






Leszek Skurski
Catalogue raisonné Vol. 1: Works from 1990–2024
![]() | |
---|---|
Author(s) | Mark Gisbourne |
Design | allcreativ studio |
Size | 24 x 27 cm |
Cover | Hardcover with open spine |
Pages | 380 |
Illustrations | |
Language(s) | German, English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-152-8 |
Leszek 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.
More books
-
Jan Zöller
10€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) art has the aura of a jerry-rigged, cosmic, comedic theater. Flames gutter, pant legs and elbows dance, run, and go up in fire. Wells, basins, and tubs are central motifs, symbolizing communal settings, but also the circulation of vital energies, of human and economic interconnections. Zöller’s paintings take fractured or antiquated systems, today’s art world among them, and reforge them into something new. In painting, he reflects on what being an artist means to him, driven by an interest less in a dialogue with art history or other contemporary painters than in the psychosocial relationships and conditions that inform his work. His paintings, sculptures, and installations probe the discrepancy between economic production and the spiritual and magical dimension of art.
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
Special Edition60€ Add to cartSPECIAL EDITION in clothbound slipcase
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
-
Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
-
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.
-
Cornelia Baltes
Dingbats44€ Add to cartCornelia Baltes’s (b. Mönchengladbach, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) paintings and installation straddle the divide between abstraction and figuration. Her pictures are inspired by observations of mundane details—apparel, body parts, or facial expressions—that she pares down to simple lines and shapes. Rendered in vibrant colors and gestural fields, they hint at a narrative in the pictorial space. Baltes works with steadily modulated color gradients, on which she places thick and assertive marks. She often interrogates the painted picture’s function, by painting on the wall beyond the rectangle of the canvas, by hanging a picture in the middle of the room as an object in its own right or laying it out on the floor. Her works blend Pop Art and minimalism with an intensity and dynamic energy—and, sometimes, unmistakable flashes of humor—that cannot fail to captivate the beholder.
This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s oeuvre.
Cornelia Baltes studied at Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2000–2003 and at Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, in 2003–2006, before rounding out her education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2009–2011.
-
Fabian Treiber
For a While Longer34€ Add to cartUnstable Prototypes of a Reality We Know
Fabian Treiber’s (b. Ludwigsburg, 1986; lives and works in Stuttgart) paintings show what appear to be interiors while interrogating subjective projections and our perceptions of reality. The artificial spaces bear witness to human existence even though there are no people to be seen. In his still lifes, Treiber negotiates classical questions of painting: form and structure, color and composition, representation of space and organization of the surface. His paintings primarily implement formal rather than narrative decisions. This lets the artist provoke a deliberate breach in which the ostensibly fallacious emerges as the essential quality of painting—the effect is that of works that seem somehow off but are actually just right.
Fabian Treiber studied painting and intermedia design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (ABK Stuttgart). His works have won him a Karl Schmidt Rottluff Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the 2021 Hans Purrmann Grand Prize. He has had numerous solo shows, including at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; and Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Cologne; and contributed to group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel—Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. For a while longer is published on occasion of his first solo exhibition at Haverkampf Galerie.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (ENGLISH)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.
-
Gregor Hildebrandt
A Blink of an Eye and the Years are Behind us48€ Add to cartFor the past two decades, Gregor Hildebrandt (b. Bad Homburg, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) has transformed analog audiotapes, cassettes, and records into collages, sculptures, panel paintings, and installations. Melding visual art with music, he has charted a complex creative vision crossing boundaries of medium and genre that he continually refines. Before using a tape, he records selected music—typically a single song—on it, whose lyrics he quotes in the work’s title. The artist’s output draws on his personal repertoire of bands that share a romantic narrative of loneliness and a melancholy keynote. The same attitude toward life is reflected in Hildebrandt’s work. The book offers insight into all periods of the artist’s oeuvre and is rounded out by archival materials from Hildebrandt’s studio, his project space Grzegorzki Shows, and the music label Grzegorzki Records that illustrate his creative process.
Gregor Hildebrandt studied at Kunsthochschule Mainz from 1995 until 1999 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1999 until 2002. He was a fellow of the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice in 2003 and worked in Vienna on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2005–06. He has been professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2015.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Martin Noël
The Retrospective38€ Add to cartThe Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut
The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.
Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
-
Plastique Fantastique
A Journey through an ephemeral Realm32€ Add to cartIn the wake of Frank Lloyd Wright’s pioneering work, visionary architects including Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller established bubbles as a recognized artistic and architectonic form. The Berlin-based art duo Plastique Fantastique (Marco Canevacci and Yena Young) go one step further and harness them as a medium of temporary social interactions. The philosopher Vilém Flusser conceived of space in the digital universe as a network of relational settings in which humans can be in multiple places at one, as a “bubble that extends into the future.” Plastique Fantastique transform our urban and rural environments into laboratories for such spaces in which urgent social, political, and aesthetic questions are negotiated. Oversized translucent bubbles, traffic islands ringed by diaphanous tubes, giant lifebelts, air-filled sausages that the audience at a Peaches concert pass over their heads: Plastique Fantastique’s installations fuse art, performance, people, and architecture in a multisensory experience that blurs the conventional boundaries of art and focuses our attention on the larger bubble in which human existence is contained. Richly illustrated with exceptional photographs, this monograph is the first to document a representative selection from the duo’s projects of the past two decades.
-
Lars Breuer
The Love of the Gods32€ Add to cartThe art of Lars Breuer (b. Aachen, 1974; lives and works in Düsseldorf and Cologne) is set apart by its broad spectrum of systems of reference. In his large-format installations, text-based works in his own typography draw connections to literature and art history. They are complemented by figurative and abstract paintings and photographs.
In The Love of the Gods, Breuer presents 104 C-prints of photographs for which he pointed the camera’s lens into the barrels of disused rifles, pistoles, revolvers, and cannons. The pictures were taken on the artist’s travels to Athens, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Leverkusen, Ingolstadt, Melbourne, New York, Oslo, and Phnom Penh, in museums, palaces, and public squares. Breuer’s conceptual and meticulously sober-minded approach yields almost abstract compositions showing nothing but the round muzzles and the dark interiors of the weapons on a deep-black ground. We see only a ring-shaped ornament until it dawns on us that it is part of a lethal implement. A cruel constant of human existence stares us in the face: humans behind these weapons were perpetrators, humans in front of these weapons were victims. Lars Breuer’s turn the spotlight on what the aura of the ornaments conceals: they have wrought death.
-
Susanne Rottenbacher
Radiationen40€ Add to cartIn expansive compositions in light, Susanne Rottenbacher (b. Göttingen, 1969; lives and works in Berlin) visualizes the fire of life in its timebound and fluid dimension. Plotinus called fire the “spiritual potency of beauty.” Pursuing a similar vision, Rottenbacher’s works orchestrate light as energy in space. To this end, the artist, who studied light and stage design in the United States and the United Kingdom, creates weightless luminous choreographies realized in colorful LED technology in combination with acrylic glass as a translucent vehicle of form. The results are installations in three dimensions that are deeply silent yet unfold in a magical ecstasy of light.
In Christian sacred architecture, light has been deployed and perceived since the Middle Ages as the aesthetic equivalent of the divine mind’s lucidity. The history of light art, by contrast, is much younger, going back to the years after the First World War. Having built her creative practice over the past fifteen years, Rottenbacher not only continues a century-old tradition of light art in Europe and the U.S.; her works also anticipate a future in which humanity will have room for feelings no less than for scientific knowledge.
-
Logan T. Sibrel
But I’m Different50€ Add to cartLogan T. Sibrel’s (born 1986 in Jasper, IN, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) paintings and drawings depict moments of great joy and beauty, but also fear, sadness, desire and aggression. Frequently only part of the mostly male figures is depicted. Sibrel’s cropping can feel simultaneously intimate and alienating—fragmentary stories are told that touch you through their authenticity and vulnerability. Sibrel’s artistic maneuvers include overlapping, shifted perspectives, and text fragments that appear like snippets of overheard conversations and thus create a collage effect.
This book is the artist’s first comprehensive publication with works from the last twenty months. While the first part presents the artist’s paintings, the second part presents his drawings with the edges of the backing paper digitally removed so that it looks as if the images were drawn directly into the book.
Logan T. Sibrel completed his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington in 2009 and his master’s degree at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2011. His most recent solo exhibitions include In Another Life and Galerie Thomas Fuchs (Stuttgart, DE) and Brake For Your Sweetheart at Auxier Kline (New York, NY).
-
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.
-
Matthew Davis
Kustodiev28€ Add to cartAn Expressive Instant in Painting
The art of Matthew Davis (b. 1969, Colchester, UK; lives and works in Berlin) operates between the micro and macro dimensions, between control and chance. Working with extraordinary precision, the artist applies drops of synthetic resin varnishes and enamel paints to canvases laid flat. The artist’s book Kustodiev showcases a recent innovative turn in Davis’s output, whose latest works were inspired by the lusciously colorful pictures of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev (1878–1927). Kustodiev was manufactured using offset presses and Office Offset, a largely forgotten reproduction process based on miniature offset printing machines. The publication is released in a limited edition of 250 copies.
Matthew Davis studied at the Camberwell College of Arts, London, and the Norwich School of Art and Design. His work has been shown at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven; and other museums and galleries.
-
Vera Mercer
New Works28€ Add to cartBeauty and Melancholy, Joie de Vivre and Vanity
The American photographer Vera Mercer’s (b. Berlin, 1936; lives and works in Omaha and Paris) oeuvre defies easy summary. She started taking pictures in Paris in the 1960s, making portraits of her then husband Daniel Spoerri—who, like she, was initially training as a dancer—and other members of the Fluxus group and Nouveaux Réalistes, including Emmett Williams and Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé. Around the same time, she also photographed Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp for various magazines; her friends Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle were among her favorite sitters.
In the 1970s, she took a long creative hiatus: after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, she poured all her energy into starting a number of restaurants and developing an entire downtown neighborhood. But then, in the early years of the new millennium, she returned to photography, capturing breathtaking neo-baroque still lifes featuring flowers, fruits, freshly killed game, antique glasses, and illuminating candles in large formats.
Vera Mercer’s fourth monograph presents her most recent opulent still lifes in color, as well as a novelty in her oeuvre: restrained black-and-white flower pictures and portraits realized as small-format platinum prints.
-
Fahar Al-Salih
Beyond Fairy Tales39€ Add to cartBridges between East and West
The protection and sense of belonging one feels where one is at home, and what it is like to lose both of them: these are central concerns in the art of Fahar Al-Salih (b. Belgrade, 1964; lives and works in Karlsruhe). Having grown up in Kuwait, where a classical education in visual art was inconceivable, Al-Salih came late to his métier; Markus Lüpertz was among his teachers, and he completed his education in Hermann Nitsch’s master class. Seeing himself as a “bridge-builder” between the cultures of the Arab world and Europe, Al-Salih probes the different lived realities in which his itinerant biography has been set. No more linear than his path through life, his oeuvre is defined by subjects to which he keeps returning in a kind of cyclical motion. This publication offers unprecedented insight into Al-Salih’s creative approach and his articulations of individual yearnings, the comforts of safety, and political and social upheavals. His work achieves a deft interweaving of global perspectives and migrant realities.