





John M Armleder
CA. CA.
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Ingrid Pfeiffer, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt |
Author(s) | Ingrid Pfeiffer, Rebecca Herlemann |
Design | stapelberg&fritz |
Size | 21 x 27 cm |
Pages | 64 |
Illustrations | 23 color and 7 b/w |
Cover | Softcover |
Language(s) | German, English |
ISBN | 978-3-947563-47-0 |
Commentaries on our Present Day Realities and the Status of Art
John M Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva; lives and works in Geneva and New York) is one of the most influential contemporary conceptual, performance and object artists. The profound and the banal, control and coincidence, high culture and everyday life coalesce in Armleder’s work to create a unique experience. The works of the Swiss – often humorous or ironically twisted commentaries on contemporary reality – draw on the formal repertoire of Classical Modernism, as well as on video and design. The book focuses on large-scale, site-specific installations and wall pieces, showing in detail the broad spectrum of Armleder’s work.
John M Armleder studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. He represented Switzerland 1986 at the 42nd Biennale di Venezia and participated in documenta 8 one year later. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Belvedere, Vienna, amongst others.
More books
-
Ugo Rondinone
winter, spring, summer, fall20€ Add to cartUgo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media—painting, sculpture, film, and installation art—his work is rooted in the transformation of outward reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres that capture the contemporary mood.
This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone’s work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a lightbulb . winter at theSørlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light . summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath, Vienna.
-
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.
-
Emmanuel Bornstein
Wildwechsel25€ Add to cartLike the deer that tests our vigilance by suddenly crossing the road, Emmanuel Bornstein’s (b. Toulouse, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) art, which is rarely winsome and often disturbing, forces us to grapple with reality. In his earlier work, the German-French artist often focused on the Holocaust and the Second World War, creating pictures profoundly informed by his own family’s story. Exploring Berlin, the epicenter of that dark history, inspired searching meditations in series that turned the spotlight on traces of what had happened. More recently, Bornstein has sought to disentangle his art from subjective experience, shifting his focus to the analysis and reconstruction of contemporary events. Wildwechsel retraces the evolution of his oeuvre as reflected in his biography, which exemplifies the cultural exchange between Germany and France.
Emmanuel Bornstein studied painting first at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, then at the Berlin University of the Arts. His works are held in numerous private and institutional collections in New York, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Istanbul.
-
Wolfgang Gäfgen
Photographic Miracles45€ Add to cartA Mysterious Play of Light and Shadow
While Wolfgang Gäfgen’s (b. Hamburg, 1936; lives and works in Stuttgart and Esslingen) hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less accomplished than the artist’s graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier history of art or allusions to historic myths.
-
Larissa Kikol
SIGNED. Unterwegs mit der 1UP-Crew und Moses & Taps18€ Add to cartWho owns the city? It is a question to which graffiti artists and politicians have very different answers. 1UP and Moses & Taps are international stars of the scene, realizing radical creative concepts in spectacular actions. The art critic Larissa Kikol shadowed them on their nocturnal forays for three years and gathered her experiences in a book that has become a singular tribute to the graffiti scene. It lets us witness the genesis of the artists’ works on the knife’s edge between civil disobedience, criminal liability, and an irrepressible freedom. Traveling throughout Germany, Kikol records absorbing dialogues that reflect the contrast between different worlds: the legal and the illegal art worlds, painting and protest. Always on the hop and in danger of being discovered and arrested, she ventures beyond the bounds of permissible art, into subway tunnels, up on roofs, across switchyards. A portrait emerges of Germany and Berlin and the power relations that shape our society.
Larissa Kikol (b. 1986) works as a freelance art critic, art scholar, and writer. She writes for Die Zeit, Spiegel Online, Art, Kunstzeitung, Mare, Monopol Online, and Kunstforum International. In 2016, she won C/O Berlin’s international Talents award in the art criticism category. She teaches and lectures at art schools and universities in Germany and France.
Kikol studied stage design and dramaturgy in Berlin-Weißensee and obtained a Ph.D. in art studies from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. She lives and works in Marseille and Cologne.
-
Cristina Lucas
Immobile Engine29€ Add to cartMechanisms of Power
The Spanish artist Cristina Lucas (b. Jaén, 1973; lives and works in Madrid) works in a wide range of media and genres. Central concerns include the confrontation of subjective and political historiographies and a critical examination of cultural stereotypes. The publication’s point of departure is the multichannel video installation Unending Lightning, begun in 2013, in which Lucas undertakes a painstaking study of the history of aerial warfare. The book also showcases works that limn a contemporary perspective on value chains and the capitalization of time and landscape. Moreover, the artist has developed a corpus of critical cartographic models that offer algorithmic, philosophical, poetic, or, in some instances, humorous visualizations of unexpected nexuses. The first German-language publication on Cristina Lucas’s art, it offers a comprehensive survey of her oeuvre to date.
Cristina Lucas studied fine arts at the University of California and the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She has had residencies in Paris, Amsterdam, and New York. Her work has been exhibited at MUDAM, Luxembourg; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile, and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Kiasma, Helsinki; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
-
wolfgang thiel
skulpturale standpunkte38€ Add to cartWolfgang Thiel (b. Zweibrücken, 1952; lives and works in Plochingen) is a sculptor who makes figurative work. He is especially interested in the southern German tradition of colorfully painted sculpture, which he seeks to bring into the twenty-first century. His experimental handling of various genres and materials suggests a researcher’s mind. Switching between different materials is key to Thiel’s approach because their particular characteristics demand his constant attention. Å playful aspect is essential to all his works, which include large-format sculptures in public settings (more than thirty have been installed in Germany) as well as sculptural garden landscapes, stage designs, and costumes.
The opulent wide-format book containing almost three hundred illustrations offers a representative overview of Wolfgang Thiel’s oeuvre and includes the first complete chronological catalogue raisonné of his works in wood.
Wolfgang Thiel studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design from 1970 until 1976 and later taught at his alma mater from 1987 until 1991. From 2008 until 2018, he held a teaching position at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart. In 1990, he won the Art Award of the City of Stuttgart. Since 1977, Thiel’s work has been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions in Switzerland, France, and Germany.
-
Erich Hörtnagl
Unforgettable – Unforgotten48€ Add to cartHow can a life be remembered—what remains, what vanishes?
In Unforgettable | Unforgotten, Erich Hörtnagl brings together photographic fragments that are more than just memories: they are symbols of lived time. Roland Barthes’ concept of the “punctum” experience—that instant when a detail in an image pierces the heart—provides a key to Hörtnagl’s photographic gaze. It is not the spectacular events but the quiet and incidental things that move us. The seemingly insignificant becomes a projection screen for memory, loss, and emotion. The focus is not on what is staged, but on what eludes creative control.
Accompanied by insightful writings by Alois Schöpf and Kurt Höretzeder, a quiet monologue emerges about happiness and missed opportunities, about what we receive—and what we give. A book that doesn’t provide answers but asks questions: What makes a life worth living? What remains unforgettable or unforgotten?
-
Shara Hughes
58€ Add to cartBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
-
Vera Mercer
New Works28€ Add to cartBeauty and Melancholy, Joie de Vivre and Vanity
The American photographer Vera Mercer’s (b. Berlin, 1936; lives and works in Omaha and Paris) oeuvre defies easy summary. She started taking pictures in Paris in the 1960s, making portraits of her then husband Daniel Spoerri—who, like she, was initially training as a dancer—and other members of the Fluxus group and Nouveaux Réalistes, including Emmett Williams and Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé. Around the same time, she also photographed Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp for various magazines; her friends Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle were among her favorite sitters.
In the 1970s, she took a long creative hiatus: after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, she poured all her energy into starting a number of restaurants and developing an entire downtown neighborhood. But then, in the early years of the new millennium, she returned to photography, capturing breathtaking neo-baroque still lifes featuring flowers, fruits, freshly killed game, antique glasses, and illuminating candles in large formats.
Vera Mercer’s fourth monograph presents her most recent opulent still lifes in color, as well as a novelty in her oeuvre: restrained black-and-white flower pictures and portraits realized as small-format platinum prints.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Plastique Fantastique
A Journey through an ephemeral Realm32€ Add to cartIn the wake of Frank Lloyd Wright’s pioneering work, visionary architects including Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller established bubbles as a recognized artistic and architectonic form. The Berlin-based art duo Plastique Fantastique (Marco Canevacci and Yena Young) go one step further and harness them as a medium of temporary social interactions. The philosopher Vilém Flusser conceived of space in the digital universe as a network of relational settings in which humans can be in multiple places at one, as a “bubble that extends into the future.” Plastique Fantastique transform our urban and rural environments into laboratories for such spaces in which urgent social, political, and aesthetic questions are negotiated. Oversized translucent bubbles, traffic islands ringed by diaphanous tubes, giant lifebelts, air-filled sausages that the audience at a Peaches concert pass over their heads: Plastique Fantastique’s installations fuse art, performance, people, and architecture in a multisensory experience that blurs the conventional boundaries of art and focuses our attention on the larger bubble in which human existence is contained. Richly illustrated with exceptional photographs, this monograph is the first to document a representative selection from the duo’s projects of the past two decades.
- 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.
-
Jürgen Claus
To the Oceans with Imagination18€ Add to cartThe Sea as a Space of Artistic Experience
Jürgen Claus’s (b. 1935, Berlin; lives and works in Aachen and Baelen, Belgium) oeuvre encompasses paintings, films, light and solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, with theoretical works that have sold over 100,000 copies. “Jürgen Claus is the first one to see the ocean through an artist’s rather than a scientist’s lens,” Michel Ragon writes. In this book, Claus intertwines his experiences working on the fascinating underwater installations with a pressing contemporary concern: the global efforts to restore the seas to health. The publication combines visual art, architecture, poetry, and music for a multifaceted engagement with the world’s oceans.
Jürgen Claus majored in theater studies at the Universität München and was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne.
-
Logan T. Sibrel
But I’m Different50€ Add to cartLogan T. Sibrel’s (born 1986 in Jasper, IN, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) paintings and drawings depict moments of great joy and beauty, but also fear, sadness, desire and aggression. Frequently only part of the mostly male figures is depicted. Sibrel’s cropping can feel simultaneously intimate and alienating—fragmentary stories are told that touch you through their authenticity and vulnerability. Sibrel’s artistic maneuvers include overlapping, shifted perspectives, and text fragments that appear like snippets of overheard conversations and thus create a collage effect.
This book is the artist’s first comprehensive publication with works from the last twenty months. While the first part presents the artist’s paintings, the second part presents his drawings with the edges of the backing paper digitally removed so that it looks as if the images were drawn directly into the book.
Logan T. Sibrel completed his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington in 2009 and his master’s degree at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2011. His most recent solo exhibitions include In Another Life and Galerie Thomas Fuchs (Stuttgart, DE) and Brake For Your Sweetheart at Auxier Kline (New York, NY).
-
Jörg Heieck
CRUX29€ Add to cartTwo Fascinating Series of Works by the Photographer and Physicist
Expertly wielding the vintage photographic technique of the cyanotype, Jörg Heieck (b. 1964, Münster; lives and works in Kaiserslautern) transmutes nature into a fascinating play of shades of blue and defamiliarized shapes. Desolate sceneries, barren landscapes—the first series gathered in the book was created in the Sahara, Iceland, and Spitsbergen. Humanity has reached a crossroads: can we avert the destruction of the planet? Contrasting this symbolic crux, the second section presents populated intersections replete with signage from China, Japan, Russia, Israel, India, Greece, and Georgia. With these panoramas of urban life standing as a counterpoint to the abstraction in the photographs in the first section, the book offers insight into the artist’s extraordinary oeuvre.
Jörg Heieck has a PhD in physics and worked for many years as a researcher at Agfa, Kodak, and the ITER nuclear fusion reactor project. His art has been shown in numerous countries, including at the Goethe-Institutes in Damascus and Beirut, the Aleppo International Photo Festival, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, and Kunsthalle Mannheim.
-
Konkrete Progressionen
François Morellet & Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr & Hartmut Böhm15€ Add to cartThanks to a generous donor, the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret welcomed a number of outstanding works to its collection in 2022. Titled Konkrete Progressionen, the first exhibition to showcase a selection from the gift features four internationally renowned artists whose works are derived from mathematical or geometric procedures: the concrete systematists Hartmut Böhm (1938–2021) and François Morellet (1926–2016) and the pioneers of computer-generated art Manfred Mohr (1938–) and Vera Molnar (1924–).
The book documents the serial paintings, drawings, collages, wall objects, and monumental installations and environments of steel beams or concrete blocks. The works play concrete games with the beholder’s ability to recognize patterns in binary contrasts or layered grids. They show sine waves, vector series, hypercubes, and markings derived from the circular constant π or the Fibonacci sequence—and in each instance demonstrate primarily how the basis of calculation takes on a life of its own.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen runs until April 14, 2024.
-
“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