




Luxus?!
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Birgit Meyer, Fakultät für Gestaltung der Hochschule Pforzheim, Jan Of, Michael Throm, Robert Eikmeyer, Thomas Hensel |
| Author(s) | Bazon Brock, Jake Chapman, Jonathan Meese, Olaf Nicolai, Raphael Fellmer, Robert Eikmeyer, Susanne Kaufmann, Tobias Rehberger, Valentin von Arnim, Wolfgang Ullrich |
| Size | 17 x 23 cm |
| Design | magma design Studio, Karlsruhe |
| Pages | 248 |
| Illustrations | 110 |
| Cover | Softcover with flaps |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-20-3 | Out of stock |
What is luxury today? How do designers perform the magic of transforming a utilitarian object into a must-have? Where does consumerism shade into obsession? When does more-is-more give way to less-is-more?
Luxury means breaking with convention, and this book showcases—and spawns—a cornucopia of ideas, products, and positions around luxury, featuring influential thinkers from the worlds of design, science, art, and society. The cultural theorists Wolfgang Ullrich and Lambert Wiesing exchange letters on the concept of luxury; Montblanc’s creative director Zaim Kamal lays out future strategies; the artist Jonathan Meese pens a gold manifesto; and Bazon Brock inquires into the asceticism of luxury. We live in a world full of things that resemble one another so closely that the only difference is how they are marketed. What might the precious objects of the future look like? The book presents examples from aspiring designers such as the fashion student Victoria Reize, whose collection counters luxury with arch defiance. Design, we learn, is not just about creating supreme values. Luxury is limitation and longevity, scarcity and refinement, yearning and sensuality.
With works by Assemble, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Daniel Chodowiecki, Kai Löffelbein, Jonathan Meese, Olaf Nicolai, Marcel Odenbach, Tobias Rehberger and Anna Skladmann.
Out of stock
Out of stock
More books
- Release January 2026

Frank Morrison
38€ Add to cartThe dynamic Neo-Mannerist images of painter and illustrator Frank Morrison (born 1971, lives in Atlanta) celebrate the resilience and dignity of African Americans in everyday life. A child of institutionalized racism in the US, he can testify that creativity and solidarity could never be suppressed in the segregated and brutally marginalized communities. Hip-hop and graffiti are resistance. Clichés of inner-city struggle are vividly refuted in this book. The volume documents Morrison’s recent exhibitions, one of which is dedicated to the younger generation: frame-braking images that interweave narrative forms of comics and pop art with illustration. Morrison’s gallery calls the book an explosive tribute to genius flourishing in institutionalized exile.
-

Räume hautnah (GERMAN)
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
-

Călin Dan
POLLIO34€ Add to cartThe oeuvre of the Romanian artist Călin Dan (b. Arad, Romania, 1955; lives and works in Bucharest) shows the influences of conceptual and minimal art. His book Pollio surveys his creative practice of the past decade, which straddles the media of installation and performance art, film, photography, and sculpture and is enriched by his work as an art historian, writer, and curator. In addition to the titular body of work, which wrestles with the Roman historian Gaius Asinius Pollio, the volume also documents the exhibition Alzheimer (2017). Călin Dan is a founding member of the artists’ group subREAL. His work was showcased at the Istanbul (1993), Venice (1993, 1999, 2001), São Paulo (1994), and Sydney Biennales (2006). He has been director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest since 2014.
-

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.
-

Jürgen Claus
To the Oceans with Imagination18€ Add to cartThe Sea as a Space of Artistic Experience
Jürgen Claus’s (b. 1935, Berlin; lives and works in Aachen and Baelen, Belgium) oeuvre encompasses paintings, films, light and solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, with theoretical works that have sold over 100,000 copies. “Jürgen Claus is the first one to see the ocean through an artist’s rather than a scientist’s lens,” Michel Ragon writes. In this book, Claus intertwines his experiences working on the fascinating underwater installations with a pressing contemporary concern: the global efforts to restore the seas to health. The publication combines visual art, architecture, poetry, and music for a multifaceted engagement with the world’s oceans.
Jürgen Claus majored in theater studies at the Universität München and was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne.
-

The Power of Wonder – New Materialisms in Contemporary Art
34€ Add to cartFor the longest time, physical matter was seen as no more than a passive and lifeless object. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, however, visual artists and scientists alike have initiated a change of thinking, conceiving matter as active, unruly, and autonomous. The ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn has called it the “willfulness of things,” while the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers has underscored the “power of wonder”—the bracing sense of marvel and surprise instilled by a material world that sometimes defies the attempt to put it into words.
This pioneering publication features six selected artistic positions that highlight the New Materialism’s significance for contemporary art. The artists employ materials that are millions of years old such as rocks from an open-pit mine as well as classic inorganic staples like ceramics and cutting-edge materials like digital products transformed in high-tech procedures into hitherto unseen hybrid objects. Their work lends art a powerful voice in contemporary debates around man’s position vis-à-vis his environment, around sustainability, participation, and justice.
With works by Ilana Halperin, Agata Ingarden, David Jablonowski, Markus Karstieß, Robert Smithson, and SUPERFLEX.
-

Ed Sommer
Planetare Allianz22€ Add to cartA Monograph on the Pioneer of Op Art
The complex and extraordinary work of the Schwäbisch Gmünd-based artist Ed Sommer (1932–2015), who preferred to call himself a Bildsprachenmaler (painter of visual imagery), includes metal objects, formations of acrylic glass, gestural painting, erotic films, projection photography, dialogical portraits, and spoken texts. In 2014, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe added a large number of works by the artist to its collection. This publication now presents the collection holdings, supplemented by further works by Ed Sommer.
Ed Sommer, together with his artist friend Marc Adrian, was one of the most important representatives of op and kinetic art and received considerable attention in the 1970s with his films and photographs.
-

Thomas Lehnerer
Freies Spiel44€ Add to cartThe function of art in human existence
Throughout his short life, the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (1955–1995) did not take the existence of art for granted. In his writings, above all in Methode der Kunst (Methods of Art), he developed a concept of art in the continuation of key texts from the fields of aesthetics, cultural theory, and art history, which can also be found in his own artistic work. The small-format figurative sculptures by Lehnerer, as well as his drawings, watercolors, and early installations, follow theoretical premises and address comprehensive themes of human existence. The present volume documents his examination of human existence, which is deepened by the inclusion of cultural historical figures and idols.
-

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.
-

Gerhard Neumaier
Die Lust an der Macht des Malens zwischen Mythos und Trivialität32€ Add to cartEin Spiel mit den Ambivalenzen
Offenkundig Mythologisches gerät bei Gerhard Neumaier (geb. 1950 in Freiburg, lebt und arbeitet in Baden-Baden) ebenso zur trivialen Episode, wie scheinbar Triviales legendäre Ikonik entfaltet. Dabei bricht sein unvoreingenommener Umgang mit Klassikern wie etwa in der Duchamp-Persiflage „Hokuspokus mit Fokus Lokus“ semantische Vorurteile in den Sehgewohnheiten auf und bietet dem Betrachter neuartige Interpretationen. In der perfomativen Bewegtheit seiner Rakelbilder legt er eine haptische Sinnlichkeit an den Tag, die Cora von Pape in ihrer Einleitung dazu bringt, den Künstler zu zitieren: „Ich male, was ich weiß, damit ich sehe, was ich fühle.“
-

Pharaonengold
3.000 Jahre altägyptische Hochkultur27,50€ Add to cartThe Mysterious World of the Pharaohs and their Magical Relationship to Gold
Hardly any other culture fascinates as much as the high culture of ancient Egypt. At its center were the pharaohs, those legendary kings who, according to the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, descended directly from the gods. Gold was ascribed a special symbolic and religious power; it stood for eternity and indestructibility and, as the “flesh of the gods,” was a sacred metal. The book brings together 150 exhibits from pharaonic tombs from the Old Kingdom of the Third Dynasty (circa 2680 B.C.E.) and the oldest gold statue of an Egyptian pharaoh to Tutankhamun and Horemheb (circa 1330–1310 B.C.E.).
-

Stephan Kaluza & Dieter Nuhr
Transit42€ Add to cartLandscapes in a Dialogue between Painting and Photography
At first glance, Stephan Kaluza’s (b. 1964, Bad Iburg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) photorealist paintings might be still lifes, portraits of pristine nature. Yet they actually show battlefields and other scenes of past horrors. The idyll in his pictures positively appeals to our vigilance to resist the impression of profound peace. The same ambiguity lies at the heart of the photographs of Dieter Nuhr (b. 1960, Wesel; lives and works in Ratingen). Nuhr, who is also widely known as a comedian, has contributed pictures that are carefully focused renditions of seemingly serendipitous discoveries from his travels in Nepal, Bolivia, India, and Sudan. In their timelessness, Nuhr’s photographs are akin to the locales in Kaluza’s works, which, disburdened of the heavy weight of their histories, reemerge as straightforward natural landscapes. The lavishly illustrated two-volume edition presents the fruits of a collaboration between two artists united by their shared preoccupation with the dialectic of ephemerality and permanence.
-

Peter Zimmermann
abstractness26€ Add to cartTreading the Limits of Originality
Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956, Freiburg; lives and works in Cologne) is one of the most important conceptual media artists. With his work, he consistently experiments with visual reproduction techniques and gained international recognition in the late 1980s with his Book Cover Paintings: motifs from book covers such as that of the Diercke Weltatlas or the Polyglott travel guides, which Zimmermann transfers to the canvas with oil and epoxy resins. The relationship between original and copy is the central theme of his work, with which he addresses the ambivalence of artistic and digital authorship. This monograph brings together early works and a selection of current productions.
Peter Zimmermann studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and was professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne, from 2002 to 2007.
-

Tim Eitel
Propositions for Afterimages 2015–202436€ Add to cartTim Eitel initiates an exchange between recollection and painting. The work on his pictures, he says, is “a conversation about reality and memory” in which he engages the canvas. In the course of this dialogue, Eitel reflects on personal experiences, creating a standalone figural-abstract reality that needs to be internally consistent—the canvas has a strong will of its own. That makes the scenes depicted in his paintings analogues or afterimages of a situation rather than renditions of it. They are characterized by a certain openness that enables the beholders to inject their own recollections into the pictorial space as well. The dialogue between canvas and artist thus gives way to a colloquy between audience and finished work. Not by coincidence, many of the paintings by Eitel gathered in this catalog show people in museums: these scenes facilitate the leap into the pictorial space. The beholders have experienced a situation like the one shown in the pictures in the past or are experiencing it right now, and so they are already at the heart of the works; they become part of the painting, and the picture becomes a particle of their recollection.
-

Ilit Azoulay
Facts and Tales. Truth be Told120€ Add to cartIn an era in which multiple perspectives and oral histories are increasingly vital, Facts and Tales—Truth Be Told delves into the haunting work of Ilit Azoulay. The artist, who was born in Jaffa in 1972, transforms objects, archives, and museum holdings into vessels, challenging traditional hierarchies of knowledge. In her most recent solo exhibition Mere Things at the Jewish Museum, New York, Azoulay presents works that probe the delicate balance between factual representation and nuanced storytelling.
The publication accompanying the exhibition includes archival pages, the artist’s notes, and depictions of the works as well as an introduction by curator Shira Backer and an essay by the art critic, curator, and writer Sarit Shapira, who passed away in 2018. Titled Houses of Junk and Specters: On Ilit Azoulay’s Early Works, it underscores the importance of honoring both factual accuracy and oral histories and invites readers to explore the complex interplay between concrete evidence and the rich and nuanced stories.
Azoulay has devised a singular method to shed light on the blanks in hegemonic narratives and expose them. As though to produce an extortion letter, she clips her pictures from archival materials and photographs of the walls of abandoned buildings and composes them in collages interweaving a multiplicity of views. The resulting works question the exclusive truth claim of museum expertise and reveal its constructed quality. The catalog of her works, designed as a box replete with texts and images, reflects this approach, aiming to dismantle established narratives and open up diverse perspectives.
Box containing 6 different standalone publications, limited edition of 500 copies
THIS PUBLICATION WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE GALLERY LOHAUS SOMINSKY, MUNICH
-

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.
-

Birgitta Thaysen
Amor and Psyche24€ Add to cartAspects of Love
The fine art photographer Birgitta Thaysen (b. Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1962; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and in Nan Hoover’s master class. Her photographic oeuvre encompasses urban motifs as well as likenesses of humans. In black-and-white portrait shots, she revisits the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche; embodiments of the yearning for love and the bafflements of the soul, the title characters have long been vehicles for variegated interpretations in visual art. Thaysen chose to shoot her portraits at Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf, where the tale is present in an adaptation as a lavishly made wallpaper from the nineteenth century. She captured the protagonists lying on the floor, bedded on cushions, their heads upside down, for a vertiginous exploration of states of mind between self-abandonment and doubt.
Birgitta Thaysen studied art with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her conceptual photographic series have been seen by wide audiences in numerous exhibitions.
-

Verena Issel
Yellow Pages. Installations and their individual components45€ Add to cartVerena Issel’s installations feel friendly and inviting, they are soft, round, colorful—we cannot but smile when we look at them. The sculptures and pictures she makes for them are replicas, sometimes laced with irony, of familiar objects from nature and culture—palm trees, ancient columns, and more—which she manufactures out of materials that surround us in everyday life and the domestic sphere such as an old bag, foamed plastic fragments, or a drainpipe. They are awkward giants, monochrome, simplified, two- and three-dimensional forms that wish us no ill. Taking a closer look, we realize that they embody what has been lost, that they are a plastic version of what we are destroying or have destroyed already: nature, obviously, but also ourselves and our cultural and social achievements. Their merriment and sympathy are tinged with melancholy, and the loss is doubly painful when we consider that the sculptures and graphic art are filled with no more than an imitation of life, and an exaggerated one. This catalogue presents a survey of Issel’s diverse and sprawling oeuvre. Expertly choreographed shots of the colorful works convey vivid impressions of her installations.
-

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.
- Out of stock

Flatland
35€ Read moreBetween the Dimensions
The title of this book quotes a literary work by Edwin A. Abbott that was first published in 1884 and gradually gained considerable fame: an allegorical satire whose protagonists are geometric figures, narrated by a square that relates its discovery of a three-dimensional world. Flatland examines the ways in which artists have found inspiration in the formal vocabularies of abstraction since the 1960s. The lavishly designed book gathers works from the past six decades that challenge orthodox interpretations of abstraction.
Contributing artists: Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Francis Baudevin, Philippe Decrauzat, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Hoël Duret, Sylvie Fanchon, Liam Gillick, Mark Hagen, Christian Hidaka, Sonia Kacem, Tarik Kiswanson, Vera Kox, Sarah Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Damián Navarro, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Bruno Peinado, Julien Prévieux, Eva Taulois, John Tremblay, Pierre Vadi, Elsa Werth, Raphaël Zarka






















