Maria Balea & George Crîngașu
The Mythenstein Project
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts, ZWEI Wealth |
| Author(s) | Bogdan Mazuru, Edith Lázár, Klaus W. Wellershoff, Zina Gallery |
| Design | BANK™ |
| Size | 18,6 x 23 cm |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Pages | 64 |
| Illustrations | 33 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-127-6 |
Maria Balea (b. Sighetu Marmației, 1990; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) and George Crîngașu (b. Focșani, 1988; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca and Rome) are among the youngest members of the School of Cluj, which has attained international renown in Adrian Ghenie, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, and Ciprian Mureșan. The overarching theme in their works in a range of media is the lived reality of today’s young people between a physical world defined by uncertainties and a virtual parallel universe whose boundless possibilities make it a fascinating yet also often deceptive safe haven. Both artists roam this dizzying kaleidoscope of worlds on a quest for beauty: Balea, through a romantically idealized focus on remnants of untouched or deserted nature; Crîngașu, by abandoning himself to the graphical possibilities of the digital realm, where beauty is often bound up with the bending of natural laws and the physical impossibility of architecture. Yet both, the retreat to an ostensibly natural state and the escape into garish artificiality, are overshadowed by a nameless menace.
You may also like…
-
Etsu Egami
Rainbow18€ Add to cartWhat is worth talking about in art eludes language. Aesthetic experience is without words, like a human encounter that touches upon our innermost being. Etsu Egami is interested in the margins of understanding, where the communication of ideas and feelings threatens to fail, where forms become illegible. That is the point on which she homes in with her brush, which she wields in a rough calligraphic style, putting almost translucent oil paints on the canvas. Spectral faces emerge that dissolve into abstraction; abstract forms, beheld from the corner of one’s eye, momentarily coalesce into a likeness. Painting, to Egami, is a physical and performative act, the brush an extension of her arm, bringing a picture into being in sweeping rhythmical motions. As we contemplate her work, that momentum imparts itself to us: first our eyes begin to wander, then we feel our bodies stir, and finally the spirit, too, pulsates in the rhythm of the brush. Gathering Egami’s most outstanding works, this catalogue is a universal invitation to join a peculiar dance, an arc of light the artist traces across all barriers to understanding and that speaks to our senses.
More books
-
Stephan Kaluza
Das Rheinprojekt48€ Add to cartReinterpreting the Classical Panorama
The mythical character of the Rhine as a ‘German symbol’ has long been of profound interest to poets and visual artists. Today, however, the Rhine has lost the aura of a great romantic river along much of its course: from Basel to Rotterdam, it serves as a high-volume shipping lane, and sprawling industrial installations line its banks.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) went on an almost eight-months-long walking tour, following the Rhine from its source at the foot of Piz Badus in Switzerland to its debouchment into the North Sea near Rotterdam. During this thousand-mile trek along the river’s right bank, he stopped every minute—after between two and three hundred feet—to take a photograph of the opposite shore. In this way, his camera compiled a painstaking record of the Rhine in 21,449 individual shots. Digitally assembled in a single six-inch-tall composite image, the pictures form a two-and-a-half-mile stream.
What Kaluza created in this project would have been inconceivable before the development of digital photography, which made the seamless presentation of the pictures in a single panoramic band possible. What is more, the computers capable of processing the enormous quantities of data did not arrive until a few years ago. It took the artist’s assistants a full two years just to edit the images. Harnessing digital technology, Kaluza creates for photography what had been the exclusive precinct of painting: a sweeping holistic perspective. A large number of the fascinating panorama photographs were published in the imposing tome Der Rhein in 2007. Das Rheinprojekt now presents a freshly composed selection from this treasure trove.
Stephan Kaluza received a comprehensive education in Düsseldorf in the 1990s, studying photography at the city’s University of Applied Sciences, art history at the Academy of Fine Arts, and history and philosophy at Düsseldorf University. Since 1995, his work has been shown at numerous galleries in Seoul, Shanghai, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Berlin and elsewhere. Kaluza’s plays have been performed in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Stuttgart.
- Out of stock
Voré
Stückwerk Mensch18€ Read moreHistorically Anchored Installations with Current Political References
The sculptures by Voré (b. 1941 in Karlsruhe, lives and works in Ettlingen) reflect the artist’s examination of the conditions of human existence and the human state of mind. Finely polished forms, splinters, and rough fractures become a statement of content and at the same time constitute the formal tension of the respective object. The process of creation can be seen in the rough remaining parts and traces of the various tools. Parallel and closely related to this, drawings and collages are created as independent works or as components of installations. Formal impulses of the sculptural concept are taken up, graphically processed, and projected back into the sculptural work. The present volume presents projects from six decades with numerous illustrations.
-
Bottrop, Breunig, Schröder
20:1528€ Add to cartRapidly growing floods of images and artificial intelligence have made art almost inevitably into a commentary on the illusion of actuality. Three painters—Jana Schröder, Peppi Bottrop und Andreas Breunig—present drawings in the Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst in Augsburg. 20:15 is the title of the exhibition and this accompanying book. All three artists have studied with Albert Oehlen at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and share a philosophical approach to painting. “Our painting is a response to the given conditions of pictoriality. We are here to deconstruct and question what images really are.” (Schröder) The art historian Christian Malycha interviews the three artists, together regarding the exhibition concept, and individually about the evolution of their works. The conversations in this book, which are supplemented by reproductions of all exhibited drawings, provide illuminating glimpses into the ongoing discourse about painting’s relevance.
-
Sinje Dillenkofer
Archives Vivantes34€ Add to cartSinje Dillenkofer’s (b. Neustadt a.d.W., 1959) body of work ARCHIVES VIVANTES inquires into the idea of the “archive,” harnessing the means of visual art to allow us to see and perceive what the archive does not reveal. With staged photographs that combine conceptual rigor with a wide spectrum of creative techniques and devices, Dillenkofer’s pictorial essay turns the spotlight on specimens, artifacts, graphic art, and writings compiled by the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ornithologist Carlo von Erlanger (1872–1904). Examining the archive as a model of nature and reality as well as a mirror of “human nature,” the artist develops compositional ideas inspired by the peculiar features of the objects in the collections in visual analogies, pictorial spaces, and spatial compositions. Animals and plants that died long ago “in the service of science” are vividly embodied through the distinctive use of light and shadow. The resulting pictures consider the archive in a new context, framed by our complex relationships with nature, humankind, society and its values and ideals, circumstances and constellations of power. The pictures were taken in six German collection archives: at the Museum bei der Kaiserpfalz Ingelheim, the Naturhistorisches Museum Mainz, the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt, the Stadtmuseum Berlin, and the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History. Dillenkofer was the first artist to be invited by the Berlin State Library—Prussian Cultural Heritage to translate Humboldt’s American travel diaries into art.
Sinje Dillenkofer studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and has taught at universities and art academies. Her work is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Berlinische Galerie, among others.
-
Filip Henin
10€ Add to cartThe events captured in Filip Henin’s (b. Mayen, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are set in a world beyond time and place, as though on an empty stage prepared for a Samuel Beckett production. It is virtually impossible to say whether a picture shows a coastal region or a craggy slope up in the mountains, whether a field of blue represents the sea or a band of open sky. Henin strips landscapes down no less than human figures, subtracting specific features to isolate basic forms that might be found in the hill country around his hometown in western Germany or in Tuscany. His work integrates quotations from antiquity, Romantic landscape painting, and postmodernism as well as Italian Transavanguardia, the mysticism of Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and the figurative painting of the 1990s. Without veering into drama or pathos, he harnesses two utterly antithetical energies: the reflection on painting and the history of art and the need to be simple.
-
Simone Haack
HAIR30€ Add to cartSimone Haack (b. 1978 in Rotenburg/Wümme, lives and works in Berlin) has always made the inwards legible in the outer appearance of her figures in her painting. This is also the case in her block of works in the exhibition of the same name, Hair. Already in the late 17th century, magic and superstition were attributed to hair. In it one suspected the whole power of the soul. The artist, who was formed in the painting class of Katharina Grosse and Karin Kneffel, symbolically reveals the fragility of the DNA of human beings through her hair landscapes, which are sometimes placed macroscopically in the picture in the spirit of a New Magic Realism. At the same time, her accompanying exhibition publication always also tells of the triangle of tension of physical as well as psychological existence, which in her case runs through the painterly psychoanalysis.
-
Shara Hughes
Time Lapsed35€ Add to cartShara Hughes (b. Atlanta, 1981; lives and works in New York) describes her pictures and drawings as psychological or invented landscapes. Her cliff coasts, river valleys, sunsets, and lush gardens, often framed by abstract patterns, might be the settings of fairy tales or scenes from paradise. As the New Yorker put it, the paintings “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.” Wielding oil paint, brushes, spatulas, and spray cans, the artist celebrates painting itself, not infrequently quoting the masters of past eras.
Shara Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her most recent solo exhibitions are currently on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. In 2021, she had shows at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Garden Museum, London; the Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado; and at Le Consortium, Dijon.
-
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.
-
Roland Schappert
Coronasehnsucht14€ Add to cartThe coronavirus pandemic hit us in a time of disparate foci of attention. A fundamental lack of comprehension and hate speech contrast sharply with an unspoken consonance of ideas as well as feelings. What do reality, statistics, love, and yearnings do to us? They are playing a game with reality, sans fiction. Relationships sustain our lives. What was unmistakable before is now manifest, with stark certainty. Are we ready for loving dissension? Can we bear to think only as far ahead as we can see? How do our emotions answer these questions, and how does our intellect? The Cologne visual artist and writer Roland Schappert retraces his personal voyage through this sun-kissed rain-drenched time. The book is a diary-like tour de force of digital amorous overtures, an attempt to explain the world of art via WhatsApp, and the real challenges of life as a single artist in a major German city in precarious circumstances.
-
Julius Hofmann
Western Philosophies35€ Add to cartJulius Hofmann (b. Göttingen, 1983; lives and works near Göttingen) has mastered the traditional aspects of painting and commands a broad repertoire of creative techniques. This expertise enables him to call conventional painting in question by combining it with the aesthetic of 1990s computer graphics. The simple and often grotesque symbolism of the imperfect digital imagery contrasts with a perfectionistic figurative painting. This approach lends his pictures a disconcerting and unexpected quality.
Western Philosophies is an episode in Hofmann’s ongoing work confronting consumerist society with its dark secrets and its indifference. Meanwhile, his creative process is also an exploration of the artist’s personal fears and frustrations. In depicting his figures, landscapes, and machines, he draws our attention to the painterly originality of structures and surfaces. The protagonists, to his mind, play a subordinate role, typically serving him as vehicles—he is more interested in the “how” than in the “what.”
Julius Hofmann studied painting with Neo Rauch and Heribert C. Ottersbach at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) from 2005 until 2011. His work is represented in international collections and institutions.
-
Maximilian Rödel
Celestial Artefacts50€ Add to cart“One must break free from wanting something and confine oneself instead to being something.” — Maximilian Rödel
Inky black, apricot, magenta, and a pastel purple: apparent monochromes, the paintings of Maximilian Rödel (b. Braunschweig, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) actually do not just traverse color spectrums; in a sense, they chart horizons of experience. To contemplate them is to embark on a voyage through space and time. Foreground and background are one, depth and surface at once; an undertow makes itself felt in which the nuances of color interweave, blur into one another, shimmer, flare up. The artist describes his pictures as an unfocused energy that already exists; he merely uncovers it.
The first publication on Rödel’s work presents the exhibition Celestial Artefacts at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, with an emphasis on the Prehistoric Sunsets series (2018–2021). It is complemented by reproductions of selected works and an extensive index that also includes details from earlier series that are relevant in the context. Aperçus contributed by Rafael Horzon and Leif Randt and writings on art by Domenico de Chirico, Lena Fließbach, Stefanie Gerke, Philipp Hindahl, and Maurice Funken add another dimension to the paintings.
- Out of stock
Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte 1999 – 2019
29,90€ Read moreDie Geschichte einer neuen Industriekultur
Die Völklinger Hütte gehört zu den wichtigsten Industriedenkmälern der Welt. Mit herausragenden Ausstellungen und Veranstaltungen ist das Kulturprojekt weit über die Grenzen des Saarlands hinaus bekannt geworden. Der Künstler Ottmar Hörl konzipierte hier sein großangelegtes Skulpturenprojekt 100 Arbeiter und Christian Boltanskis Installation in der Sinteranlage wurde zum hochemotionalen Erinnerungsort für die hier verpflichteten Zwangsarbeiter. Noch bis zum Jahr 1986 war die Völklinger Eisenhütte in Betrieb und wurde 1994 als erstes Industriekulturdenkmal aus der Hochphase der Industrialisierung in die renommierte Liste des UNESCO-Weltkulturerbes aufgenommen. Das Buch zum 25. Jubiläum dieser Auszeichnung zeigt die vielfältigen und eindrucksvollen Aufnahmen einer Transformation – vom größten Schrotthaufen Europas zum Begnungszentrum der Menschen mit der Kunst. Es dokumentiert die gelungene Umstrukturierung einer hochproduktiven Eisenverhüttungsstätte zu einem Ort für Kultur im 21. Jahrhundert.
-
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
- temporarily not available
MEUSER
Works 2012–2023 (ENGLISH)Read moreEver since his studies with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich, since his first exhibitions – for instance at ‘Kippenberger’s Office’ in 1979 – Meuser (b. Essen 1947, lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been a solitaire. His sculptures are unyielding and unruly, just as much as they are vulnerable and tender. They are witty and heart-touchingly charming.
Meuser finds his material in the scrapyard. Confidently and empathically, he reinstates form and dignity to the remnants and vestiges of industrial society. As a romantic, he grants things a life of their own and turns them into self-reliant protagonists, once more. Unwaveringly, he works to re-poetize a standardized and maltreated world.
The lavishly designed monograph is published on the occasion of Meuser’s 75th birthday, presenting works and exhibitions from the past ten years. Eight international authors and scholars create a dazzling mosaic and reveal how Meuser boldly holds his own in face of Duchamp, Minimalism, and Social Sculpture. An open-ended outlook.
Meuser studied 1968–1976 at Art Academy, Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich. 1991 he received the ars viva award. 1992-2015 professorship at Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe.
Since 1976, numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions and works in international collections: Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; documenta IX / Fridericianum, Kassel; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Joanneum, Graz; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe.
-
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.
-
The Art of Society
1900–194529€ Add to cartThe Collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the last building designed by Mies van der Rohe, has been closed a full six years for refurbishment. To mark its reopening the museum is presenting the highlights of its classical modernist collection under the title The Art of Society, 1900–1945. Visionary, critical, resigned or utopian, the paintings and sculptures bear witness to art’s dialogue with prevailing social conditions – from the German Empire to the First World War, the Weimar Republic and ultimately National Socialism. The catalogue documenting all works in the exhibition traces the major artistic tendencies during the first half of the 20th century in thirteen chapters. The Art of Society, 1900–1945 offers a renewed encounter with works by Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tamara de Lempicka, Lotte Laserstein, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and many others that is as captivating as it is illuminating.
Click here for the German edition.
- Release March 2026
Monet – Cézanne – Matisse
The Scharf Collection48€ Add to cartThe Scharf Collection is a German private collection of French art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and international contemporary art. Now in its fourth generation, it continues a branch of the renowned Otto Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin, which encompasses everything from the beginnings of modernism, represented by Francisco de Goya, to the French avant-garde of the second half of the nineteenth century with Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas and the entire graphic oeuvre of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The richly illustrated catalog accompanies the collection’s first comprehensive exhibition at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf and the Alte Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
-
100 Windows
Site-specific art installations at Berlin-Weekly project space28€ Add to cartEstablished in 2010 by Stefanie Seidl in a former gateway for horse-drawn carriages that is now enclosed by glazing at both ends, the project space BERLIN-WEEKLY offers the narrow yet exceptionally tall display space to artists as a highly visible public stage for installations that respond to the setting or site. Its unilateral orientation toward the street makes BERLIN-WEEKLY a creative intervention into the urban fabric that harnesses the shopwindow format. The book presents 100 selected window installations to illustrate the widely diverse ways in which individual artists have engaged with the venue, time and again transforming the unusually shaped small space.
With works by: Menno Aden, Alexandra Baumgartner, Isabelle Borges, Astrid Busch, Simon Faithfull, Moritz Frei, Max Frisinger, Wolfgang Flad, Dagmara Genda, Andreas Greiner & Armin Keplinger, Sabine Groß, Marc van der Hocht, Sabine Hornig, Irène Hug, Bettina Khano, Julia Kissina, Nikolaus List, Ulrike Mohr, Virginie Mosse, Piotr Nathan, Katja Pudor, Philip Topolovac, Inken Reinert, Sophia Schama, Geerten Verheus, Sinta Werner, Barbara Wille, and others
-
Female Gaze
From Virtual to Reality25€ Add to cartWorks of Art Take a Stance
The “female gaze” embodies a stance that is the polar opposite of the “male gaze.” The latter term came into use in the movie and advertising industries in the 1970s to describe the fact that women typically appear in films in supporting roles, as accessories to men, rather than as protagonists. The male gaze originated in a patriarchal society that has begun to change. The female gaze champions a modern form of emancipation that challenges men to abandon entrenched structures. Much more importantly, it encourages women to become aware of the strength that lies in their femininity and make it the source of their own creative expression and their own perspective on the world. For many years, the writer Silke Tobeler has visited artists in their studios, collecting the photographs she took there and her conversations with her hosts on her blog, Female Gaze.
-
Sonja Yakovleva
10€ Add to cartSonja Yakovleva (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) uses pornographic representations and images from the internet as templates for papercuts, some in large formats, that grapple with personal and public stories about women, power relations, sexuality, and violence. The silhouettes show popular motifs that have served to ingrain fairy tales, myths, and ideologies in the collective consciousness from the colonial era to modernism and the early twenty-first century. Yakovleva, whose art is often associated with sex-positive feminism, appropriates this folkloristic visual idiom and hybridizes and sexualizes it. Dessous and strap-on dildos, for example, figure as preserved specimens of butterflies and insects, bringing historic scientific expeditions to mind. Yet her work also addresses the capitalist urge to categorize, evaluate, and market every kink.
