




JOHN BOCK
AURAAROMA-Ω-BEULE
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Johan Holten, Sebastian Baden |
| Author(s) | Antonella Bianca Meloni, Jens Hoffmann, Marianne Wagner, Till Wyler von Ballmoos, Ulrike Widmaier Picasso, Sebastian Baden |
| Design | Peter Nils Dorén |
| Size | 21 x 27 cm |
| Pages | 256 |
| Illustrations | 230 |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover, wrapped in a pair of socks |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-60-9 | With socks designed by the artist and augmented reality |
The 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.
With socks designed by the artist and augmented reality
More books
-

The Art of Society
1900–194529€ Add to cartThe Collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the last building designed by Mies van der Rohe, has been closed a full six years for refurbishment. To mark its reopening the museum is presenting the highlights of its classical modernist collection under the title The Art of Society, 1900–1945. Visionary, critical, resigned or utopian, the paintings and sculptures bear witness to art’s dialogue with prevailing social conditions – from the German Empire to the First World War, the Weimar Republic and ultimately National Socialism. The catalogue documenting all works in the exhibition traces the major artistic tendencies during the first half of the 20th century in thirteen chapters. The Art of Society, 1900–1945 offers a renewed encounter with works by Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tamara de Lempicka, Lotte Laserstein, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and many others that is as captivating as it is illuminating.
Click here for the German edition.
-

Konrad Mühe
Guide38€ Add to cartAn Artist’s Book as an “Optical Illusion”
Konrad Mühe’s (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany, 1982; lives and works in Berlin) works interrogate the construction of our identities by uncovering the technological and media apparatuses that sustain it and confronting it with the autonomous lives of objects. Their basic formal principle is the installation hybridizing sculpture and digital moving image, with a particular focus on the projector and the interaction of pedestal or suspension and projection screen. Where the classical black box in the movie theater or exhibition venue seeks to conceal the technical equipment in favor of an immersive visual experience, Mühe brings it to the fore and sets it out in the gallery space as sculpture and installation. Yet his works also undercut the conventional display regime in the white cube: the process of projection emerges as the true creative medium and subject. This book acts as a descriptive illustrated Guide to Mühe’s projects.
Konrad Mühe was Hito Steyerl’s master student and trained at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. His works have been featured at numerous film festivals including the 61st Berlinale and in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.
-

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.”
- 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.
-

Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
-

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. -

Nobuyuki Tanaka
Primordial Memories25€ Add to cartThe craft of traditional Japanese lacquer finishing in contemporary art
In his extraordinary sculptures, Nobuyuki Tanaka (b. 1971 in Tokyo) combines a lacquer finishing that has been practiced in Japan for centuries with an organic formal language. Tanaka is considered the most important representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art. He uses the material in polished deep black or intense red as a multi-layer coating for large-format sculptures. This results in abstract works with lively, curved, glossy surfaces in which the multi-faceted effect created by the interplay with changing light conditions plays a key role. The lavishly illustrated book includes texts by Britta E. Buhlmann, Beatrice Kromp, Antje Papist-Matsuo, Annette Reich, Atsuhiko Shima, and Nobuyuki Tanaka.
In his extraordinary sculptures, the artist combines a treatment of lacquer practiced for centuries in Japan with an organic language of form.
An exceptional representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art, Tanaka uses the lacquer mostly in polished deep black, sometimes also in intense red, as a multi-layer coating for his large-scale sculptures.
-

Pat Steir & Ugo Rondinone
Waterfalls & Clouds20€ Add to cartThe imposing installation Waterfalls & Clouds consists of three sculptures by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) and nineteen paintings by the American Pat Steir (b. Newark, NJ, 1940; lives and works in New York). The three large gray monoliths of concrete, sand, and gravel bear the titles Faces, Look, and Twisted and are part of a series of twenty works created in 2018. They are surrounded by nineteen tall and narrow black oil paintings titled Flags for Ugo #1 through #19 (2021); with colorful or white paint streaming down the canvases, they hark back to Steir’s Waterfall series from the 1980s. A symbiotic relationship connects the works: the sculptures, in which erosion is integral to the art, embody time, while the pictures symbolize gravity and hence nature as such.
-

Jan Muche
Agora42€ Add to cartTracing the Wear of the Life of Labor
The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century’s ideologies – Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche’s roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear’s “heroes of labor” into focus.
Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin.
- Release November 2022

X x X
Semjon Contemporary50€ Add to cartFounded by Semjon H. N. Semjon in 2011, the gallery Semjon Contemporary has built a distinctive and singular profile that has earned it an unrivaled position in the art world. It represents international positions in contemporary art that, their divergences notwithstanding, are united by the extraordinary intelligence of their engagement with the material. The result is an unmistakable visual language that permits of no modification of established choices. Despite the considerable differences of material, technique, and expression, the artists’ works enter into dialogue with one another, as parallel solo presentations and special exhibitions showcasing numerous visiting artists have demonstrated.
The book features Colin Ardley, Edward L. Buchanan, Takayuki Daikoku, Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Ute Essig, Experimental Setup (Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager’s collective moniker), Katja Flint, Andreas Fux, Dave Grossmann, Renate Hampke, Marc von der Hocht, Nataly Hocke, Michael Kutschbach, Henrik U. Müller, Cornelia Nagel, Susanne Knaack, Katja Kollowa, Susanne Pomrehn, Thomas Prochnow, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Gerda Schütte, Gil Shachar, Li Silberberg, Karina Spechter, Klaus Steinmann, Stefan Thiel, Hitomi Uchikura, Royden Watson, and Bettina Weiß in dedicated chapters. It is rounded out by statements from collectors including Thomas Lenhart, Cornelie Kunkat, Gabriele Quandt, Roland Schnell, Nobert Fuhr and Klaus Werner, Roswitha and Jürgen König, and Helmut Ließ. Remarks by art critics and scholars and an interview with Semjon by Jan Maruhn provide additional insight into the gallery’s work.
-

Yes To All
Die Schenkung Paul Maenz Gerd Vries42€ Add to cartThe catalog accompanying the exhibition YES TO ALL offers profound insight into a collection of over nine hundred works on paper—from postcards and drawings to photographs and posters—that was gifted to the Kupferstichkabinett in 2022, with subsequent additions over the years until 2025. The donors are Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, who ran a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne until 1990 and chaperoned the evolution of avant-garde art from the conceptualism of the late 1960s to the neo-expressive painting of the 1980s. The most recent works in the collection date from 2024. Several essays and a conversation with the donors invite the reader to experience the stylistic and thematic polyphony of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in new ways.
EXHIBITION:
YES TO ALL. THE GIFTS OF PAUL MAENZ GERD DE VRIES TO THE KUPFERSTICHKABINETT
KUPFERSTICHKABINETT, STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -

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.
-

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.
-

ODOR
Immaterial Sculptures40€ Add to cartThe effect of odor is immediate. Smells arouse feelings in us, put us in moods, awaken recollections. They color the other senses and shape our perceptions more profoundly than we are aware. Scents create closeness and distance at the same time. They become imprinted on our memories and consolidate our experiences. And yet their existence in the world of three dimensions remains invisible, and the act of picking up a scent is fleeting.
The publication Odor—Immaterial Sculptures zooms in on the power of smells. Contributions from curators, artists, scientists, and scholars frame a variety of perspectives on this evanescent phenomenon, examining the olfactory sense and the qualities of the immaterial. Full-page plates conceived by the artists provide additional information, imagery, and contexts around the individual works, which put odor as an olfactory and spatial experience at the center of the engagement with art. The works operate between the poles of time and space, individual and community, consciousness and the subconscious, visibility and invisibility, the everyday and the miraculous, the sense of self and the perceptions of others, presence and absence, life and death.
Artists : Jason Dodge, Carsten Höller, Koo Jeong A, Oswaldo Maciá, Teresa Margolles, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sissel Tolaas, Clara Ursitti, Luca Vitone
-

Mihai Olos
42€ Add to cartMihai Olos (b. Ariniș, Romania, 1940; d. Endingen am Kaiserstuhl, 2015) ranks among the most fascinating artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His adaptations of the formal vocabulary pioneered by Constantin Brâncuși are unrivaled in their creative originality. His works evince an utterly novel approach to the combination of materials from the culture of rural Romania with the visual strategies of modernism. His formidable oeuvre engages with conceptual and minimal art and comprises paintings, drawings, and sculptures, sometimes in the dimensions of land-art projects, as well as performances and poetry. Despite the constraints imposed by the communist system, his art and travels—during which he also met his kindred spirit Joseph Beuys—were dedicated to the unerring pursuit of his vision of social sculpture and radical utopian architecture.
-

Etsu Egami
Rainbow18€ Add to cartWhat is worth talking about in art eludes language. Aesthetic experience is without words, like a human encounter that touches upon our innermost being. Etsu Egami is interested in the margins of understanding, where the communication of ideas and feelings threatens to fail, where forms become illegible. That is the point on which she homes in with her brush, which she wields in a rough calligraphic style, putting almost translucent oil paints on the canvas. Spectral faces emerge that dissolve into abstraction; abstract forms, beheld from the corner of one’s eye, momentarily coalesce into a likeness. Painting, to Egami, is a physical and performative act, the brush an extension of her arm, bringing a picture into being in sweeping rhythmical motions. As we contemplate her work, that momentum imparts itself to us: first our eyes begin to wander, then we feel our bodies stir, and finally the spirit, too, pulsates in the rhythm of the brush. Gathering Egami’s most outstanding works, this catalogue is a universal invitation to join a peculiar dance, an arc of light the artist traces across all barriers to understanding and that speaks to our senses.
-

Freeters
HELP! Artistic Intelligence38€ Add to cartFREETERS stands for an artist collective that designs, creates, transforms and plays with spaces, for and with the people who experience their time there. The artistic intelligence used in the process transforms into spaces for thinking, working, living, playing and learning, creating identity, emotion and inspiration.
This book is about the mediation of artistic thinking and artistic action in processes. The artistic practice of Freeters is characterized by strategies of thought and action that are needed in a society with constantly changing conditions, in a working world that overturns itself in its dynamics. The necessity of shaping the present through artistic thought and action can no longer be limited to the art context.
FREETERS’ AI approach should be understood less as a scientific methodology and more as a call not to reduce our intelligence to only rational thought processes with a utility maxim. Of course, AI has already made impressive progress in many areas of our public services via the hard components of machine learning. However, it is doubtful whether this approach alone can really give rise to a superintelligence that will one day create a resource-saving paradise on earth. Nor is it guaranteed that we as Homo Sapiens will be assigned a place in this paradise by such a unilaterally gifted superintelligence. Cognitively, this machine will be superior to us in any case – only the necessary feeling of happiness of a consensual coexistence does not seem quite conceivable.
-

Michelle Jezierski
Simultaneous Spaces34€ Add to cartMichelle Jezierski’s (b. Berlin, 1981; lives and works in Berlin) paintings unfurl simultaneous spaces that are awash in light. Contrasts between bright and dark and muted as well as lucent hues engender a singular atmosphere characterized by depth and dynamism. The artist is as invested in the perception of these constructed spaces as in the capaciousness of natural landscapes. In her paintings, luminous colors and geometric disturbances achieve shifting balances between the extremes of order and chaos, light and shadow, interior and exterior, structure and flux. Simultaneous Spaces, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, presents forty-five works painted between 2017 and 2022.
Michelle Jezierski studied with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of Arts and graduated from Valérie Favre’s class in 2008. She also received a fellowship for a semester abroad at Cooper Union, New York, where she studied with Amy Sillman.
-

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.
-

CHRISTIAN ROTHMANN
The Light Touch45€ Add to cartA Monograph of Curiosity
Christian Rothmann (b. Kędzierzyn, Poland, 1954; lives and works in Berlin) is an artistic jack-of-all-trades, a builder of bridges between cultures, and a restless globetrotter and traveler across time. He takes photographs wherever he goes, especially when he is on the road, gathering documentaries with a creative edge, spontaneous yet powerfully symbolic pictures, or conceptual series. His motifs have included basketball hoops in the most unbelievable places, toys in restaurants and stores, exotic dishes, and—in the sequence Legs of the World—beautiful legs, of real-world women, but also of advertising-poster idols and art objects. He has a special knack for recruiting accomplices from all age groups and across social and cultural differences, as for his series you and me or Mother & Daughter. Fierce large-format paintings and delicate watercolors on small paper formats from Rothmann’s studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg complement his long-term photographic projects. The Light Touch presents the artist’s variegated visual art on almost five hundred pages.






















