Kraftwerk
Innovation durch Transformation
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Studio 23, Ulrich Dietz, Ingrid Hertfelder and trend factory, Thomas Wenger, Mike Wutta |
| Author(s) | Katharina Stolz, Ruth van Doornik |
| Design | remède, Florian Hägele |
| Size | 30 x 30 cm |
| Cover | Linen hardcover |
| Pages | 120 |
| Illustrations | 140 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-181-8 |
The power plant in Rottweil, built in 1915 by the architect Paul Bonatz, looks back on a rich and interesting history: until 1976, it provided power to a gunpowder factory and, later, to a rayon manufacturer and at times also to the city of Rottweil. The façade design, the imposing perron leading up to the main entrance, and the tall chimneys still stand as testament to the modernist industrial structure’s erstwhile significance. Twenty years after the plant was taken out of service, the entrepreneurs Thomas Wenger and Mike Wutta with their event agency trend factory took over the dilapidated building with the surrounding premises and restored it, taking care to preserve its architectonic elements and the most important technical installations. (In the course of fifteen years, around 60,000 square feet of floorspace were reopened, with a special emphasis on the distinctive blend of morbid charm and contemporary design.) The power plant now serves the company as its headquarters and, more importantly, as a cutting-edge venue for concerts, congresses, and corporate events that has attracted clients and visitors from all over Baden-Württemberg and beyond.
More books
-
Larissa Kikol
Neue abstrakte Malerei26€ Add to cartAbstract painting has reinvented itself: rid of political and ideological burdens, it now stands for pure creative autonomy. From the Abstract Expressionism of the postwar era to today’s expansive ease—in essays and conversations, Larissa Kikol sheds light on how this art form broke free of the narratives that attended its emergence and performed a “great reset.” From the seminal innovations of Katharina Grosse or Albert Oehlen and radically subjectivist approaches in Cecily Brown or André Butzer to cutting-edge tendencies like Dirty Minimalism and Post Vandalism, the book presents thrilling insights into a painting that puts emotion, color, and shapes center stage. An inspiring look at the renaissance of abstract art in the 21st century and a must-have reference work for all art lovers.
Artists: Frederic Anderson, Karla Black, Frank Bowling, Andreas Breunig, Jenny Brosinski, Cecily Brown, André Butzer, Diamonds Crew, Willehad Eilers, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Antwan Horfee, Aneta Kajzer, Joan Mitchell, Michael Müller, Oscar Murillo, NEU, NUG, Albert Oehlen, David Ostrowski, Over, Daisy Parris, Marco Pariani, Jackson Pollock, Christopher Wool
-
João Penalva
The Asian Books40€ Add to cartThe First Survey on the Exceptional Artist Books of João Penalva
Since 2007 João Penalva (b. 1949, Lissabon; lives and works in London) has exhibited large format unbound books, printed with archival inks on fine art paper, displayed on tables with chairs, to be handled freely. Each one is published in an edition of three and one artist’s proof. Those whose content relate to Asia, whether factually or fictionally, are collected here for the first time: Taipei Story, 2007; Portraits: Machines and Kabuki Wigs, 2009; The Toshiba Book of Happiness, 2009; Hello? Are you there?, 2009; Michio Harada, 2015; Boro, 2017.
João Penalva studied Fine Art at the Chelsea School of Art in London. His works have been shown in manifold international exhibitions. Penalva represented Portugal 2001 at the Venice Biennale and 1996 at the São Paulo Biennale.
-
Laura Schawelka
Double Issues24€ Add to cartSales Spaces without Merchandise
In her installations, Laura Schawelka (b. 1988, Munich; lives and works in Berlin) makes use of photography, video, and sculpture in a multilayered dialogue. In her latest works, the artist focuses on the role of photography in the development of modern consumer society. What does it mean if goods are only communicated through other goods, such as computers, cell phones, tablets? If this withholding of the genuine object is precisely what prompts the desire for it? The artist creates sales spaces without merchandise, in which images, photographs, and videos have replaced consumer goods of any kind.
Laura Schawelka studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main as a student of Tobias Rehberger master-class. In 2015, she was awarded the Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and in 2017 she moved to Paris as the recipient of a studio bursary of Hessische Kulturstiftung.
- Release November 2025
ELASTE
1980 – 198649€ Add to cartThe story of ELASTE is the story of a movement – that of the New Wave generation in West Germany. Founded in 1980 in Hanover, the magazine was a beacon of cultural revolt and the first glossy indie magazine of the Federal Republic: self-published, a statement somewhere between pop avant-garde, subversion, and a sharp sense of style. Among those who shaped the look and spirit of the magazine were Jon Savage, Ellen von Unwerth, and Diedrich Diederichsen. No other magazine operated at the intersection of music, fashion, and society quite like ELASTE — with headliners such as Warhol, The Rolling Stones, and Kraftwerk. This book by the magazine’s editors Thomas Elsner and Michael Reinboth, looks back — at the pioneering spirit, the minds, and the stories behind the magazine.
- Release July 2023
Martha Rosler
32€ Add to cartThe American conceptual artist and pioneer of critical feminism Martha Rosler (b. 1943 in Brooklyn, NY, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) has influenced numerous contemporary artists with the radicalism of her artistic position. Rosler’s work is always political and examines questions of power and violence, the ideals of beauty and their demolition, and the purported contrasts between war and consumption. For her sociocritical collages and videos, Rosler uses found pictorial material that has already been published. The artist delights in working with photos from public sources like magazines and newspapers, which she processes and arranges in new contexts in order to visualize inequality and protest. Following on from Rosler’s iconic series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (ca. 1967–1972), at the heart of the publication lies the confrontation with warlike disputes as conveyed in the media, together with the associated dissonance between the private and the political.
Martha Rosler received a Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1965 and a Master of Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 1985. In 1975 she began to write reviews for Artforum and other art magazines. She teaches at School of Arts of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
- temporarily not available
CLARA MOSCH
and early art events in the GDRRead moreThe legendary producer-run gallery Clara Mosch and the artists’ group of the same title that gathered around it were founded in Karl-Marx-Stadt (today’s Chemnitz) in 1977 and existed until 1982. The catchy name was an acronym of the contributors’ last names: CLA = Carlfriedrich Claus, RA = Thomas Ranft and Dagmar Ranft-Schinke, MO = Michael Morgner, SCH = Gregor-Torsten Schade. As the founders of the first producers’ gallery in the GDR and creators of diverse oeuvres, the group’s artists rank among the foremost exponents of avant-garde art in East Germany. The book presents works of art, limited editions, and posters as well as photographs from the Ralf-Rainer Wasse archive in the collections of the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg. One thematic focus is on Clara Mosch’s land-art happenings and plein-air pieces. The unconventional actions attest to the group’s stated objective of building greater awareness of the ongoing devastation of the local environment. Forty years after the fact, Clara Mosch’s work has lost none of its relevance and urgency.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
Gabriele Basch
fortuna24€ Add to cartPaper and Foil Cut‑Outs in an Innovative Language of Forms: An Overview of the Works of Gabriele Basch from 2008 to 2019
Since the 1990s, Gabriele Basch (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) has been working with cut-outs and translating the age-old tradition of silhouettes into an idiosyncratic and innovative language of forms. The artist interweaves creation and destruction, planning and chance into a complex, multi-layered reality and makes views into the spatial environment an integral part of her work. In her paper and foil cut-outs, foreground and background, materiality and void combine to form a whole that oscillates between painting and drawing, as well as between urban structures and hints of the biomorphic – in delicate color gradients, swirling structures, spontaneous gestures, and stenciled surfaces. The generously illustrated monograph offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work from 2008 to 2019.
-
Konkrete Progressionen
François Morellet & Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr & Hartmut Böhm15€ Add to cartThanks to a generous donor, the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret welcomed a number of outstanding works to its collection in 2022. Titled Konkrete Progressionen, the first exhibition to showcase a selection from the gift features four internationally renowned artists whose works are derived from mathematical or geometric procedures: the concrete systematists Hartmut Böhm (1938–2021) and François Morellet (1926–2016) and the pioneers of computer-generated art Manfred Mohr (1938–) and Vera Molnar (1924–).
The book documents the serial paintings, drawings, collages, wall objects, and monumental installations and environments of steel beams or concrete blocks. The works play concrete games with the beholder’s ability to recognize patterns in binary contrasts or layered grids. They show sine waves, vector series, hypercubes, and markings derived from the circular constant π or the Fibonacci sequence—and in each instance demonstrate primarily how the basis of calculation takes on a life of its own.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen runs until April 14, 2024.
- Out of stock
Supernatural
Sculptural Visions of the BodyRead moreThe future of human corporeality in the Anthropocene era
Given the technological development in biogenetics, humans will be able to make existential modifications to all living things, Nature, the animal world and human likenesses in future. What will bodies of the future look like? Who or what will we be? Supernatural offers us some answers in its hyperrealistic and realistic sculptures. These visionary works not only exemplify the impact of the digital revolution and genetic engineering on “posthumans” and the environment, but also illustrate, including in their own hybrid creations, how increasingly blurred the line between nature and culture is now becoming. Technological innovations are also having more and more effects on trends in the latest hyperrealistic sculptures. In using 3D printing to perfect their creation processes and pushing sculptural boundaries to encompass robotics and synthetic biology, artists are opening the door to new design possibilities in artefact, biology and technology for themselves as well.
The book presents works by Anne Carnein, Isa Genzken, Glaser/Kunz, Thomas Grünfeld, Sam Jinks, Josh Kline, Krištof Kintera, Reiner Maria Matysik, Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, Fabien Mérelle, Patricia Piccinini amongst others.
- 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.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe Pop Artist as Master of Watercolor Painting
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is a master of the watercolor. Themes and motifs that also determine the painterly work gain a special expressiveness here: bizarre landscapes and opulent blossoms, fantastic celestial bodies and colorful abstractions. This opulent volume presents this part of Bengston’s oeuvre for the first time in great breadth with roughly 400 works. They demonstrate the skill of an artist who has brought watercolor to extreme precision and enriched it with numerous new aspects.
Billy Al Bengston attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. His works can be found in outstanding permanent collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Cudelice Brazelton IV
Mortal Surface35€ Add to cartCudelice Brazelton IV’s works are magnets. He uses them to glean what he finds in the urban landscape, in the street, in factories and studios: fabric, leather, metal, cardboard, and all sorts of implements. He arranges these materials and things atop one another and side by side in collages, assemblages, and sculptures, staging encounters also between the contexts in which they originated and what he calls their “undercurrents,” their subtexts. Such frames of reference, including that of the exhibition space, play a key role in his art, an aspect he will occasionally engage quite explicitly, creating site-specific works for some settings. This makes the space the context and a part of the piece, sometimes physically so, as when Brazelton works directly on the walls. The recent works gathered in this catalogue were displayed in a former railcar repair workshop. It is hard to imagine a more industrial, “metallic” environment. There, as between the covers of this catalogue, Brazelton’s works appear to their fullest advantage, becoming veritable magnets drawing the gaze.
-
Martin Noël
paintprintpaint35€ Add to cartA Comprehensive Overview on the tenth Anniversary of the Death of Martin Noël
Martin Noël (b. 1956, Berlin; d. 2010, Bonn) was a German painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He was one of the formative innovators of the long-neglected techniques of linocut and woodcut. With his large-format works on paper, he created a position for himself in contemporary art that is as much respected as it is independent. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the artist’s death, this volume presents a comprehensive overview of his work from the mid-1980s to the last year of his life in 2010. Thirty-five exceptional works document Noël’s path from his early years as a painter, via the middle phase marked by printing blocks, linocuts and woodcuts, up to his late paintings.
Martin Noël studied Graphics and Painting at the Rheinische Fachhochschule Köln, Cologne. His works are included in, among others, the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, and the collection of the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
-
Simone Demandt
Movers / Beweger38€ Add to cartMotorways are Europe’s lifelines. The products we buy every day arrive on supermarket shelves after traveling along these arteries on the backs of thousands of trucks steered by hard-working drivers. Glancing up into the cabs of their hulking vehicles, we can just barely make out their heads sticking up above the steering wheels. In this overdue volume, Simone Demandt lets us see more of the heroes of the road who confidently posed for her camera. The pictures demonstrate Demandt’s knack for discovering “the intimate in the anonymous and the narrative element in the matter-of-factly” (Matthias Winzen). She has condensed the truckdrivers’ lifeworld into documentary black-and-white shots in which she shows these people as whole persons and individuals—very different from how we perceive them when they’re in the next lane. Movers lets us peek into the cabs through Demandt’s nonjudgmental lens, broadening our horizons hardly less than travelling would and helping us overcome our prejudices about teamsters. If you’ve always wanted to know whom we really have to thank for those never-empty supermarket shelves, you should not miss out on this book.
-
Konrad Mühe
Guide38€ Add to cartAn Artist’s Book as an “Optical Illusion”
Konrad Mühe’s (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany, 1982; lives and works in Berlin) works interrogate the construction of our identities by uncovering the technological and media apparatuses that sustain it and confronting it with the autonomous lives of objects. Their basic formal principle is the installation hybridizing sculpture and digital moving image, with a particular focus on the projector and the interaction of pedestal or suspension and projection screen. Where the classical black box in the movie theater or exhibition venue seeks to conceal the technical equipment in favor of an immersive visual experience, Mühe brings it to the fore and sets it out in the gallery space as sculpture and installation. Yet his works also undercut the conventional display regime in the white cube: the process of projection emerges as the true creative medium and subject. This book acts as a descriptive illustrated Guide to Mühe’s projects.
Konrad Mühe was Hito Steyerl’s master student and trained at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. His works have been featured at numerous film festivals including the 61st Berlinale and in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.
