



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
-
Nicola Staeglich – Farbe schwebend / Color floating
22€ Add to cart“The more slowly one approaches Staeglich’s works, the more they reveal.” Stephan Berg
Nicola Staeglich transforms color and traces of the act of painting into complex pictorial spaces that exude light and make time visible. Using an extra-wide brush, she applies luminous oil paints to (semi-) transparent foils and solid support media made from acrylic glass. Each movement of her body leaves a distinct mark on the paintings. Once the works are placed in the exhibition space, they absorb their environment and ambient light as well as the eye. The artist’s experimental approach generates a rich dynamic: paint hovers in mid-air, disembodied, while a constant oscillation between color and surface, between pictorial body and setting unlocks novel dimensions in space and time. The picture continually coalesces in the eye of the beholder, metamorphosing as the angle of incidence shifts and the mind parses the traces and strata of paint. Even in printed form, Staeglich’s works convey a rousing vitality.
The catalogue accompanies Staeglich’s solo exhibition at Städtische Galerie Waldkraiburg.
-
Born in the Woods
Jems Koko Bi & HAP Grieshaber24€ Add to cartThe Political Substance of Wood
Jems Koko Bi (b. Sinfra, Côte d’Ivoire, 1966; lives and works in Kaarst, Germany, Dakar, and Abidjan) is world-renowned for the monumental wood sculptures he creates using a machine saw. This book juxtaposes his most recent body of works with the large-format woodcuts of HAP Grieshaber (b. Rot an der Rot, Germany, 1909; d. Eningen unter Achalm, 1981). Although the two artists never met, their oeuvres are characterized by similar themes, values, and materials. The central concern is the fate of the forests and its momentous political and social implications: Grieshaber’s woodcuts articulate his principled opposition to the predatory exploitation of nature in the 1970s—an issue that is more relevant than ever today in light of the climate crisis and the Fridays for Future movement. Koko Bi’s figural groups bring this tradition of political art into our time, making a global and universally compelling case for a sustainable husbandry of our resources.
Jems Koko Bi studied at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts et de l’Action Culturelle (INSAAC), Abidjan, and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; at documenta 13; the Havana Biennial; and several Venice Biennials and Dakar Biennials. In 2019, he founded the forest biennial Abidjan Green Arts.
HAP Grieshaber studied advertising art at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart. His work is regarded as a signal contribution to the renewal of the woodcut medium in the twentieth century. He participated in documentas I, II, and III, held a professorship at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, and was honored with numerous awards and retrospectives.
- Release August 2025
Bettina Buck
Finding Form45€ Add to cartThe German sculptor Bettina Buck (1974-2017) called attention to herself with her “performative sculptures,” which she often presented vis-à-vis museal objects. Buck’s preferred materials came from the hardware store: corrugated cardboard, ceramic tiles, pressed foam, or plastic foil, which are all not meant to last. Out of these materials she created a kind of changeable and transient “protagonists,” who didn’t have a final form but rather emphasized the actual process of finding form (as well as losing form). In a provocative action in 2015, Buck dragged an oversized foam bloc through a museum collection and let it rest next to famous artworks, which gained a new dynamic in this interplay. Buck herself said once that her works were meant to “simultaneously attract and alienate the viewer.” In the exhibition space the objects should “create a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with its surroundings.”
Finding Form, a posthumous monograph presents Bucks complete sculptural works on over 300 pages and contains texts by Phyllida Barlow, Paolo Icaro, Cecilia Canziani, and Andrea Maria Popelka. The book was conceived and published by the artist’s estate, Bureau Bettina Buck.
-
Pensive Images
16 Artists in Dialogue with W. G. Sebald35€ Add to cartOn Memories and Temporalities
Pensive Images examines the complex and invariably singular relationships through which images and memories are inextricably linked. The book relates to the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald (b. 1944, Wertach; d. 2011, Norfolk), especially to four fictional stories he published between 1990 and 2001, in which he inserted non-captioned blackand- white photographs of uncertain provenance and nature into the text like memories punctuating ways reminiscent of his writing. It brings together 16 artists who, in ways reminiscent of Sebald’s approach, explored the realms of memory and past from the perspective of experience and intertwining temporalities.
With works by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Dove Allouche, Lonnie van Brummelen / Siebren de Haan, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Jason Dodge, Félix González-Torres, Ian Kiaer, Jochen Lempert, Zoe Leonard, Helen Mirra, Dominique Petitgand, John Stezaker, Danh Vo and Tris Vonna-Michell.
-
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
-
Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
-
FREIGEISTER
FRAGMENTS OF AN ART SCENE IN LUXEMBOURG AND BEYOND35€ Add to cartThinking Otherwise—the Mudam in Luxembourg at Fifteen
A free spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, is someone who “thinks otherwise than is expected of him in consideration of his origin, surroundings, position, and office, or by reason of the prevailing contemporary views” (Human, All Too Human,1878). As the German philosopher saw it, one must seek to become “untimely” and remain a “stranger” to one’s time in order to question its premises. This view to states of alienation unites the positions of fourteen young Luxembourgish artists in Freigeister, the publication accompanying the celebrations on occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.
In recent years, Luxembourg’s art scene has grappled in a wide variety of ways with the challenges that come with the small yet economically successful country’s ongoing transformation. Charting realities between the familiar and the unknown, the artists featured in Freigeister employ photography, painting, and installation as well as film, sculpture, printmaking, and performance art to paint a carefully considered but by no means dispassionate portrait of today’s society in an effort to build bridges between identity and the future.
The book presents works by Yann Annicchiarico, Laurianne Bixhain, Aline Bouvy, Marco Godinho, Sophie Jung, Catherine Lorent, Filip Markiewicz, Karolina Markiewicz & Pascal Piron, Claudia Passeri, Daniel Reuter, Nina Tomàs, Daniel Wagener, and Jeff Weber.
-
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.
-
Brandon Lipchik
10€ Add to cartIn recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.
-
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.
-
Hannes Norberg
2728€ Add to cartThe Ideal of Simplicity, Clarity and Timelessness
To make his photographs, Hannes Norberg (b. 1969, Worms; lives and works in Düsseldorf) constructs artificial spaces that integrate elements of painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. Rather than reproducing selected details of an existing reality, his works make empty space and the play of light and shadow their point of departure. In his most recent pieces, the artist has focused on samples of typography that he collected on his travels and in numerous libraries all over the world and subjected to graphical redaction. Captured in natural light in his studio, his pictures showcase the quiet beauty of writing and paper, while their landscape-like aura gestures toward their place of origin. Designed by the artist himself, the book marks the public première of a selection of twenty-seven new photographs.
Hannes Norberg studied fine arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was an artist-in-residence in Paris, New York, Florence, São Paulo, Xiamen and Seoul.
-
Anna Leonhardt
Touching Space34€ Add to cartAnna Leonhardt’s (b. Pforzheim, 1981; lives and works in New York and Leipzig) paintings probe her own experiences and moods, while also referencing works of literature and quoting phenomena in the history of her craft. Abstract surfaces composed of numerous layers that break the two-dimensional bounds of the canvas engender a physical and imagined space that is further expanded by the interrelations between the pictorial elements, an imaginary communication with other works of art, and the beholders. The publication Touching Space presents Anna Leonhardt’s most recent works. A compendium of writings on the subject of space by the phenomenologist Franz Xaver Baier and the artist’s correspondence with the curator Sophia Pietryga complement the imposing illustrations. The book is released in conjunction with the eponymous solo exhibition at Galerie She BAM! Laetitia Gorsy, Leipzig.
Anna Leonhardt studied painting and graphic art at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK) from 2002–2008, completing her education with postgraduate training with Ralf Kerbach until 2010.
-
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.
-
Glückliche Tage
32€ Add to cartWe see in contrasts. Freedom from pain follows pain, and felicity is the more radiant after a period of misfortune. Happiness, that is to say, displaces unhappiness and is perhaps its recompense; what is certain is that, as antonyms, they are (at least in this world) inconceivable without each other. The contrast they form also underlies the tensions inherent in the works in this catalogue. Some take us straight from the pinnacle of happiness down into the abyss, while in others the gradients of ascent or descent are so gentle that no culmination is perceptible. What all oeuvres gathered in the book have in common is that they furnish the human being, a social creature, with an experience of resonance. Happiness and unhappiness reverberate between the art and the beholders, leaving, in the best case, a lasting impression. Opening the catalogue—a metaphor for the human condition materialized in paper—one overhears this serenely melancholy echo of the works.
Artists: Rui Chafes, Tamara Eckhardt, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Barbara Hammer, Carsten Höller, Ken Lum, Johanna von Monkiewitsch, Yoko Ono, Heike Weber, Stefan Wissel
With contributions by: Yevgenia Belorusets, Nell Sophie Bender, Elias Bendfeldt, Laura Berestecki, Annabella Ernst, Annika Gaeth, Hristina Georgieva, Markus Heinzelmann, Malwin Kraßnigg, Max Florian Kühlem, Natascha Laurier, Martin Middeke, Navaz Mirhosseini, Vanessa Joan Müller, Julia Neumann, Martin Paul, Caroline Planert, Maike Prause, Arne Rautenberg, Kira Sophie Röller, Gina Marie Schwenzfeier
-
Katja Aufleger
Schwindelerregende Höhen30€ Add to cartOn a Razor’s Edge: Evanescent Moments
Katja Aufleger’s (b. Oldenburg, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) works bring instants of suspense and uncertainty into focus in a variety of aesthetic forms. Their nuclei are typically everyday phenomena and physical models, which she combines with a range of concepts from cultural history and psychology. The publication presents several series, some of which capture explosive tensions. Among them are photographs of homemade Molotov cocktails for which the artist set perfume flacons on fire, making this most recent series a probing exploration of the potentials of material aesthetics and emotion. With an introductory essay by Julia Katharina Thiemann.
Katja Aufleger studied visual art the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK), where Andreas Slominski, Matt Mullican, and Michael Diers were her teachers.
-
SERIES
Prints from Warhol to Wool40€ Add to cartA Creative Strategy and Technique of Modernism
Series are open systems, telling stories, toying with rhythms, permitting variations, and documenting creative processes. Andy Warhol’s famous silkscreen prints made the serial iteration of images his trademark stratagem. In the mid-1960s, Pop Art and Fluxus had established the fine art print as a medium in which seminal work was being done. New graphic techniques such as serigraphy and offset printing, used with aggressive colors and punchy motifs, not only allowed for large numbers of copies, they also opened the door to an unprecedented engagement with the imagery of popular print and advertising media. Opening with an inquiry into how serial fine art prints are made, the book presents and contextualizes the explosive visual and political energy of graphic series. The numerous illustrations and essays are rounded out by an interview with Thomas Schütte and Ellen Sturm.
With works by Josef Albers, Joseph Beuys, Ulla von Brandenburg, John Cage, Helen Cammock, Nina Canell, Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Donald Judd, Ronald B. Kitaj, Maria Lassnig, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Stefan Marx, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Fred Sandback, Nora Schultz, Thomas Schütte, Dasha Shishkin, Frank Stella, Rosemarie Trockel, Victor Vasarely, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Corinne Wasmuht, Emmett Williams, Christopher Wool, and others.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur14€ Add to cartThe Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
-
“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 -
Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst38€ Add to cartContemporary Visual Communication in a Historic Weaving Technique
Margret Eicher’s (b. Viersen, Germany, 1955; lives and works in Berlin) large-format tapestries combine the baroque form of the woven picture with familiar motifs excerpted from contemporary media images. She digitizes her sources and then assembles them in painstaking editing work on the computer. The resulting ‘media tapestries’ occupy the interface between the traditional work of art as a physical object and the electronic noise of the digital realm: two worlds that at first glance would seem to be incompatible yet find themselves in harmonious union in Eicher’s art. In Göttliche Liebe (Divine Love), for example, Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns meets a kissing gay couple from a pro-tolerance campaign in Berlin, while Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is sampled together with a subway station in Frankfurt. In conceptual art production, the creative idea is central and its realization becomes secondary; in a final twist, Lob der Malkunst (Praise of Painting) elects this practice as its artistic lodestar. Eicher installs the painter Martin Kippenberger in the interior of Berlin’s Paris Bar, where he poses as a dandy and presides over a clash between the different tendencies in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
-
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.