






Konkrete Progressionen
François Morellet & Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr & Hartmut Böhm
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Holger Kube Ventura |
Author(s) | Holger Kube Ventura |
Design | Thomas Schmid |
Size | 19 x 21 cm |
Cover | Softcover |
Pages | 144 |
Illustrations | 70 |
Language(s) | German |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-138-2 |
Thanks 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.
More books
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (GERMAN)28€ Add to cartThe sculptor and object artist Liam Gillick (b. Aylesbury, UK, 1964; lives and works in New York) has created an intervention titled Filtered Time for the historic galleries of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Projections of light and color and acoustic effects condense six thousand years of cultural history into an immersive spatial experience. Gillick initiates a conversation between the iconic Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, the monumental sculptures of Tell Halaf, and other exhibits, engendering new layers of meaning across all historical periods. The first joint project of the Vorderasiatisches Museum and the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart makes for a singular visual and sensory experience. Designed by the artist himself, the publication not only documents the richly colorful production, but also provides insight into the eventful history of the museum, which is approaching its centennial.
Liam Gillick studied at the Hertfordshire College of Art in 1983–1984 and at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1984 until 1987. Gillick is a prolific published writer as well, producing essays, reviews, fiction, and theatrical scenarios.
-
Antonia Hirsch
Phenomenal Fracture24€ Add to cartIn a probing engagement with the screen, an omnipresent object in contemporary life, Antonia Hirsch charts the gulf between the digital and the analog, the two spheres of which our perceived reality is composed. In provocative installations and objects, the artist conceives the distinctions between screen, mirror, and blade as less than sharply defined. Her works show rigidly geometric shapes made of hard and shimmering glass and steel; they encounter eerily somatic and perishable-looking cardboard or soft foamed-plastic components that recall the bodies they perhaps once served. Reflective surfaces mirror our gaze, but the less classy materials, too, await recognition by the beholder’s body. The book accompanies Hirsch’s solo exhibition Phenomenal Fracture at Kunsthalle Lingen; photographs and writings convey extensive and sustained impressions that run the gamut from the uncanny to the darkly humorous.
-
Beate Höing
It’s all about Love28€ Add to cartRecollections—What remains?
The painter and ceramist-sculptor Beate Höing (b. 1966, lives and works in Coesfeld and Münster) creates works of art whose aesthetic is deeply informed by the ornamentation and manual techniques of folk art. Drawing inspiration for her motifs from souvenir culture, but also from fairy tales and myths, she unfurls her burgeoning imagination in works defined by an unmistakable style and a singular allure. Poetic pictures and sculptures deftly toy with the conventions of kitsch and forms of traditional craftsmanship. Tangible objects, associations, and recollections coalesce in an ambivalent play between reality and fiction in which only a fine line separates dream from nightmare, congeniality from alarm.
The lavishly illustrated monograph presents a comprehensive survey of the artist’s output between 2011 and 2021.
-
Spaces Embodied (ENGLISH)
Draiflessen Collection32€ Add to cartWe live in spaces that we shape in accordance with our own ideas. Our everyday lives leave traces in them that speak to our habits. Spaces promise shelter and belonging, but they can also instill a sense of constraint. We grow into the spaces we inhabit—and they in turn become expressions of our personalities. Conversely, spaces, depending on their architecture and location, inform our existence. RÄUME HAUTNAH gathers works of art that, rather than conceiving of the human sphere and the spatial domain as separate, comprehend them in their complex entanglements: in bodily experience, emotional dependency, or the instinctive need for protection. An essay by Olesja Nein, the project’s curator, offers an introduction to the exhibition and takes the reader on a tour, describing each artist’s space of activity and supplying helpful information. Philipp Zitzlsperger, meanwhile, zooms in on a key aspect of the art in the exhibition, the imprint as an artistic technique with a distinctive aura, and illuminates its origins and significance since the dawn of modernism.
Artists: Absalon, Shannon Bool, Heidi Bucher, Eileen Gray, Do Ho Suh, Mary Mattingly, Tracey Snelling, Francesca Woodman
-
Olaf Breuning
Paintings37€ Add to cartThe multimedia artist Olaf Breuning (b. Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970; lives and works in Upstate New York) has built a multifaceted oeuvre in installation art, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and performance that questions contemporary reality. In a recent series of paintings, he playfully grapples with pressing concerns such as global warming. Like his earlier work, the new ensemble manifests his unorthodox approach. Breuning devised a unique painterly technique involving large-format wooden stamps with which he presses paint onto the canvas. The result is unconventional and fresh.
The publication—the first book dedicated exclusively to Breuning’s paintings—presents two dozen pictures as well documentation of the production process in the form of wooden stamps and sculptures. A dialogue between Katharina Beisiegel, director of the Kirchner Museum, Davos, and Gianni Jetzer, designated director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, delves into parallels and differences between the oeuvres of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Olaf Breuning.
Breuning trained as a photographer in Winterthur from 1988 until 1993 and completed a master class in photography from 1992 until 1995. In 1995–1996, he was enrolled in a postgraduate program at today’s Zurich University of the Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne. He participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has had work in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthalle Zürich; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
-
G. I. Widmann
Retrospektive24€ Add to cartA Tribute to the 100th Birthday. One of the Important Figurative Positions of the Young Federal Republic of Germany
She was an unusual painter who sought to hide her gender behind a pseudonym, while at the same time addressing her own circumstances as an independent artist and single mother in her large-format canvases. Gudrun Irene Widmann (b. 1919, Reutlingen; d. 2011, Reutlingen) created an oeuvre that lays claim to being one of the most important figurative positions of the 1950s and ’60s. This retrospective volume pays testimony to a strong personality and sheds light not only on her self-image as an artist but also on the influences of society and personal contexts — representative of the situation of female artists in general.
Gudrun Irene Widmann studied at the academies in Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, and Vienna during the Second World War. She worked in her own studio in her hometown of Reutlingen until her death.
-
Roland Schappert
Coronasehnsucht14€ Add to cartThe coronavirus pandemic hit us in a time of disparate foci of attention. A fundamental lack of comprehension and hate speech contrast sharply with an unspoken consonance of ideas as well as feelings. What do reality, statistics, love, and yearnings do to us? They are playing a game with reality, sans fiction. Relationships sustain our lives. What was unmistakable before is now manifest, with stark certainty. Are we ready for loving dissension? Can we bear to think only as far ahead as we can see? How do our emotions answer these questions, and how does our intellect? The Cologne visual artist and writer Roland Schappert retraces his personal voyage through this sun-kissed rain-drenched time. The book is a diary-like tour de force of digital amorous overtures, an attempt to explain the world of art via WhatsApp, and the real challenges of life as a single artist in a major German city in precarious circumstances.
-
Rainer Jacob
justICE30€ Add to cartRainer Jacob (b. Jena, 1970; lives and works in Leipzig) has anonymously installed objects made of ice in public settings in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, and Budapest since 2013. He then allows them to dematerialize and records the process in photographs. Radiators, wall outlets, QR codes, and the Duchampian pissoir are among his recurrent motifs. The impermanence of the ice objects builds bridges to street art, Fluxus, and action art. Critical observations on the unequal distribution of resources and political power in contemporary society, his works reflect on our perceptions and question the idea of originality in art while also probing the outer limits of sculpture.
The publication showcases the ice objects of the past ten years, embedding them in a decade that has marked a sea change in the life of humankind: JustICE captures an artist’s distinctive perspective on societal processes.
- Release February 2026
Tim David Trillsam
Willkommen im Panoptikum38€ Add to cartWith his idiosyncratic figurative bronze sculptures Tim David Trillsam (born 1985 in the Swabian Alb) has hit a nerve. The artist’s “self memorials” ask the viewer to remember the transience and illusion of this very self. Although Trillsam employs a loaded material that evokes many great sculptors before him, his own sculptures resist the past. His figures are tangibly protagonist of the present and they provoke with their exaggerated sensuality, twisted bodies, and oversized hands and feet. “The oversizing is programmatic. As is the skeptical approach to the human species. Trillsam proceeds as a thoughtful questioner with doubt yet also irritation,” writes Dorothee Baer-Bogenschütze. Her in-depth art-historical analysis is part of this forthcoming book about Trillsam’s oeuvre since 2012.
-
Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia.
-
Roland Schappert & Wolfgang Ullrich
Aktualitätsjetzt16€ Add to cartPhilistinism, climate change, legitimation discourses—in a tour de force sustained by profound knowledge of the phenomena in question, AKTUALITÄTSJETZT blazes trails through the jungle of contemporary art and its current debates. Over the course of two years, the art scholar and author Wolfgang Ullrich initiated 14 dialogues on Schappert’s word paintings, murals, and interventions. Their distinctive formal features and conceptual and substantial dimensions inspired illuminating conversations that range far beyond the specific works to explore today’s art world and questions of the philosophy of art and the sociology of culture. The best volume of dialogues on art since David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.
-
Sam Falls
After Life45€ Add to cartSam Falls (b. San Diego, 1984; lives and works in New York) delegates the authorship of his works to the phenomena of nature. Applying water-reactive dry pigments or plant parts to support media like canvas, aluminum, or tiles and then exposing them to the effects of sun, rain, and wind at selected sites for extended periods, he deliberately integrates the agency of chance into his art. The playful yet conceptually rigorous process is a metaphor for the impermanence of all bodily existence. Falls’s symbiotic work with nature and its elements evinces references to the technique of the photogram as well as land art. Melding diverse media—photography, sculpture, and painting—he bridges the gulf between artist, object, and beholder.
Sam Falls studied at Reed College in Portland, Maine, and at the International Center of Photography Bard in New York. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Mori Museum, Tokyo, and Frankfurter Kunstverein.
- Out of stock
Kurt Weidemann
Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt49,95€ Read moreSignierte Sonderauflage
Kurt Weidemanns Ansichten über Schrift und Typografie ist das beeindruckende Ergebnis eines über Jahrzehnte erlebten und reflektierten Berufslebens als Schriftsetzer, Typograf, Autor, Lehrer und Berater. Das Buch schildert die persönlichen, philosophischen und fachlichen Ansichten seines Metiers.
-
Horst Keinig
Scoop29€ Add to cartAn Artist Book Setting New Visual Processes in Motion
Around the year 2009, Horst Keining (b. 1949, Hattingen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) began to create blurred contours with the help of a small spray gun used without stencil. Up to four partially superimposed pictorial planes result in the oscillation and almost three-dimensional pulsation of the pictorial space. In interplay with a contrasting juxtaposition of strongly contoured images, his works convey a completely new visual experience. Since the resulting “blur effect” shrinks due to the reduction, this artist book places an essential accent on the reproduction of image details in their original size, followed by a full image of the picture.
-
Toni Mauersberg
Entre Nous28€ Add to cartToni Mauersberg (b. Hannover, 1989; lives and works in Berlin) is interested in the different layers of a picture’s signification: there is, in the first instance, what it depicts; then the larger tradition in which it is grounded; and finally, the conditions of its genesis. She employs a range of painterly strategies and techniques to uncover the potentials of paintings as a medium of understanding, insight, and storytelling. The question that animates her art is how it is possible, in this post-religious, post-rational, and post-individual age, to be one’s own person. In her most recent series, Pas de Deux, Mauersberg investigates the complex visual language of abstract painting, which originated in part in a quest for new ways of representing spirituality and emancipation. Combining nonrepresentational pictures with portraits, she draws attention to how both are products of “making,” composed of nothing but color, while enlarging their interpretative ambits. The dialogue between the paintings is meant to help the beholders chart their own course as they unlock what appear to be hidden laws encoded in pictures.
Toni Mauersberg studied Jewish studies at Freie Universität Berlin in 2008–2012 and fine arts with Leiko Ikemura at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009. In 2017, she was Michael Müller’s master student.
-
Ugo Rondinone
nuns + monks20€ Add to cartContemplation and Communion with the World
Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is a conceptual and installation artist whose oeuvre spans abstract painting, photography, and sculpture. Nature is where he has long found inspiration, regeneration, and comfort: “In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another.” Rondinone’s works oscillate between the extremes of interiority and engagement with the wider world; stone is often present in his art as a recurrent material and symbol. The sculptures in the series nuns + monks originated as limestone models; the artist made three-dimensional scans and then cast the works in bronze. As a reflection of the inner self in the outside world, the friable mineral contrasts with the solidity of the bronze; the natural genesis of the millennia-old stones with the presence of the polychrome casts in the here and now. nuns + monks attest to a visibility while also giving the impression of flinching from the gazes to which they expose themselves.
Ugo Rondinone studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His work has been presented at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, the Swiss National Museum, Zurich, MoMA/PS1, New York, and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, among others.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.