshat, Helena Parada Kim, Thomas Ruff, Nicola Samorì & Cindy Sherman
-

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.
-

Stephan Kaluza
Mechanik Sehnsucht. Kunsterzeugung und Betrachtung14€ Add to cartUngewohnte Antworten aus der Sicht des Kunsterzeugers
Die Frage, was Kunst ist und wie sie entsteht, wird gerne von denen beantwortet, die sie selbst nicht erzeugen. Die Betrachtung und Interpretation steht im Vordergrund und damit eine wissenschaftliche Distanz zur Kunst. Es gibt aber durchaus die Eigen-Betrachtung derer, die Kunst aktiv herstellen und naturgemäß einen inneren Blick auf die prozessualen Bedingungen haben, die überhaupt erst das entstehen lassen, was anschließend betrachtet und beurteilt wird. Diese Sichtweise ist nicht zwangsläufig identisch mit der von außen. Nicht die Interpretation oder eine deduktive Schlüssigkeit steht hier im Vordergrund, sondern ein ableitender und besonders ein schöpferischer Sinn, der sich aus dem Prozess des Kunstherstellens von selbst ergibt.
Die Arbeiten von Stephan Kaluza (geb. 1964 in Bad Iburg, lebt und arbeitet in Düsseldorf) wurden unter anderem im Ludwig Museum Koblenz, im State Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, in der Kunsthalle Osnabrück, im Palacete des Artes Rodin, Salvador, im Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, sowie in der KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, ausgestellt.
- Release November 2025

Simone Haack
NEW MAGICAL REALISM44€ Add to cartTalking about magical realism today, we typically think of the literary genre. Yet when Franz Roh coined the term, he was referring to a tendency in German visual art in the years before the rise of fascism. What marked a major departure from Expressionism and abstraction has seen a renaissance in the New Magical Realism pioneered by Simone Haack since the turn of the millennium, now framed by a comparable geopolitical situation. The influence of Giorgio de Chirico and his pittura metafisica is unmistakable in Haack, as are those of the New Objectivity, Kafkaesque painting, and the metaphysical dimension of Surrealism. One of the most eminent artists of our time.
-

Considering Finland
14€ Add to cartContemporary Art from Finland
With fourteen artistic positions from the fields of photography, video, and installation, Considering Finland offers fascinating insight into the Finnish art scene. The themes of the artists from one of the least populated and most densely forested countries in Europe is the relationship between humankind and nature, as well as the political, social, and economic implications of this. Their works point to cultural dispositions and standardizations of the individual within a society based on unattainable maxims, such as permanent success, lasting recognition, and limitless growth. Pictorial traditions, geographical structures, and socio-political and infrastructural factors are the bases of a mental construction that summarizes their artistic work under a national heading. With works by Kenneth Bamberg, Elina Brotherus, Ville Lenkkeri, Aurora Reinhard, Iiu Susiraja, Nestori Syrjälä, and Pilvi Takala.
-

Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
-

Spaces Embodied (ENGLISH)
Draiflessen Collection32€ Add to cartWe live in spaces that we shape in accordance with our own ideas. Our everyday lives leave traces in them that speak to our habits. Spaces promise shelter and belonging, but they can also instill a sense of constraint. We grow into the spaces we inhabit—and they in turn become expressions of our personalities. Conversely, spaces, depending on their architecture and location, inform our existence. RÄUME HAUTNAH gathers works of art that, rather than conceiving of the human sphere and the spatial domain as separate, comprehend them in their complex entanglements: in bodily experience, emotional dependency, or the instinctive need for protection. An essay by Olesja Nein, the project’s curator, offers an introduction to the exhibition and takes the reader on a tour, describing each artist’s space of activity and supplying helpful information. Philipp Zitzlsperger, meanwhile, zooms in on a key aspect of the art in the exhibition, the imprint as an artistic technique with a distinctive aura, and illuminates its origins and significance since the dawn of modernism.
Artists: Absalon, Shannon Bool, Heidi Bucher, Eileen Gray, Do Ho Suh, Mary Mattingly, Tracey Snelling, Francesca Woodman
-

On Air
Der Klang des Materials in der Kunst der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre40€ Add to cartOn Air showcases a distinctive art form, the sound sculpture, retracing its evolution from the early 1950s, when artists begin dismantling the conventional boundaries of art, to the early 1970s. In no more than a quarter-century, the range of possible answers to the question “What is art?” grows vastly larger. Propelled by the idea of the work of art as a machine and instrument, sounds, noises, tones, vibrations, silence, words, breath become a “tangible” sculptural material. Artists enrich visual perception by adding the acoustic dimension, interweave seeing and hearing, explore time and space with fresh zeal. In emerging artistic genres such as performance, installation, or media art, sound is an integral component of the work. The book focuses on sound objects by Yaakov Agam, Joseph Beuys, Hermann Goepfert, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, David Tudor, Timm Ulrichs, and others.
With five scholarly essays and numerous illustrations and notes on individual works, the comprehensive publication offers an attractive introduction to the subject.
-

Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game32€ Add to cartThe Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
- 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.
-

Stephan Kaluza
Fragmente eines Ängstlichen28€ Add to cartA Novel on Coping with Guilt or the Feeling of Having Violated Life
The filmmaker Castner and the anthropologist Pollock not only share the similarity of their names with those of Castor and Pollux, the fabled twins of Greek myth, but also a hard fate: an irreparable guilt whose motifs run through the entire novel. Pollock is forced to admit to himself that, in his role as a scientist, he was involved in a genocide against indigenous people in Panama; Castner, meanwhile, tries to get a handle on his bouts of excessive hypochondria. In episodic flashbacks and an interview that gradually turns into an emotional dispute between them, the two characters analyze the minutiae of their life stories and arrive at a surreal insight.
Castor and Pollux were known in antiquity as the patrons of sailors, who took their bearings from the twins’ constellation. That is why water figures in this novel as the element that unites all narrative planes. Water—like life—will fill any vacant space regardless of shape and adapt to all circumstances.
Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a visual artist, working in the media of photography and painting, and a writer whose output includes plays, novels, and nonfiction books. The philosophy of nature is a central theme in both Kaluza’s art and his fiction.
-

Ingo Mittelstaedt
Courtesy15€ Add to cartPerception 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.
-

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.























