Karsten Konrad
Room Service
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Alexander Ochs |
| Author(s) | Martin Conrads, Alexander Ochs, Ulrike Pennewitz |
| Design | Marina Dafova |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Size | 24 x 30 cm |
| Pages | 272 |
| Illustrations | 250 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-037-8 |
The Visual Archeologist
Objets trouvés, used designer objects, and discarded furniture are the defining elements of the sculptor Karsten Konrad’s (b. Würzburg, 1962; lives and works in Berlin) material poetics. Not unlike the Dadaist or Surrealist readymade, the works that Konrad has made since the 1990s transform these “disregarded things” into sculptures, immersive installations, reliefs, and collages. Detecting the faint traces that anonymous consumers have left on the secondhand stuff, he unfolds an archaeology of the present. Konrad’s first monograph in a decade offers comprehensive insight into an oeuvre that throws the marginal into relief and questions the destructive impact of unbridled consumerism.
Karsten Konrad studied at Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, and the Royal College of Art, London. He has been professor of sculpture at the Universität der Künste in Berlin since 2016. His works are held, amongst others, by the Bundeskunstsammlung Bonn and the Margulies Collection, Miami.
Each copy is hand-signed by the artist on the spine.
More books
-
Gabriel Vormstein
40€ Add to cartGabriel Vormstein (b. Konstanz, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) explores themes of impermanence, temporality, and futility through a unique visual language. He paints using newspapers as a canvas, and creates installations out of tree branches and other organic matter. These “poor” materials subvert a prevailing notion in Western culture that an artwork should be eternally preserved. Through the adaptation of various styles and symbols, Vormstein’s paintings likewise speak to the transience of art historical and cultural trends. Over 300 pages, this richly illustrated book provides an overview of Vormstein’s oeuvre over the past two decades, while also offering an atmospheric glimpse into the artist’s source material and working methods. The publication is enriched by an essay by Gean Moreno, who characterizes Vormstein’s work as follows: “Gabriel Vormstein’s paintings and sculptures (…) announce their condition as withering artifacts, as if no other manner of existing was available to them (and maybe to us, as well).”
-
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.
- 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.
-
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.
-
Horst Schwitzki (1932–2016)
Eine Werkmonografie38€ Add to cart“I have my place in concrete painting!”
Horst Schwitzki’s (b. Marburg/Lahn, 1932; d. Frankfurt/Main, 2016) talent was recognized early on by renowned painters including Arnold Bode and Fritz Winter. During his studies at the Werkakademie, today’s Kunsthochschule, in Kassel, Schwitzki came into contact with concrete art. The network he built there opened doors for him, leading to exhibitions with prestigious galleries such as Rolf Ricke’s and Rudolf Zwirner’s. By the 1970s, however, he found himself compelled to make a living by working first as a graphic artist for an advertising agency and then as a construction draftsman. Although these day jobs left him little time for painting, he kept working on his art until 2010. This book is the first to present a comprehensive survey of Schwitzki’s oeuvre, which spans almost six decades and shows him continually devising novel creative solutions within the formal repertoire of concretion. The biography, rounded out by statements from contemporaries, colleagues, and friends, offers profound insights into the highs and lows of an artist’s life that stands as a characteristic example of the experiences of the generation born in the 1930s.
-
Sonja Yakovleva
Soaplands50€ Add to cartSonja Yakovleva’s (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) silhouettes are informed by her sex-positive feminist views. They mix and match pornography with art-historical references, folkloristic motifs, fairy tales, and myths that have served to ingrain misogynistic, racist, and homophobic ideologies in the collective consciousness since the Middle Ages. The dissemination of such materials was facilitated by the paper cut, a medium that encouraged simplified graphical representations and was seen as domestic and appropriate for women. Yakovleva’s intentions in adopting it, however, are contrarian: her iridescent silhouettes grapple with women’s stories, precarious gray areas, power relations, representation, sexuality, and violence in novel ways.
Soaplands, the title of Sonja Yakovleva’s first monograph, is a nod to Japanese bathhouses where men receive personal care, massages, and sexual services. Most recently, a number of soaplands have opened that cater to women with male prostitutes. Similarly, in the paper cuts in the book, which were created between 2018 and 2023, women have seized sexual power and conquered the patriarchal system. Unchecked by shame, they use men as objects to satisfy their desires.
-
Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
-
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.
The extensive monograph presents over two thousand works from more than three decades. Essays embed the various bodies of work in their art-historical contexts.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Paintings & Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe First Monograph on the Californian Pop Artist Since More Than Thirty Years
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is the very personification of the cheerful, carefree attitude towards life in California – with his work as well as his person: a former surfer and motorcycle racer, an extravagant artist and key figure of West Coast Pop Art. After studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the Otis Art Institute, he exhibited at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957 and was the central figure among a group of artists that included Frank Gehry, Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, and Ken Price. BAB, as he apostrophizes himself, inserts car and motorcycle parts as motifs into his otherwise abstract paintings, using lacquer and spray paint instead of oil, and aluminum panels with at times dented surfaces instead of the traditional canvas. Art and lifestyle combine to create the individual “Bengston iconography” of California Cool.
-
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.
-
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.
- 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.
-
Vanessa Henn
Same Same35€ Add to cartVanessa Henn’s (b. Stuttgart, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) objects and installations blend formal reduction with playful comedy. The handrails she makes out of a wide variety of materials run along walls, project into rooms, trace spirals, mark lines or arcs, and often solicit our active engagement. Besides banisters, her oeuvre, which straddles the line between architecture and sculpture, also comprises bridges, stairs, and fences. All her creations are energized by the tension between the static work of art and its dynamic environment, which the artist resolves by integrating her works into the goings-on of everyday life. A guardrail that runs perpendicular to a flight of stairs or abruptly ends in the ceiling or floor is relieved of its function; rather than helping us go where we are going, it is a companion who invites us on a stroll into the imaginary and uncertain. And that is what makes Vanessa Henn’s art so alluring.
The book presents Vanessa Henn’s latest works from the years 2019-2023.
Vanessa Henn studied sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (1992–2001) and at Edinburgh College of Art (1995–1996) and completed a Master of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art in Christchurch, New Zealand (1999–2000).
-
Winston Roeth
Speed of Light32€ Add to cartColor Is Light
Intense monochrome areas of color, radiant pigments, and multifaceted surfaces are the characteristics of the art of Winston Roeth (b. Chicago, 1945; lives and works in Beacon, New York, and Waldoboro, Maine). He has devoted himself to abstract color field painting since the 1970s, with the grid as a leitmotif running through his oeuvre; both are fraught with painterly memories of light, “a light that can jump out and grasp the beholders, a color saturation that throbs with a deep glow,” as the artist himself puts it. It emanates from the strata of paint in his pictures, encountering the light that, falling upon his works, molds their chromatic effect. Roeth experiments with pure pigments, which he mixes by hand to make paints he applies in layers to diverse media including paper, aluminum, honeycomb, slate, and wood panels. The book documents a tour of an exhibition, presenting works dating from between the early 1990s and 2020.
-
Thyra Schmidt
Über Diebe und die Liebe. On Thieves and Love.15€ Add to cartAn artist’s book, an artist’s text
On twenty-two large-format typographic sheets, Thyra Schmidt (b. 1974, Pinneberg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) develops a narrative featuring moments in an amorous relationship. Thoughts and encounters between “her” and “him” are captured in poetically constructed, fragmentary units of meaning. Imaginary images are conjured in the mind’s eye: Close-ups and intimate insights into a delicate web of interpersonal incidents. Personal observations and experiences form the starting point of this artistic exploration of love. Yet the focus of her work is not on autobiographical rendering, but rather on the tracking down of elementary structures, a general understanding of intimacy.
-
Angelika J. Trojnarski
Noble Earth38€ Add to cartAngelika J. Trojnarski (born 1979 in Mrągowo/Polen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) examines facets of nature through an ecological, scientific, poetic study of their phenomena. Through a process centered on painting, her art articulates allegorical relationships between some of the most significant contentions of our time: humans and nature, strength and fragility, crisis and hope. She expresses a desire to understand nature by reproducing its workings, pointing to its incredible might while underscoring its increasing fragility. Trojnarski overlays raw canvases with paper fragments, employing brushwork and collage to apply materials like graphite or soot, generating a source of energy and suspense through color and contrast. The monograph offers an overview of the last decade of Trojnarski’s work.
Angelika J. Trojnarski 2006–2013 studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. 2006–2009 Painting with Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and Herbert Brandl, from 2010 Free Art with Andreas Gursky.
-
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.
-
Rooted
Female Brazilian Artists28€ Add to cartThe book Rooted. Female Brazilian Artists, accompanies the eponymous exhibition at Brainlab/Munich, which is open until the end of September 2025. The works of the 16 artists come from the collection of Sergio Linhares and Stefan Vilsmeier. The collectors present this selection hoping to illuminate important and difficult themes such as, among others, discrimination, displacement, and violence but also to remind of our shared rootedness in nature. “Art has no obligation to comfort us; it can challenge, disrupt and remind us that our coexistence is fragile.” The volume shows installation views along with close-ups of the individual works and it includes short texts for each artist along with an essay by curator Tereza de Arruda.
Artists: Marlene Almeida, Azuhli (Luiza Diogo Veras), Tarsila do Amaral, Beatrice Arraes, Carmezia Emiliano, Sonia Gomes, Iêda Jardim, Lucia Laguna, Laura Lima, Rosilene Luduvico, Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa, Paula Siebra, Luzia Simons, Nádia Taquary, Alexsandra Ribeiro, Larissa de Souza
-
Hans Hofmann
Chimbote24€ Add to cartExpressive Forms between Art and Architecture
As an exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (b. Weißenburg, Germany, 1880; d. New York, USA, 1966) ranks among the preeminent artists of the twentieth century. As a teacher at his Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, which he founded in 1933 after emigrating to the United States, he exerted a formative influence over a generation of young painters. With Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others, he was a member of the illustrious New York School, a loose association of visual artists. In 1950 he was spending time in Europe and collaborated with the architects Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener on designs for colorful wall paintings to be executed on buildings in Chimbote, Peru. The urban masterplan they developed for the city’s post-World War II expansion was never realized, and so Hofmann’s intensely colorful works in large formats have been known only to specialists. The selection gathered in this book together with drawings and a city plan provides focused insight into a visionary project.
-
Călin Dan
POLLIO34€ Add to cartThe oeuvre of the Romanian artist Călin Dan (b. Arad, Romania, 1955; lives and works in Bucharest) shows the influences of conceptual and minimal art. His book Pollio surveys his creative practice of the past decade, which straddles the media of installation and performance art, film, photography, and sculpture and is enriched by his work as an art historian, writer, and curator. In addition to the titular body of work, which wrestles with the Roman historian Gaius Asinius Pollio, the volume also documents the exhibition Alzheimer (2017). Călin Dan is a founding member of the artists’ group subREAL. His work was showcased at the Istanbul (1993), Venice (1993, 1999, 2001), São Paulo (1994), and Sydney Biennales (2006). He has been director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest since 2014.
