





Martin Noël
The Retrospective
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Estate Noël (Margarete und Cora Noël, Dr. Wenzel Jacob) |
Author(s) | Achim Gnann, Constanze Malissa, Cora Anna Noël, Leonie Pfennig, Klaus Albrecht Schröder |
Design | Kaisers Ideenreich |
Cover | Hardcover with flush cut |
Size | 24 x 28 cm |
Pages | 224 |
Illustrations | 250 |
Language(s) | German, English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-063-7 |
The 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.
More books
-
ODOR
Immaterial Sculptures40€ Add to cartThe effect of odor is immediate. Smells arouse feelings in us, put us in moods, awaken recollections. They color the other senses and shape our perceptions more profoundly than we are aware. Scents create closeness and distance at the same time. They become imprinted on our memories and consolidate our experiences. And yet their existence in the world of three dimensions remains invisible, and the act of picking up a scent is fleeting.
The publication Odor—Immaterial Sculptures zooms in on the power of smells. Contributions from curators, artists, scientists, and scholars frame a variety of perspectives on this evanescent phenomenon, examining the olfactory sense and the qualities of the immaterial. Full-page plates conceived by the artists provide additional information, imagery, and contexts around the individual works, which put odor as an olfactory and spatial experience at the center of the engagement with art. The works operate between the poles of time and space, individual and community, consciousness and the subconscious, visibility and invisibility, the everyday and the miraculous, the sense of self and the perceptions of others, presence and absence, life and death.
Artists : Jason Dodge, Carsten Höller, Koo Jeong A, Oswaldo Maciá, Teresa Margolles, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sissel Tolaas, Clara Ursitti, Luca Vitone
-
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.
-
Arantxa Etcheverria
Doors38€ Add to cartThe Mythical Power of Grids
Arantxa Etcheverria’s (b. 1975, France; lives and works in Bucharest) creative practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Since 2006, she has been especially interested in modernist architecture, a ubiquitous sight in her adopted country, Romania. Blending rationalism with speculation, the artist draws on historical references including post-Communist turbo architecture, Op art, and minimalism for works that balance between figuration and abstraction, construction and deconstruction. This book documents Etcheverria’s more recent panel paintings and installations, seen in interaction with actors in monochrome costumes. With essays by the Paris-based Romanian curator and critic Ami Barak and the art historian and curator Alina Şerban.
Arantxa Etcheverria studied fine arts at Villa Arson, Nice, and stage design at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg.
-
Pokorny
25€ Add to cart“Abstraction means the omission of the irrelevant and the unnecessary in order to find more substantial content and form.”—Werner Pokorny
His often monumental sculptures can be found in many places in Germany and abroad, including Aachen, Berlin, Busan (South Korea), Frankfurt am Main, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Riehen, Saarbrücken, and Stuttgart. Werner Pokorny works (b. 1949, Mosbach; lives and works in Ettlingen) exclusively with Corten steel for his outdoor sculptures and with wood, steel, and bronze for his indoor works. Well-known basic forms such as bowls, spheres, cuboids, and houses serve as points of departure and reference, which are abstracted by reduction, rotation, tilting, or combination with other elements. The artistic field of tension characteristic of Pokorny’s impressive sculptural oeuvre is due to the oscillation between form and abstraction, figure and reduction, hard edges and soft curves.
-
Jan Zöller
Ritual Believer40€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) paintings, sculptures, and installations probe the discrepancy between economic production and the spiritual and magical dimension of art. The artist’s book Ritual Believer surveys the so-called charcoal paintings series, created between 2019 and 2023. For these works, the artist paints directly in charcoal on the unprimed canvas, making it impossible to correct “blunders.” Another distinguishing feature is the virtual absence of color; the austerity of the compositions contrasts with Zöller’s other, often intensely colorful paintings. The motifs that are the hallmark of his oeuvre—birds, running legs—are complemented by writing and text. Another aspect of this shift is that the works’ titles play a central part and almost figure as a creative element in their own right. For the text in the book, the artist sent the titles of the works shown to his brother, who wove them into a story. An appendix presents scanned archival materials. Notebooks and zines Zöller produced between 2015 and 2017 provide interesting insight into how he finds his motifs and his compositional process.
Jan Zöller studied with Marijke van Warmerdam and Leni Hoffmann at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 2012 until 2017 and with Jean-Marc Bustamante and Götz Arndt at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016.
-
Jagoda Bednarsky
SHADOWLAND ET AL40€ Add to cartJagoda Bednarsky’s (b. Złotoryja, Poland, 1988; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are pop-cultural and nostalgic borrowings that she transfers into the grotesque register, with allusions to stereotyped role models between hypermasculinity and matriarchy. Unfurling pastel-colored hillscapes composed of breasts, breast pumps, vulvas, figures from Greek myth, and motifs from flora and fauna, Bednarsky’s Shadowland series interrogates traditional ideas of femininity and motherhood. The depiction of the female breast serves as a metaphor referring to the titular “Shadowland,” where this part of the body is still perceived as a sexualized object rather than as natural. The title, one might note, is borrowed from a culture magazine first published in New York in 1919 in which the artist spotted Art Deco illustrations that became a vital source of inspiration. Despite the dense aggregation of fraught symbols and referential gestures, the sensual, poetic, and richly imaginative works exude a lightness that stems from their translucency and subtle irony.
The comprehensive volume presents Bednarsky’s works from between 2018 and 2023 and a singular conversation with the artist.
Jagoda Bednarsky studied fine arts, first at Kunsthochschule Kassel (2008–2009), then at HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, with Michael Krebber and Monika Baer (2009–2014).
- Release September 2021
Paul Uwe Dreyer
Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken68€ Add to cartA Painter, Draftsman, and Draftsman of Concrete Art
Paul Uwe Dreyer (b. 1939, Osnabrück; d. 2008, Stuttgart) taught painting as a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart for more than three decades. His oeuvre shows the hallmarks of geometric constructive art: inspired by subjective experiences of reality, Dreyer’s compositions visualize the dialectics of organizing principles and their potentials for variation, a guiding interest that is already evident in his early work since the 1960s and especially in the pairs and series of pictures he begins creating in the early 1970s. His art unfolds a fascinatingly dynamic yet nonhierarchical dialogue between colors, surfaces, and lines. The chronological catalogue raisonné reveals the consistency with which motifs evolve from his early to his late oeuvre, from architectural, figural, and ornamental tokens through elements resembling symbols and icons to complex penetrations of spaces.
- Release April 2025
Fidel Martínez
Todesfuge. Das Leben des Dichters Paul Celan26€ Add to cartThe Spanish graphic artist Fidel Martínez Nadal’s (b. Seville, 1979) graphic novel Todesfuge recounts the life of Paul Celan (1920–1970), one of the most eminent lyric poets of the twentieth century. The narrative interweaves biographical and literary aspects of Celan’s life, including his Jewish identity, his lifelong trauma as a Holocaust survivor, and his acclaimed poem Todesfuge. Martínez’s expressive and somber illustrations visualize Celan’s struggles with feelings of guilt, memory, and his creative efforts to find words for the unspeakable. An artistically brilliant homage to Paul Celan’s oeuvre, Todesfuge is an impressive contribution to the engagement with the Shoah in the medium of the graphic novel pioneered by Art Spiegelman.
-
Simone Demandt
Movers / Beweger38€ Add to cartMotorways are Europe’s lifelines. The products we buy every day arrive on supermarket shelves after traveling along these arteries on the backs of thousands of trucks steered by hard-working drivers. Glancing up into the cabs of their hulking vehicles, we can just barely make out their heads sticking up above the steering wheels. In this overdue volume, Simone Demandt lets us see more of the heroes of the road who confidently posed for her camera. The pictures demonstrate Demandt’s knack for discovering “the intimate in the anonymous and the narrative element in the matter-of-factly” (Matthias Winzen). She has condensed the truckdrivers’ lifeworld into documentary black-and-white shots in which she shows these people as whole persons and individuals—very different from how we perceive them when they’re in the next lane. Movers lets us peek into the cabs through Demandt’s nonjudgmental lens, broadening our horizons hardly less than travelling would and helping us overcome our prejudices about teamsters. If you’ve always wanted to know whom we really have to thank for those never-empty supermarket shelves, you should not miss out on this book.
- Out of stock
Eva Jospin
Wald(t)räume22€ Read moreThe Forest as a Place of Longing: Eva Jospin’s Magical Corrugated Cardboard Sculptures
The French artist Eva Jospin (b. 1975, Paris; lives and works in Paris) cuts and layers corrugated cardboard to create sculptures and reliefs. Handcraft and precision are essential aspects of her work. The artist retains the original color of the cardboard, since, for her, the material itself already contains sufficient color variations and nuances. The recurring motif is the forest — consisting of numerous trunks, branches, and twigs in extreme density and interspersed with black shadows. They suggest depth and stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Eva Jospin does not reproduce nature one to one, but conveys the feelings of fear, anarchy, or freedom that it triggers: The forest as a universal place of longing.
-
Gabriel Vormstein
40€ Add to cartGabriel Vormstein (b. Konstanz, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) explores themes of impermanence, temporality, and futility through a unique visual language. He paints using newspapers as a canvas, and creates installations out of tree branches and other organic matter. These “poor” materials subvert a prevailing notion in Western culture that an artwork should be eternally preserved. Through the adaptation of various styles and symbols, Vormstein’s paintings likewise speak to the transience of art historical and cultural trends. Over 300 pages, this richly illustrated book provides an overview of Vormstein’s oeuvre over the past two decades, while also offering an atmospheric glimpse into the artist’s source material and working methods. The publication is enriched by an essay by Gean Moreno, who characterizes Vormstein’s work as follows: “Gabriel Vormstein’s paintings and sculptures (…) announce their condition as withering artifacts, as if no other manner of existing was available to them (and maybe to us, as well).”
-
Thyra Schmidt
Über Diebe und die Liebe. On Thieves and Love.15€ Add to cartAn artist’s book, an artist’s text
On twenty-two large-format typographic sheets, Thyra Schmidt (b. 1974, Pinneberg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) develops a narrative featuring moments in an amorous relationship. Thoughts and encounters between “her” and “him” are captured in poetically constructed, fragmentary units of meaning. Imaginary images are conjured in the mind’s eye: Close-ups and intimate insights into a delicate web of interpersonal incidents. Personal observations and experiences form the starting point of this artistic exploration of love. Yet the focus of her work is not on autobiographical rendering, but rather on the tracking down of elementary structures, a general understanding of intimacy.
-
Fritz Overbeck und Hermine Overbeck-Rohte
Der Briefwechsel38€ Add to cartIntimate Glimpses from the Marriage of Two Worpswede Artists
In the final years of the nineteenth century, numerous painters settled in the village at the foot of Weyerberg hill, followed by young women who took classes with the local artists. Fritz Overbeck (b. Bremen, 1869; d. Bröcken near Vegesack, 1909) and Hermine Overbeck-Rohte (b. Walsrode, 1869; d. Bremen, 1937) became one of Worpswede’s husband-and-wife creative duos, though their union has been less celebrated than those of Otto Modersohn and Paula Becker or Rainer Maria Rilke and Clara Westhoff. Like the stories of their more famous neighbors, theirs exemplifies life and work in the artists’ colony, but also the dogged struggle for equality in the creative professions. Yet unlike those other relationships, theirs did not break up over the conflict between art and marital life; it lasted until Fritz Overbeck’s tragic early death. In a first, this book contains virtually the entire extant correspondence between the Overbeck-Rohtes in unabridged form and with numerous annotations. Offering fresh and nuanced insight into the lives and oeuvres of its protagonists, it makes for moving and entertaining reading.
- Out of stock
Thomas Lehnerer
Grott18€ Read moreA Facsimile by the Theologian and Artist
The genesis of images is a central aspect of the work of the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (b. Munich, 1955; d. ibid., 1995). In drawings and sculptures, as well as in spatial and conceptual works, the production of images creates a counter-world to our own lives. By transferring fundamental experiences of human existence into art, Lehnerer creates an equivocal, anthropological space for observation and reflection. The artist’s book Grott, published in 1986, contains ambiguous elements. All drawings are positioned on the right page. In the not yet dried state, a double image was formed on the left side, which relativizes the “primary image.” The depictions of animals, people, and the environment were drawn nearly without interruption from a single line. In this style of continuous movement, the overall image can be traced back to its beginning. For Lehnerer, it was important to understand human (self-)consciousness from the perspective of the history of evolution, since there are countless models of thought and belief within this narrative. Grott refers in the title, as well as in the drawings, to the charged relationship between the earthly and the spiritual.
-
Karsten Konrad
Room Service42€ Add to cartThe Visual Archeologist
Objets trouvés, used designer objects, and discarded furniture are the defining elements of the sculptor Karsten Konrad’s (b. Würzburg, 1962; lives and works in Berlin) material poetics. Not unlike the Dadaist or Surrealist readymade, the works that Konrad has made since the 1990s transform these “disregarded things” into sculptures, immersive installations, reliefs, and collages. Detecting the faint traces that anonymous consumers have left on the secondhand stuff, he unfolds an archaeology of the present. Konrad’s first monograph in a decade offers comprehensive insight into an oeuvre that throws the marginal into relief and questions the destructive impact of unbridled consumerism.
Karsten Konrad studied at Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, and the Royal College of Art, London. He has been professor of sculpture at the Universität der Künste in Berlin since 2016. His works are held, amongst others, by the Bundeskunstsammlung Bonn and the Margulies Collection, Miami.
Each copy is hand-signed by the artist on the spine.
-
Ossian Fraser
DISSOLVING ACTS38€ Add to cartOssian Fraser (b. Edinburgh, 1983; lives in Munich and Berlin) molds and captures evanescent moments. Working with volatile materials such as water, dust, or light, the artist exposes the latent potentials of unremarkable situations in the urban fabric and natural scenes. A tunnel in a city, a rock face in the mountains become points of departure and elementary components of his site-specific interventions, which he records in photographs. The book is the first to offer comprehensive insight into Fraser’s artistic practice. Series of pictures showcasing his conceptual and poetic pieces alternate with conversations that not only demarcate the framework in which his art operates, but also touch on the great issues of our time.
Ossian Fraser studied fine arts and sculpture at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Bonn, from 2006 until 2009 and at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, from 2009 until 2013, rounding out his education in Albrecht Schäfer’s master class in 2013–2014.
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game32€ Add to cartThe 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.
-
SOMA
Collective SineUmbra18€ Add to cartOn the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
-
Hans Hofmann
Chimbote24€ Add to cartExpressive Forms between Art and Architecture
As an exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (b. Weißenburg, Germany, 1880; d. New York, USA, 1966) ranks among the preeminent artists of the twentieth century. As a teacher at his Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, which he founded in 1933 after emigrating to the United States, he exerted a formative influence over a generation of young painters. With Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others, he was a member of the illustrious New York School, a loose association of visual artists. In 1950 he was spending time in Europe and collaborated with the architects Josep Lluís Sert and Paul Lester Wiener on designs for colorful wall paintings to be executed on buildings in Chimbote, Peru. The urban masterplan they developed for the city’s post-World War II expansion was never realized, and so Hofmann’s intensely colorful works in large formats have been known only to specialists. The selection gathered in this book together with drawings and a city plan provides focused insight into a visionary project.
- Out of stock
Otto Dix in Baden-Württemberg
Museumsführer9,80€ Read moreSeven Museums Jointly Present the World’s Largest Collection of Works by the Famous German Painter.
In 1933, after the loss of his professorship in Dresden and mounting defamation by the National Socialists, Otto Dix (b. 1891, Untermhaus; d. 1969, Singen) retired to Lake Constance, where he lived for more than thirty years. Together, seven museums in the state of Baden-Württemberg — including the museum in his former home in Hemmenhofen — have the world’s most comprehensive collection of his works at their disposal, providing insight into all facets of his creative work: from the social criticism of the major works, at times depicted with brutal verism, to the old masterly glaze painting of his inner emigration and the expressive alla prima paintings of the late years. For the first time ever, this treasure trove is presented in one volume.
The participating museums: Kunstmuseum Albstadt, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Museum Haus Dix, Gaienhofen-Hemmenhofen, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Kunstmuseum Singen, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.