João Onofre
Untitled (in awe of)
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| Editor(s) | FCT; CIEBA; FBAUL; Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art |
| Author(s) | João Onofre, Andrew Renton |
| Design | Vera Velez |
| Size | 19,7 x 27 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 44 |
| Illustrations | 76 |
| Language(s) | |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-192-4 |
João Onofre’s works are tributes to art history and pop. He gleans what is in danger of being lost right now, realigns it, and translates it into something sublime. His art encourages the beholders to reconsider a past that has faded in collective memory with a critical eye and make peace with it. His creative process is guided by the material and a clearly defined concept that nonetheless does not restrict a work’s finding its own way. That is why he does not commit to a particular medium, making videos, performances, installations, and much more. What all his works have in common is that they probe the limitations of their medium and our perceptive capacities in novel ways. This catalogue presents three recent works in which the essence of Onofre’s art becomes manifest: he molds myths and symbols into awe-inspiring images, sounds, and forms—not for nothing have critics labeled him an alchemist. In the catalogue, his tangible compressions of cultural history are rendered in imposing pictures and flanked by an ambitious essay that places them in their context.
More books
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SOMA
Collective SineUmbra18€ Add to cartOn the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
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Sabrina Fritsch
syntaxerror28€ Add to cartSabrina Fritsch’s (b. Neunkirchen/Saar, 1979; lives and works in Cologne) paintings explore the potentials of the compositional process and the mechanisms of perception. Many of them feature coarse structures, textile surfaces, and delicate superimpositions. In this publication, Fritsch, who was recently appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, presents a résumé of the painterly oeuvre she has developed since her graduation from the same school in 2008. It encompasses two related books, each of which undertakes a structured study of a major strand in Fritsch’s art. One offers a chronological survey of a representative selection of works created between 2008 and 2019 that illustrate her playful and experimental engagement with the constituents of the painted picture: the picture-as-object, the organization of pictorial space, and the phenomenology of physical color. In addition to works on canvas boasting a wide variety of applications of materials and paint, it also covers serial variations in prints. The other showcases three exhibitions and bodies of work dating from 2020 and 2021 that are dedicated to the three color systems RGB, black-and-white (BAW), and CMYK.
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Tobias Rehberger
1993–202244€ Add to cartIn his sculptural work, Tobias Rehberger (b. Esslingen, 1966; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main) connects strategies from different, also non-art disciplines. His interiors meant to be taken into service have established him as one of the most influential artists of his generation. In 2022, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart will honor Rehberger with a grand exhibition that will feature some of the most important bodies of work from the past three decades. The accompanying book makes a signal contribution to the ongoing critical engagement with his art.
Tobias Rehberger studied with Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1987 until 1992 and later returned to his alma mater as a professor. He has had numerous solo shows in Germany and abroad and, in 2009, furnished the central cafeteria at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which won him a Golden Lion.
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Steven Shearer
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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.
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SELBER ORT, ANDERE ZEIT.
Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg 1955 – 202538€ Add to cartThis two-volume publication commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Baden-Württemberg Artists’ Association, which presented its first exhibition in 1955 at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. At that time, the state-wide artists’ association included Otto Dix, Ida Kerkovius, and Willi Baumeister, among others. Today, the Baden-Württemberg Artists’ Association has 450 members. Archival material provides insight into its multifaceted history, and insightful essays illuminate the significance of artists’ associations and the discourses they initiated in post-war Germany, after the country’s division and eventual reunification. The second volume documents the current exhibition Selber Ort, andere Zeit (Same Place, Different Time), featuring 21 artists who stand for the broad spectrum of creative approaches and generations represented in the association.
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Penny Hes Yassour
Temp-Est24€ Add to cartA Monograph about the Award-Winning Israeli Artist
Penny Hes Yassour (b. 1950, lives and works at kibbutz En-Harod Ihud) tells stories and keeps history alive, explores the boundary between remembering and forgetting. In her installations she combines sound, image, and a multi-part world of objects into narrative mise-en-scènes of great poetic power. Hes Yassour leads the viewer through the Jordan Valley with its many watchtowers, accompanies the transformation of the landscape in a gigantic, stagelike water basin, and documents the flight of bats in a narrow, labyrinthine spatial installation. The book published on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition in Germany provides comprehensive insights into her subtle artistic work.
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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.
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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.
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Liam Gillick
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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.
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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.
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Malte Hagen
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Bottrop, Breunig, Schröder
20:1528€ Add to cartRapidly growing floods of images and artificial intelligence have made art almost inevitably into a commentary on the illusion of actuality. Three painters—Jana Schröder, Peppi Bottrop und Andreas Breunig—present drawings in the Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst in Augsburg. 20:15 is the title of the exhibition and this accompanying book. All three artists have studied with Albert Oehlen at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and share a philosophical approach to painting. “Our painting is a response to the given conditions of pictoriality. We are here to deconstruct and question what images really are.” (Schröder) The art historian Christian Malycha interviews the three artists, together regarding the exhibition concept, and individually about the evolution of their works. The conversations in this book, which are supplemented by reproductions of all exhibited drawings, provide illuminating glimpses into the ongoing discourse about painting’s relevance.
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Judit Reigl
Kraftfelder / Centers of Dominance28€ Add to cartBeginning in the 1950s, Judit Reigl (b. Kapuvár, Hungary, 1923; d. Marcoussis, France, 2020) builds a singular creative oeuvre between abstraction and figuration, between Surrealism and gestural painting. After studying art in Budapest, Reigl flees Hungary in 1950; arriving in Paris, she is introduced to André Breton, who organizes her first exhibition in 1954. Under the influence of the École de Paris, she branches out into écriture automatique, then shifts toward free expression. Like her contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler in New York, she lays out ever larger unprimed canvases on the floor and works them with a brush, her fingers, or other instruments. After 1966, bodily shapes emerge from her abstractions, and figures reappear in the pictures.
On occasion of Reigl’s centenary and the gift of three major works, the Neue Nationalgalerie mounts the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Germany. The book surveys the oeuvre of one of the most important protagonists of European art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Judit Reigl studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1942 until 1945 and was a fellow at the Hungarian Academy in Rome in 1947–48. From 1950 onwards, she lived and worked in France.
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Stephan Grunenberg
10€ Add to cartStephan Grunenberg (b. 1954) paints peculiar portraits: not heads or sitting and reclining figures but seemingly independent feet, legs, trousers, socks or soles of shoes. These and other under-appreciated motives are playfully arranged in captivating compositions which take issue with our hierarchical habits while looking at art. “Leaving out the ‘civilized’, educated head and centering on neglected parts such as the legs, including the lower abdomen—which is either eroticized or made taboo—is the artist’s point”, writes Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in an essay that accompanies the images inside this small and attractive new book. The paintings reproduced in this volume were all exhibited in Grunenberg’s latest exhibition in 2024, which was titled tongue-in-cheek „Representatives Regional To Earth.”
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Ion Bitzan
48€ Add to cartThe painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country’s isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceaușescu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and São Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.
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Austin Eddy
Selected poems40€ Add to cartSince 2018, the American painter and sculptor Austin Eddy (b. Boston, 1986; lives and works in Brooklyn) has probed the manifestations of modern painting in a world between abstraction and figuration. As a child and teenager, Eddy immersed himself in the imageries of comics, cartoons, and record covers. In the early 2010s, he studied in Chicago with Barbara Rossi, who had been one of the Chicago Imagists in the 1960s. The deconstruction of everyday objects into innumerable forms and hues became his central theme. Eddy’s works play with luminous colors, overlaid textures, animated bird motifs, and abstract planes of light while grappling with a human existence defined by loss and the passage of time. Situated on the margins of reality, his paintings and sculptures are like visual poems, celebrating the evanescent instant that exists only for a second before fading into the past.
Austin Eddy completed a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.
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Franziska Windisch
Walk with a wire14€ Add to cartThe interweaving of traces, sounds, and movements in an impressive work of sound art
The narrow brown magnetic tape of an audio cassette runs through a half-opened hand, slides through the fingers, is palpated in constant motion, and finally falls to the ground. The hand and its touching, particles of sand and small stones leave their traces and, when the tape is played, generate a multi-layered soundscape with crackling and background noises.
In her performative action in the ruins of the city of Messene in the Peloponnese region of Greece, Franziska Windisch (b. 1983) thematizes aspects of repetition and recording. Her artistic examination of the vestiges of the ancient urban space, the reciprocal transition from traces to writing in her video documentation, and the graphic element of the line visible on the ground lead to a reflection on temporality, dissolution, and decay. -
Idee – Entwurf – Konzept
48€ Read moreArt in the Preliminary and Provisional Stage
In this sumptuous volume, Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg, the association of visual artists in Baden-Württemberg, puts the focus on visualizations of inchoate impulses, spontaneous flashes of inspiration, and the euphoria of that first spark rather than the painstaking process of hammering out a work. Structured as a complex compendium comprising contributions by more than 240 artists, the book highlights the experimental circumstances in which the individual creative mind experiences the nascency of ideas—without regard for the specialized skills and technical accomplishment that distinguish the finished work. Perfunctory sketches, doodles, drawings, notes and material collages, photographs and other media images provide insight into very intimate stages of the creative process that are not usually revealed to visitors to an exhibition of contemporary art.
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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.
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Jeff Wall
AppearanceRead moreA New Perspective on the Work of the Photo Artist
The trademark of Jeff Wall (b. 1946, Vancouver; lives and works in Vancouver) are large-scale backlit light boxes, which appear like carefully composed film stills. The art historian ties his works in manifold ways to art history and, due to his elaborate arrangements, is often compared to modern masters. Many pictures by Jeff Wall are inspired by novels or stories and condense into intentional stagings of the everyday. With a special focus on constellations which present the medium photography like a search for traces, the book allows a new perspective on the artist’s works which have up until now rarely been shown in exhibitions.
Jeff Wall studied art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His works are exhibited internationally, for example at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008 he received the Audain-Award for his life work.
