Matthew Davis
Kustodiev
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | David Lillington |
| Design | Book Book, Berlin |
| Size | 16,5 x 24 cm |
| Pages | 48 |
| Illustrations | 29 |
| Cover | Stapled booklet with text segment on shortened pages |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-82-1 |
An Expressive Instant in Painting
The art of Matthew Davis (b. 1969, Colchester, UK; lives and works in Berlin) operates between the micro and macro dimensions, between control and chance. Working with extraordinary precision, the artist applies drops of synthetic resin varnishes and enamel paints to canvases laid flat. The artist’s book Kustodiev showcases a recent innovative turn in Davis’s output, whose latest works were inspired by the lusciously colorful pictures of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev (1878–1927). Kustodiev was manufactured using offset presses and Office Offset, a largely forgotten reproduction process based on miniature offset printing machines. The publication is released in a limited edition of 250 copies.
Matthew Davis studied at the Camberwell College of Arts, London, and the Norwich School of Art and Design. His work has been shown at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven; and other museums and galleries.
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Emmanuel Bornstein / Lotte Laserstein
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Dissonance
Platform GermanyRead moreA Changed Vision—New Painting from Germany
Post-reunification Germany has emerged as an important forum for international painting. The generation of artists born in the 1970s and 1980s eschew alignment with collective tendencies and resist clearly definable influences. Meanwhile, their art has registered the cultural and sociological dislocations and divergences since the fall of the Iron Curtain with seismographic precision.
The editors of Dissonance – Platform Germany present eighty-one of the most significant painters living and working in Germany in the past two decades. They have the courage of strong opinions, turn the spotlight on unsuspected treasures, and tease out the unexpected value in aesthetically thrilling achievements of programmatic pluralism. A vital survey of one of the most exciting chapters in the more recent history of art in Germany.
Some of the presented artists have graciously agreed to allow DCV to release limited editions of their works, which you can find here.
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Toni Mauersberg studied Jewish studies at Freie Universität Berlin in 2008–2012 and fine arts with Leiko Ikemura at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009. In 2017, she was Michael Müller’s master student.
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Michelle Jezierski
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Michelle Jezierski studied with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of Arts and graduated from Valérie Favre’s class in 2008. She also received a fellowship for a semester abroad at Cooper Union, New York, where she studied with Amy Sillman.
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On Trickling Away
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Wolfgang Gäfgen
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While Wolfgang Gäfgen’s (b. Hamburg, 1936; lives and works in Stuttgart and Esslingen) hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less accomplished than the artist’s graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier history of art or allusions to historic myths.
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Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte27,50€ Add to cartErinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
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6 U L
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Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
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Sprache/Text/Bild
32€ Add to cartSpoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change—that we share responsibility for them.
Artists: John Baldessari, Maria Bartuszová, Alice Bidault, Alejandro Cesarco, Ayşe Erkmen, Nadine Fecht, Gary Hill, Janice Kerbel, Gabriel Kladek, Gordon Parks, The National AIDS Memorial, Markus Vater, Gillian Wearing
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Peter Hermann
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On Air
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With five scholarly essays and numerous illustrations and notes on individual works, the comprehensive publication offers an attractive introduction to the subject.
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wolfgang thiel
skulpturale standpunkte38€ Add to cartWolfgang Thiel (b. Zweibrücken, 1952; lives and works in Plochingen) is a sculptor who makes figurative work. He is especially interested in the southern German tradition of colorfully painted sculpture, which he seeks to bring into the twenty-first century. His experimental handling of various genres and materials suggests a researcher’s mind. Switching between different materials is key to Thiel’s approach because their particular characteristics demand his constant attention. Å playful aspect is essential to all his works, which include large-format sculptures in public settings (more than thirty have been installed in Germany) as well as sculptural garden landscapes, stage designs, and costumes.
The opulent wide-format book containing almost three hundred illustrations offers a representative overview of Wolfgang Thiel’s oeuvre and includes the first complete chronological catalogue raisonné of his works in wood.
Wolfgang Thiel studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design from 1970 until 1976 and later taught at his alma mater from 1987 until 1991. From 2008 until 2018, he held a teaching position at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart. In 1990, he won the Art Award of the City of Stuttgart. Since 1977, Thiel’s work has been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions in Switzerland, France, and Germany.
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Dietmar Lutz
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For a full year, from August 2020 until August 2021, Dietmar Lutz (b. Ellwangen, 1968; lives and works in Düsseldorf) painted or drew a picture every day in which he rendered a scene or detail from his day-to-day life. All 365 works appear here in chronological sequence, either in reproductions or in photographs showing them in the setting in which they were created. Taken together, the series constitutes a radically subjective review of one year. The paintings capture memories, but although they invariably owe their existence to a particular situation, they do not necessarily frame it as a memorable event. The artist observes himself in his world and defines his role in it. Painting as a daily task seems to structure time rather than the other way around. Each picture opens up a new space in which the different facets of time manifest themselves to the senses.
Dietmar Lutz studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and rose to renown with large-format paintings in which he portrays situations from ordinary life and weaves references to the histories of film and literature. Lutz is a cofounder of the German-British artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, with which he has exhibited at the 1st Athens Biennale; Deitch Projects, New York; Tate Britain, London; and elsewhere.
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Tim David Trillsam
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Alexander Ruthner
Cour: Sommer36€ Add to cartContemplating Nature in a Reduced-Mobility Environment
“The events of the year 2021, which was defined by lockdowns, the pandemic, and restrictions, has brought out the resonance in my pictures of Gustave Courbet’s realism,” Alexander Ruthner (b. Vienna, 1982; lives and works in Vienna) says about his most recent works: oil paintings featuring lush green vegetation and veritable down comforters painted all-over in saturated color gradients. The works will make their public début as the publication is released in the summer of 2021, hence the word “Sommer” in the title. The other word, “Cour,” is a nod to the first syllable of the French painter’s name as well as French for “court,” a term the artist creatively reinterprets as a synonym for the solitary “castle of the mind” to which we have retreated under pandemic conditions. Ruthner, who studied with Peter Kogler, Daniel Richter, and Albert Oehlen, revisits the boscage and pasture painting of past eras in new works that propose a distinctive personal interpretation of that tradition’s charm.
Alexander Ruthner’s work has been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Montenegro, among other venues.
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Tamara Suhr
Skulpturen24€ Add to cartHesitant yet Immediately Present
As a sculptor, Tamara Suhr (b. 1968, Tübingen; lives and works in Ludwigsburg) has devoted herself unswervingly to the human figure. Her subjects are figures of children whose hesitancy always embodies a certain curiosity, a sense of expectation. In their form reduced to the essential, indeed almost archaic, they radiate calm and serenity—supported by balance with regard to both the motif and possible associations. In their small size and vulnerability, Suhr’s figurative sculptures, painstakingly crafted in bronze, seem apparently in need of protection, yet they appear strong and courageous. They stand, gaze, crouch, fish, swim or balance. They are present, in the here and now, a symbol for the children of the world.
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Shara Hughes
Day by Day by DayRead moreGraphic Manifestations of the Unconscious
The painter Shara Hughes (b. Atlanta, GA, 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA) is one of the rising stars of the American arts scene. Her colorful imaginary landscapes, executed in a radiant palette and with an expressive gesture, pay homage to the Symbolists, the Fauves, and the Expressionists, whose artful handling of lighting and depth she deftly emulates. In an intuitive approach, Hughes applies paints to the canvas that match her present state of mind. She calls her pictures “emotional landscapes” and notes that she does not know what will happen next; her work on them touches on a vulnerable boundary. The lavish book presents numerous works on paper, most of them in large formats, and contains an essay by the New York-based art critic Andrew Russeth.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Newport Art Museum, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
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Konkrete Progressionen
François Morellet & Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr & Hartmut Böhm15€ Add to cartThanks to a generous donor, the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret welcomed a number of outstanding works to its collection in 2022. Titled Konkrete Progressionen, the first exhibition to showcase a selection from the gift features four internationally renowned artists whose works are derived from mathematical or geometric procedures: the concrete systematists Hartmut Böhm (1938–2021) and François Morellet (1926–2016) and the pioneers of computer-generated art Manfred Mohr (1938–) and Vera Molnar (1924–).
The book documents the serial paintings, drawings, collages, wall objects, and monumental installations and environments of steel beams or concrete blocks. The works play concrete games with the beholder’s ability to recognize patterns in binary contrasts or layered grids. They show sine waves, vector series, hypercubes, and markings derived from the circular constant π or the Fibonacci sequence—and in each instance demonstrate primarily how the basis of calculation takes on a life of its own.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen runs until April 14, 2024.
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Heike Negenborn
Terra Cognita24€ Add to cartLebensraum of our Time: Contemporary Landscape Painting
The central theme of Heike Negenborn (b. 1964, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler; lives and works in Windesheim) is the seen lebensraum. In reference to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, her works stand in a specific tradition of capturing reality. With her new group of works titled Net-Scape – Landscape in Transition, Negenborn transfers art historical references into contemporary images. The artist is interested in the possibilities of media transfer and the increasing appropriation of analog reality by the digital image. The present volume provides impressive insights into the developments of the landscape painter from 2007 to 2020.
Heike Negenborn studied fine arts at Austin College, Texas, Art Education at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, and Painting and Printmaking at the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz.
