




Julius Hofmann
Western Philosophies
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Saša Bogojev, Michaela Kühn |
Author(s) | Saša Bogojev |
Design | Tobias Jacob, Torsten Illner |
Cover | Hardcover with colored edges |
Size | 22,5 x 28,5 cm |
Pages | 136 |
Illustrations | 82 |
Language(s) | German, English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-114-6 |
Julius Hofmann (b. Göttingen, 1983; lives and works near Göttingen) has mastered the traditional aspects of painting and commands a broad repertoire of creative techniques. This expertise enables him to call conventional painting in question by combining it with the aesthetic of 1990s computer graphics. The simple and often grotesque symbolism of the imperfect digital imagery contrasts with a perfectionistic figurative painting. This approach lends his pictures a disconcerting and unexpected quality.
Western Philosophies is an episode in Hofmann’s ongoing work confronting consumerist society with its dark secrets and its indifference. Meanwhile, his creative process is also an exploration of the artist’s personal fears and frustrations. In depicting his figures, landscapes, and machines, he draws our attention to the painterly originality of structures and surfaces. The protagonists, to his mind, play a subordinate role, typically serving him as vehicles—he is more interested in the “how” than in the “what.”
Julius Hofmann studied painting with Neo Rauch and Heribert C. Ottersbach at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) from 2005 until 2011. His work is represented in international collections and institutions.
More books
-
Steven Shearer
Working from Life58€ Add to cart“Today’s images are echoes of how people have always been depicted.”
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.
-
Chiharu Shiota
The Unsettled Soul48€ Add to cartWidely acclaimed for her distinctive visual language, which combines drawing, performance, sculpture, and installation art, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972 in Osaka, lives and works in Berlin) addresses fundamental human concerns. Creating large-scale thread installations that incorporate a variety of everyday objects and memorabilia, she forms powerful environments that evoke a sense of nostalgia, personal history, and collective memory. The catalog accompanies the exhibition The Unsettled Soul, the first presentation of the artist in the Czech Republic. In addition to extensive photographic documentation of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha, the publication features an essay by Jason Waite discussing Shiota’s early works as well as an interview with the artist conducted by the editor, Christelle Havranek, about her key themes and the creation of the Prague exhibition.
-
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.
-
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.”
-
Julius Hofmann
Western Philosophies35€ Add to cartJulius Hofmann (b. Göttingen, 1983; lives and works near Göttingen) has mastered the traditional aspects of painting and commands a broad repertoire of creative techniques. This expertise enables him to call conventional painting in question by combining it with the aesthetic of 1990s computer graphics. The simple and often grotesque symbolism of the imperfect digital imagery contrasts with a perfectionistic figurative painting. This approach lends his pictures a disconcerting and unexpected quality.
Western Philosophies is an episode in Hofmann’s ongoing work confronting consumerist society with its dark secrets and its indifference. Meanwhile, his creative process is also an exploration of the artist’s personal fears and frustrations. In depicting his figures, landscapes, and machines, he draws our attention to the painterly originality of structures and surfaces. The protagonists, to his mind, play a subordinate role, typically serving him as vehicles—he is more interested in the “how” than in the “what.”
Julius Hofmann studied painting with Neo Rauch and Heribert C. Ottersbach at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) from 2005 until 2011. His work is represented in international collections and institutions.
- 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.
-
Cahier #1
Heinz Gappmayr22€ Add to cartDo we think in images or in language? Can writing visualize time? Heinz Gappmayr (1925-2010) was interested in text as a spatial event and in letters as architecture. Although his works were often presented in the context of Visual Poetry, Gappmayr himself preferred the more neutral term text to lyricism. His understanding of written language as a conceptual medium and typography as an indicator of physicality was closer to Lawrence Weiner’s approach than to that of the Concrete Poets. This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Tiroler Landesmuseum and includes Gappmayer’s most important art-in-architecture projects, as well as a complete notebook from 1961, with commentary by Gaby Gappmayr, the artist’s daughter. A conversation with her provides valuable philosophical insights into her father’s work.
-
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.
-
On Trickling Away
Concepts of Time in Contemporary Art30€ Add to cartTime, like space, is one of the key coordinates of human existence. The great mysteries of our lives revolve around it, only to remain unresolved when death inevitably ends our days. What is time’s role in art? The vanitas, a genre that was popular with painters in the seventeenth century, is hardly the earliest form that artists have devised to grapple with it. Holger Kube Ventura’s book On Trickling Away. Concepts of Time in Contemporary Art presents the ideas of contemporary artists who approach time from diverse angles. In the twenty-first century, their interest appears to have shifted from visualizations of future raptures to visions of slowness, of the distension, repetition, and standstill of moments in time. Bernard Aubertin (FR), Inge Dick (AT), Rom Gaastra (NL), Gosbert Gottmann (DE), Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen (FI), Manuela Kasemir (DE), Timo Klos (DE), Dimitry Orlac (FR), George Rickey (US), Patrik Söderlund & Visa Suonpää (FI), and John Woodman (UK) hone our awareness of how subjective the passage of time is and convey vivid experiences of its trickling away.
-
Gregor Hildebrandt
A Blink of an Eye and the Years are Behind us48€ Add to cartFor the past two decades, Gregor Hildebrandt (b. Bad Homburg, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) has transformed analog audiotapes, cassettes, and records into collages, sculptures, panel paintings, and installations. Melding visual art with music, he has charted a complex creative vision crossing boundaries of medium and genre that he continually refines. Before using a tape, he records selected music—typically a single song—on it, whose lyrics he quotes in the work’s title. The artist’s output draws on his personal repertoire of bands that share a romantic narrative of loneliness and a melancholy keynote. The same attitude toward life is reflected in Hildebrandt’s work. The book offers insight into all periods of the artist’s oeuvre and is rounded out by archival materials from Hildebrandt’s studio, his project space Grzegorzki Shows, and the music label Grzegorzki Records that illustrate his creative process.
Gregor Hildebrandt studied at Kunsthochschule Mainz from 1995 until 1999 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1999 until 2002. He was a fellow of the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice in 2003 and worked in Vienna on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2005–06. He has been professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2015.
-
PULS 20
New Entries in the MNAC Collection36€ Add to cartPULS 20 unites the most valuable finds from a communal treasure hunt. Exponents of the Romanian arts scene and representatives of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest teamed up to review the oeuvres of countless eminent Romanian artists and select works of outstanding quality that reflect the diversity of the country’s creative production over the past fifty years. In time for the celebrations of MNAC’s twentieth anniversary in 2020, the institution acquired the 180 works reproduced in this catalogue. That makes PULS 20 a singular document in two respects: it gathers a selection of key works of Romanian art that is unprecedented in its breadth between the covers of a book; and it is the result of a successful cooperative curatorial process, an organic discourse involving a wide variety of participants, demonstrating that democratic dialogue in art is not just possible but also extraordinarily fruitful and indeed necessary. All in all, this catalogue is the perfect choice both for newcomers to Romanian contemporary art and for specialists.
-
Harte Zeiten
Ciężkie Czasy34€ Add to cartIncreasingly pressing global political and societal challenges are always also rewarding subjects of creative engagement, and sometimes artists devise anticipative approaches to real-world problems.
Harte Zeiten—Ciężkie Czasy is a cooperative venture launched by Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg; Port25—Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Mannheim; and Galeria Miejska bwa, Bydgoszcz, Poland. It showcases works by altogether ten Polish and ten German contemporary artists. Putting the principle that art knows no boundaries into practice, the publication, with statements from Wolfgang Ullrich, Joanna Kiliszek, Schamma Schahadat, and others as well as documentation of the symposium held in September 2021, inspires forward-looking reflections on the conditions in which cultures thrive and similarities and differences between the two countries and beyond.
-
Martin Krumbholz
Alex, Martin und Ich14€ Add to cart“The Vocation of Saint Matthew”: that is the title that Martin Krug has chosen for his novella, after Caravaggio’s iconic painting at the Church of San Luigi degli Francesi in Rome. The irony is unmistakable—Martin, the protagonist of his narrative, hesitates to accept a promotion: he has been offered the job of his boss, for whose wife, Marion, he has fallen on a shared vacation. Yet Martin’s friend, whom he has asked for advice, proposes a different title: Ghost Story—a key element of the plot is the mysterious Alexander’s disappearance, seemingly forever, in the sea …
Martin’s friend and interlocutor, the novel’s first-person narrator, embeds the novella in a narrative framework that mirrors its motifs: love as passion, eros and sex, loyalty and betrayal, manliness and chivalry, art, film, and music. Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, glamorously adapted for the silver screen by Jean-Luc Godard, is reread and discussed as a MeToo story.
Martin Krumbholz (b. Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, 1954; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a writer and theater critic. His first novel, Eine kleine Passion, came out in 2013.
-
B.A.R.O.C.K.
24,80€ Add to cartArtistic Interventions in the Caputh Palace. Contemporary Parallels to the Baroque Era
Four international women artists spent more than three years studying Caputh Palace near Potsdam and creating works specifically for this magnificent location. The tapestries by Margret Eicher (b. 1955, Viersen; lives and works in Berlin), the floral scans by Luzia Simons (b. 1953, Quixadá, Brazil; lives and works in Berlin), the wax sculptures by Rebecca Stevenson (b. 1971; lives and works in London), and the ceiling painting projections by Myriam Thyes (b. 1963, Luxembourg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) blend into the surrounding space both naturally and surprisingly. With twelve double-page collages, the large-sized catalog is an artistic commentary on the ambitious project.
- Release September 2025
Andreas Wegner
Wir fahren mit der Schneckenpost, weil sie uns keinen Pfennig kost50€ Add to cartThe art of Andreas Wegner is an inquiry into capitalist urbanity. His interventions explore alternative models for urban interaction, trade, city development, traffic, or the use of public space. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Charles Fourier’s social utopias, Wegner founded, e.g. a cooperative department store in Berlin, a grocery store in Vienna, and conducted real estate business as a form of creative resistance. This monograph illustrates the artist’s most important projects with ample imagery, essays by renowned authors, interviews, and his own texts. Alongside collective initiatives, installations, photography, film, and sculpture, painting remains a constant in Wegner’s oeuvre to this day.
-
nolde/kritik/documenta (English)
42€ Add to cartEmil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
-
Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte27,50€ Add to cartErinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
-
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.
- temporarily not available
Der tanzende Blick
Roman Novitzkys Stuttgarter BallettRead moreWeightlessness, Grace, Emotions
The photographs by Roman Novitzky (b. 1984 in Bratislava) reveal the entire vocabulary of dance—and yet convey much more than this. With his camera, the first soloist of the Stuttgart Ballet not only captures hidden moments in rehearsal or from the side stage, but also opens the door to his own cosmos for the viewer. He depicts sweat and tension, doubt and euphoria, and gives the audience intimate insight behind the scenes of the Stuttgart Ballet. Roman Novitzky’s first monograph comprises more than sixty photographs of the ballet hall, the cloakroom, and guest performances. It not only stands for his two passions, dance and photography, but also describes his photographic approach, shaped by years of dance experience, which gives the viewer familiar insights into his everyday surroundings.
-
Alexandru Chira
42€ Add to cartAlexandru Chira’s (b. Tăușeni, Romania, 1947; d. Bucharest, 2011) oeuvre systematically and comprehensively maps a fictional field of research. His paintings, drawings, and objects, whose individual elements recall switches, screens, keyboards, and levers, were designed to “bring rain and rainbows,” to promote prosperity and prevent floods. Working in his art laboratory, Chira resembled a farmer tilling his field. He sowed symbols across his paintings, sometimes transplanted them to create new semiotic interconnections, then reaped them and stored up his harvest in painted machines of varying shapes and dimensions. In the 1990s—by then Chira held a professorship and was a widely recognized artist—he fulfilled a lifelong dream by building the “Tăușeni Ensemble,” the largest monument single-handedly created by one man in Transylvania. Much of his oeuvre accordingly consists of sketches and elaborations relating to the monument. In the course of his decades-long fascination with an agrarian aesthetic, architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, ufology, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy fused, yielding a kind of practical knowledge as well as spiritual speculations sustaining his endeavor.
The extensive monograph with more than 750 illustrations surveys Alexandru Chira’s output of four decades and synthesizes years of research undertaken at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. It contains numerous transcriptions of textual parentheses, legends, and instructions on how to decode the works and poetic fragments embedded in Chira’s pictures.