Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Michael Buhrs |
| Author(s) | Michael Buhrs, Marc Wellmann, Margret Eicher |
| Design | Access All Areas (Felix Flemmer, Noëm Held) |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Size | 19,5 x 25 cm |
| Pages | 244 |
| Illustrations | 33 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-017-0 |
Contemporary 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.
More books
-
Erich Hörtnagl
to be a man38€ Add to cart“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” The witty remark, attributed to Diane Arbus, succinctly captures the twofold code at work in Erich Hörtnagl’s (b. Innsbruck, 1950) pictures. Aesthetically appealing photographs, mostly in black and white, show men (and women) in a wide variety of cultural, social, and religious contexts: from Swedish bikers and drag queens to monks in Myanmar, from Turkish belly dancers to Tyrolean performers in traditional attire. What looks at first glance like a conventional photobook soon reveals itself to be a brilliantly staged interactive riddle around clichéd notions of masculinity with positive and negative connotations, around gender roles and persistent stereotypes. With the deftly composed visual meta-narrative in to be a man, Hörtnagl, a seasoned theater and film director, lures us into a trap, and the only way out is by taking the challenge head-on: by engaging in self-reflection and questioning our own prejudices and ideas.
- Release December 2025
Cahier 002
Silke Wagner. bürgersteig22€ Add to cartBetween 2001 and 2002, a VW bus bearing the inscription “Lufthansa Deportation Class” was on display in various German cities. It was part of the provocative bürgersteig action by Silke Wagner (born 1968, lives in Frankfurt) about Lufthansa providing aircraft for deportation purposes. The bus sparked heated debates and became a vehicle for activist networking and communication among citizens. The participatory art project was groundbreaking at the time in its collaboration with civil justice initiatives. Cahier 002 documents bürgersteig for the first time with all its aspects, disclosing the sources for the action as well as material on the legal conflicts that followed the project.
-
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.
-
Emil Nolde
A Critical Approach by Mischa Kuball40€ Add to cartWhat is Visible and What is Not
Mischa Kuball (b. 1959, Düsseldorf; lives and works in Düsseldorf) investigates public and institutional spaces and the social and political discourses that shape them. At the invitation of the Draiflessen Collection and with support from the Nolde Stiftung, the conceptual artist grappled with the life and oeuvre of the painter Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and created a body of work titled Nolde/critique/Kuball. In piece after piece, Kuball drains Nolde’s works of the colors that made the Expressionist famous, challenging the beholder’s preconceptions and examining perception and its constituent processes. Laid out in black and white, the book accordingly directs our attention not only to what a picture shows, but also to how structures and organizing principles emerge into view.
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, and associate professor of media art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM Karlsruhe since 2007.
Note: This publication is released in German, English and Dutch. When ordering, please let us know which edition you would like to receive. Use the annotation box on the checkout page.
-
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
READ48€ Add to cartThroughout their careers, the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961, and Ingar Dragset, b. Trondheim, Norway, 1969, live and work in Berlin) have eschewed the traditional “White Cube” exhibition format by creating large-scale installations and staging narrative situations in which autobiographical quotes blend with fictional stories and cultural references.
For the solo exhibition READ, Elmgreen & Dragset have transformed Kunsthalle Praha into a minimalist version of a modern public library to prompt reflections on our relationship with physical books and knowledge in the age of digital media. With new works by Elmgreen & Dragset as well as performances, videos, collages, paintings, and sculptures by other artists, READ also probes the relation between books and the making of art.
This richly illustrated publication documents the dynamic interaction between language, books, and art. With contributions from renowned scholars and a curatorial text by Elmgreen & Dragset.
-
Urban Art! Biennale® 2019
27,50€ Add to cartThe World’s Most Important Exhibition of Urban Art — Presented for the Fifth Time in 2019
Its themes are the city and urban lifestyle, its can-vases walls, doors, or windows, its artists cosmo-politan. Since the turn of the millennium, Urban Art has developed out of the non-commercial, often illegal art forms of graffiti and street art. Although it makes use of the same stylistic means — spraying, tagging, the deliberate inclusion of drips, the use of graffiti scripts, etc. — it transports these as commis-sioned works into the legal space of the museum, gallery, or architecture. The Urban Art Biennial at the World Cultural Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte is the largest international exhibition of its kind. Fifty individual works and twenty-five installations by one hundred artists shed light on the latest developments and positions from Western metropolises, as well as from current hot spots around the globe.
-
Sabine Hornig
Passage through Presence45€ Add to cartLayered Spacetimes in Large Formats
Sabine Hornig (b. 1964; lives and works in Berlin) has earned international acclaim with sculptures, photographs, and architectural interventions that interweave image, perspective, and space in distinctive ways. Her works feature translucent pictorial planes on glass panes; integrating these sculptural elements into the setting, she creates environments in which meaning unfolds as viewers allow their gazes—and themselves—to wander. For her new works, which engage with architecture, the artist superimposes enormous photographs on entire façades and concourses. This publication is the first to put the focus on Sabine Hornig’s art in three dimensions, detailing her process from the building of sculptural models and the combination with transparent photographic layers to her creation of works in public settings. It showcases her largest installation to date, at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, which she discusses in a conversation with Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator, Public Art Fund, New York.
-
Tobias Rehberger
1993–202244€ Add to cartIn his sculptural work, Tobias Rehberger (b. Esslingen, 1966; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main) connects strategies from different, also non-art disciplines. His interiors meant to be taken into service have established him as one of the most influential artists of his generation. In 2022, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart will honor Rehberger with a grand exhibition that will feature some of the most important bodies of work from the past three decades. The accompanying book makes a signal contribution to the ongoing critical engagement with his art.
Tobias Rehberger studied with Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1987 until 1992 and later returned to his alma mater as a professor. He has had numerous solo shows in Germany and abroad and, in 2009, furnished the central cafeteria at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which won him a Golden Lion.
-
Stefan Knauf
10€ Add to cartStefan Knauf (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) uses selected materials such as construction supplies or plants to investigate the histories of botany, migration, trade, science, and architecture and critique an idealized and anthropocentric conception of nature that is still prevalent. His sculptures, geometric-abstract pictures, and installations, with echoes of constructivism and minimal art, are contact zones in which everything is related to everything: human and non-human history, the natural and the artificial, ecology and ideology. Knauf’s works do not propose to unravel these entanglements. Rather, they suggest alternative perspectives and topographies guided by the idea of the “modified landscape” and devise material and alchemistic forms of knowledge and a novel and multiperspectival approach to the history and reality of the Anthropocene.
-
Peter Hermann
Skulpturen24€ Add to cartDefying the Classical Canon
The figures of Peter Hermann (b. 1962, Bietigheim; lives and works in Ludwigsburg) stand and gaze. Made of limewood or bronze, his sculptures are precisely crafted in the manner of the old masters and thus stand in opposition to other contemporary positions. Nevertheless, in their static severity, their shortened and slightly caricatured limbs, and with a certain irony that accompanies this, they also defy the classical canon of figurative sculpture. Peter Hermann finds his themes in everyday life and succeeds in letting this apparent everydayness vibrate further in the encounter between the artwork and the viewer.
-
Africa
in the View of the Photographers19,90€ Add to cartContemporary Photography from Africa
Stereotypes still dominate the Western image of Africa; we tend to know little about cities like Lagos, Porto-Novo, or Kinshasa. The book presents photographs by African artists who tell stories from everyday life in the metropolises, of the unruliness of nature and industry, of traces of the past and pop culture. Osborne Macharia, for example, interweaves Kenya’s cultural identity with fictional Afro-futuristic plots; Yoriyas documents the small moments of life in his native Casablanca in pictures that have been picked up by the New York Times, National Geographic, and Vogue; Alice Mann’s intimate essays in portraiture, meanwhile, explore ideas about the making of pictures as a collaborative act. With additional works by Ilan Godfrey, Fabrice Monteiro, Kibuuka Mukisa Oscar, Léonard Pongo, and Fethi Sahraoui, the book offers a profoundly original survey of African realities.
-
MK Kaehne
Π = 3,1415935€ Add to cartThe biography of conceptual artist MK Kaehne (b. Vilnius, 1963; lives and works in Berlin) oscillates between Vilnius, Moscow and Berlin. Influenced by Russian Constructivism, he draws and builds suitcase sculptures with a department store aesthetic, a reversal of the readymade principle. His focus gradually shifted from the formal to the psychological, towards life-size figures such as It’s me (2023): a hyper-realistic replica of himself, lying upside down in the mud, with a garden gnome next to him. Kaehne’s work is strictly analytical, but the results are full of tragedy and irony. Unintentional drawings, in which biographical, Dadaist and political elements merge, accompany his oeuvre. A total work of art that traces personal and social development.
-
Ottmar Hörl
Second Life – 100 Arbeiter14,80€ Add to cartThe Workman Sculptures at Völklinger Hütte Steelworks
Sculptures on topics of everyday life are at the center of the work of Ottmar Hörl (b. 1950, Nauheim; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main and Wertheim). His major projects gained international recognition, they are based on the artist’s concept of art as a communication model. For the Völklingen Ironworks World Heritage Site, Hörl conceived the sculpture project Second Life, which features 100 figures modeled on the Völklingen ironworker with helmet and work clothes. The book documents the impressive project that focuses on the universal theme of the Völklingen Ironworks: work and the working people.
-
Peter Buggenhout
Eerie28€ Add to cartAn Autonomous Counterpart
The renowned sculptor Peter Buggenhout (b. 1963, Dendermonde, Belgium; lives and works in Ghent) describes his hybrid pieces as “abject things” that defy classification and even the label “work of art.” He aggregates and manipulates found and discarded objects as well as both technical and organic materials including pig blood, cow stomachs, and horsehair until he achieves a certain degree of abstraction. Buggenhout’s sculptures confront the beholder as creatures that are somehow “off,” exuding an eerie atmosphere by allowing something sinister to rise to the surface that, it appears, lurks just behind the façades of the physical world: vestiges of humanity, society’s sedimented refuse. The book presents a comprehensive survey of his growing oeuvre; it is the first publication to cover his most recent creations in marble.
Peter Buggenhout’s art has been featured at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the MoMA PS1, New York; the 2014 Taipei Biennial; and elsewhere.
-
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.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Fragmente eines Ängstlichen28€ Add to cartA Novel on Coping with Guilt or the Feeling of Having Violated Life
The filmmaker Castner and the anthropologist Pollock not only share the similarity of their names with those of Castor and Pollux, the fabled twins of Greek myth, but also a hard fate: an irreparable guilt whose motifs run through the entire novel. Pollock is forced to admit to himself that, in his role as a scientist, he was involved in a genocide against indigenous people in Panama; Castner, meanwhile, tries to get a handle on his bouts of excessive hypochondria. In episodic flashbacks and an interview that gradually turns into an emotional dispute between them, the two characters analyze the minutiae of their life stories and arrive at a surreal insight.
Castor and Pollux were known in antiquity as the patrons of sailors, who took their bearings from the twins’ constellation. That is why water figures in this novel as the element that unites all narrative planes. Water—like life—will fill any vacant space regardless of shape and adapt to all circumstances.
Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a visual artist, working in the media of photography and painting, and a writer whose output includes plays, novels, and nonfiction books. The philosophy of nature is a central theme in both Kaluza’s art and his fiction.
- Release November 2025
Charles Moore
On painting16€ Add to cartFor On Painting, New York-based art historian and curator Charles Moore, interviewed four women artists about their practice, asking them to reveal their motives and aspirations. This publication consists of four interviews, each containing an introduction by Moore and illustrations of the artist’s works. Danielle Mckinney, who paints exclusively Black women, reflects on her experiences as a woman growing up in the US South. Nicola Staeglich creates subtle layered abstract works to evoke new perspectives and the potential for change. Nirit Takele elaborates on how her Ethiopian Jewish heritage has shaped her painting practice. Jorinde Voigt, who creates complex installations inspired by notation systems, discusses the use of algorithms and the beauty to be found in the unexpected.
- Release October 2025
Werner Hahn
Kailas. Berg und Gott72€ Add to cartKailas is far more than just a mountain—it is a symbol of spiritual quest, transcendence, and enlightenment. In this book, the painter and photographer Werner Hahn (b. Karlsbad, now Czech Republic, 1944) approaches the holiest peak in Asia from a unique perspective: as an artist, traveler, and profound connoisseur of its cultural history. This book interweaves art, mythology, and historical accounts from Buddhism and Hinduism. Hahn’s personal travel experiences, complemented by reflections on Western travel literature and spiritual sources, enter into a dialogue with ancient traditions, revealing Kailas as a place of both deep personal experience and artistic contemplation. A visual pilgrimage to one of the most significant mountains in the world.
-
SERIES
Prints from Warhol to Wool40€ Add to cartA Creative Strategy and Technique of Modernism
Series are open systems, telling stories, toying with rhythms, permitting variations, and documenting creative processes. Andy Warhol’s famous silkscreen prints made the serial iteration of images his trademark stratagem. In the mid-1960s, Pop Art and Fluxus had established the fine art print as a medium in which seminal work was being done. New graphic techniques such as serigraphy and offset printing, used with aggressive colors and punchy motifs, not only allowed for large numbers of copies, they also opened the door to an unprecedented engagement with the imagery of popular print and advertising media. Opening with an inquiry into how serial fine art prints are made, the book presents and contextualizes the explosive visual and political energy of graphic series. The numerous illustrations and essays are rounded out by an interview with Thomas Schütte and Ellen Sturm.
With works by Josef Albers, Joseph Beuys, Ulla von Brandenburg, John Cage, Helen Cammock, Nina Canell, Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Donald Judd, Ronald B. Kitaj, Maria Lassnig, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Stefan Marx, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Fred Sandback, Nora Schultz, Thomas Schütte, Dasha Shishkin, Frank Stella, Rosemarie Trockel, Victor Vasarely, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Corinne Wasmuht, Emmett Williams, Christopher Wool, and others.
-
Andreas Wegner
Wir fahren mit der Schneckenpost, weil die uns keinen Pfennig kost50€ Add to cartThe art of Andreas Wegner is an inquiry into capitalist urbanity. His interventions explore alternative models for urban interaction, trade, city development, traffic, or the use of public space. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Charles Fourier’s social utopias, Wegner founded, e.g. a cooperative department store in Berlin, a grocery store in Vienna, and conducted real estate business as a form of creative resistance. This monograph illustrates the artist’s most important projects with ample imagery, essays by renowned authors, interviews, and his own texts. Alongside collective initiatives, installations, photography, film, and sculpture, painting remains a constant in Wegner’s oeuvre to this day.
