Maximilian Rödel
Celestial Artefacts
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Domenico de Chirico, Lena Fließbach, Maurice Funken, Stefanie Gerke, Philipp Hindahl, Rafael Horzon, Leif Randt |
| Design | Markus Dreßen, Spector Bureau |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover |
| Size | 26 x 36 cm |
| Pages | 96 |
| Illustrations | 64 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-057-6 |
“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.
More books
-
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.
-
Toni Mauersberg
Entre Nous28€ Add to cartToni Mauersberg (b. Hannover, 1989; lives and works in Berlin) is interested in the different layers of a picture’s signification: there is, in the first instance, what it depicts; then the larger tradition in which it is grounded; and finally, the conditions of its genesis. She employs a range of painterly strategies and techniques to uncover the potentials of paintings as a medium of understanding, insight, and storytelling. The question that animates her art is how it is possible, in this post-religious, post-rational, and post-individual age, to be one’s own person. In her most recent series, Pas de Deux, Mauersberg investigates the complex visual language of abstract painting, which originated in part in a quest for new ways of representing spirituality and emancipation. Combining nonrepresentational pictures with portraits, she draws attention to how both are products of “making,” composed of nothing but color, while enlarging their interpretative ambits. The dialogue between the paintings is meant to help the beholders chart their own course as they unlock what appear to be hidden laws encoded in pictures.
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.
-
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.
-
Glückliche Tage
32€ Add to cartWe see in contrasts. Freedom from pain follows pain, and felicity is the more radiant after a period of misfortune. Happiness, that is to say, displaces unhappiness and is perhaps its recompense; what is certain is that, as antonyms, they are (at least in this world) inconceivable without each other. The contrast they form also underlies the tensions inherent in the works in this catalogue. Some take us straight from the pinnacle of happiness down into the abyss, while in others the gradients of ascent or descent are so gentle that no culmination is perceptible. What all oeuvres gathered in the book have in common is that they furnish the human being, a social creature, with an experience of resonance. Happiness and unhappiness reverberate between the art and the beholders, leaving, in the best case, a lasting impression. Opening the catalogue—a metaphor for the human condition materialized in paper—one overhears this serenely melancholy echo of the works.
Artists: Rui Chafes, Tamara Eckhardt, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Barbara Hammer, Carsten Höller, Ken Lum, Johanna von Monkiewitsch, Yoko Ono, Heike Weber, Stefan Wissel
With contributions by: Yevgenia Belorusets, Nell Sophie Bender, Elias Bendfeldt, Laura Berestecki, Annabella Ernst, Annika Gaeth, Hristina Georgieva, Markus Heinzelmann, Malwin Kraßnigg, Max Florian Kühlem, Natascha Laurier, Martin Middeke, Navaz Mirhosseini, Vanessa Joan Müller, Julia Neumann, Martin Paul, Caroline Planert, Maike Prause, Arne Rautenberg, Kira Sophie Röller, Gina Marie Schwenzfeier
-
Brandon Lipchik
10€ Add to cartIn recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.
-
Lovis Corinth
Maestro del colore – Maestro della grafica35€ Add to cartLovis Corinth (b. Tapiau, East Prussia, 1858; d. Zandvoort, Netherlands, 1925) ranks among the leading German Impressionists. But he has also been described as a precursor of Expressionism for his impulsive and passionate style in painting and graphic art as well his liberal handling of form, which vividly conveys agitated states of mind and powerful emotions. In addition to an eminent body of paintings and numerous drawings and watercolors, he left a graphic oeuvre encompassing over a thousand prints. In his paintings as in his etchings and lithographs, Corinth dedicates himself to a set of recurring themes: mythological and religious motifs, nudes, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits of his family and close friends. His graphic work also shows him engaging with the challenges of self-portraiture.
-
Andreas Eriksson
42€ Add to cartAll is related, from the outside in. Look what’s behind it.
Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975 in Björsäter, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden) is one of Sweden’s most notable contemporary artists. His artistic practice is based on a traditional painterly language, but he constantly expands this field to also encompass a vast production of textile works. He examines different histories through conceptual twists and turns in sculpture and prints. This monograph, the artist’s first, seeks to explain and illustrate Eriksson’s development and thoughts behind the meandering array of works he produces. It is a close look behind the canvas.
Andreas Eriksson studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1993 to 1998 and represented Sweden with the Nordic Pavilion at the 54. Biennale di Venezia. His most comprehensive solo exhibition to date took place in 2014 at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.
-
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.
- Release May 2025
Antonia Hirsch
Phenomenal Fracture24€ Add to cartIn a probing engagement with the screen, an omnipresent object in contemporary life, Antonia Hirsch charts the gulf between the digital and the analog, the two spheres of which our perceived reality is composed. In provocative installations and objects, the artist conceives the distinctions between screen, mirror, and blade as less than sharply defined. Her works show rigidly geometric shapes made of hard and shimmering glass and steel; they encounter eerily somatic and perishable-looking cardboard or soft foamed-plastic components that recall the bodies they perhaps once served. Reflective surfaces mirror our gaze, but the less classy materials, too, await recognition by the beholder’s body. The book accompanies Hirsch’s solo exhibition “Phenomenal Fracture” at Kunsthalle Lingen; photographs and writings convey extensive and sustained impressions that run the gamut from the uncanny to the darkly humorous.
-
Jakob Ganslmeier
Lovely Planet. Polen / Poland16€ Add to cartAn Unconventional and Humorous Guide to a Country of Contrasts
In 2015, the photographer Jakob Ganslmeier (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) went on an extended tour of Poland in search of shots that captured the country’s social realities and way of life at a time of wrenching changes. The title of his project evokes associations with Lonely Planet, one of the world’s best-selling series of travel guides, and the artist took inspiration from the format of the popular books, where recommendations for readers exploring strange lands are grouped by categories. Crisscrossing Poland—he covered over ten thousand kilometers—Ganslmeier encountered widely different people and draws our attention to places that would never make it into a guidebook. His pictures show a country of extremes, between boomtown optimism and decline, consumerism and poverty, gleaming façades and bleak village streets.
Jakob Ganslmeier studied at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin, and at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. His pictures, which have garnered numerous awards, are frequently featured in leading German media and have been shown in exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus, the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, the Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, and the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris.
- temporarily not available
David Hockney: Insights
Reflecting the Tate CollectionRead moreDavid Hockney (born 1937 in Bradford) is one of the most influential and technically versatile artists living today. This new publication gathers some of his most defining work from the 1960s to the present, including major works in the Tate collection. From early graphic cycles, double portraits and iconic pool paintings through to his photo collages, plein air landscapes, iPad drawings, and multimedia installations, the volume documents central themes and genres in Hockney’s oeuvre, as well as his constant experimentation.
Original essays by renowned critics and commentators illuminate the artist’s search for new forms of expression, the topographical and biographical reference points of his work, the technical innovation of his painting and printmaking, as well as his approach to new media.
-
Franziska Windisch
Walk with a wire14€ Add to cartThe interweaving of traces, sounds, and movements in an impressive work of sound art
The narrow brown magnetic tape of an audio cassette runs through a half-opened hand, slides through the fingers, is palpated in constant motion, and finally falls to the ground. The hand and its touching, particles of sand and small stones leave their traces and, when the tape is played, generate a multi-layered soundscape with crackling and background noises.
In her performative action in the ruins of the city of Messene in the Peloponnese region of Greece, Franziska Windisch (b. 1983) thematizes aspects of repetition and recording. Her artistic examination of the vestiges of the ancient urban space, the reciprocal transition from traces to writing in her video documentation, and the graphic element of the line visible on the ground lead to a reflection on temporality, dissolution, and decay. -
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.
-
America! America!
How real is real?38€ Add to cartMyths, Projections, Aspirations
In times of fake news and alternative facts it is becoming even more clear how the American Dream is closely interwoven with emotional pictures and symbols. At the same time, it can be said that no other nation might have the same strong awareness of the power of images. Images of the American Way of Life, which are produced in media and entertainment, are able to consolidate existing power structures and perceptions of reality, but also question them in a radical way. The psychologically charged canvasses of Eric Fischl, the hermetic scenes of Alex Katz, the enormous film-noir-like graffiti paintings of Robert Longo dissect the dreams and fears of an insecure white middle class. Simultaneously, artists such as Jeff Wall or Cindy Sherman conquer scenes that critically reflect our media-influenced perception, becoming models for subsequent generations. By showing 70 masterpieces of US-contemporary art, the book shows how artists from the 1960s to date comment on the American reality.
-
CHRISTIAN ROTHMANN
The Light Touch45€ Add to cartA Monograph of Curiosity
Christian Rothmann (b. Kędzierzyn, Poland, 1954; lives and works in Berlin) is an artistic jack-of-all-trades, a builder of bridges between cultures, and a restless globetrotter and traveler across time. He takes photographs wherever he goes, especially when he is on the road, gathering documentaries with a creative edge, spontaneous yet powerfully symbolic pictures, or conceptual series. His motifs have included basketball hoops in the most unbelievable places, toys in restaurants and stores, exotic dishes, and—in the sequence Legs of the World—beautiful legs, of real-world women, but also of advertising-poster idols and art objects. He has a special knack for recruiting accomplices from all age groups and across social and cultural differences, as for his series you and me or Mother & Daughter. Fierce large-format paintings and delicate watercolors on small paper formats from Rothmann’s studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg complement his long-term photographic projects. The Light Touch presents the artist’s variegated visual art on almost five hundred pages.
-
6 U L
Lust and Desire in Art and Design28€ Add to cart“Whose Jizz is this?” Sechs-u-ell: to make sense of the publication title, trust your college German and your phonetic ear. “Sexual,” here, comprises the entire broad spectrum of what we associate with carnal pleasure. Lust, desire, ecstasy, repression, obsession—the world of art, fashion, and design abounds with specimens of eroticism and sexuality in their infinite variety, shopworn stereotypes be damned. Looking back on the thorough revision of society’s ideas about sexuality in the past three decades, the book inquires into how the works of visual artists, fashion creatives, and designers reflect today’s public debates over biological and social gender roles, power structures, and sexual violence or the fading of taboos over sexual practices. With works and designs by Walter Van Beirendonck, Monica Bonvicini, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jürgen Klauke, Peaches, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Vivienne Westwood, and many more. This book documents a grand exhibition scheduled for the past summer at the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig, which had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
-
Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
-
Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
-
Vera Mercer
New Works28€ Add to cartBeauty and Melancholy, Joie de Vivre and Vanity
The American photographer Vera Mercer’s (b. Berlin, 1936; lives and works in Omaha and Paris) oeuvre defies easy summary. She started taking pictures in Paris in the 1960s, making portraits of her then husband Daniel Spoerri—who, like she, was initially training as a dancer—and other members of the Fluxus group and Nouveaux Réalistes, including Emmett Williams and Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé. Around the same time, she also photographed Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp for various magazines; her friends Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle were among her favorite sitters.
In the 1970s, she took a long creative hiatus: after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, she poured all her energy into starting a number of restaurants and developing an entire downtown neighborhood. But then, in the early years of the new millennium, she returned to photography, capturing breathtaking neo-baroque still lifes featuring flowers, fruits, freshly killed game, antique glasses, and illuminating candles in large formats.
Vera Mercer’s fourth monograph presents her most recent opulent still lifes in color, as well as a novelty in her oeuvre: restrained black-and-white flower pictures and portraits realized as small-format platinum prints.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (ENGLISH)28€ Add to cartThe sculptor and object artist Liam Gillick (b. Aylesbury, UK, 1964; lives and works in New York) has created an intervention titled Filtered Time for the historic galleries of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Projections of light and color and acoustic effects condense six thousand years of cultural history into an immersive spatial experience. Gillick initiates a conversation between the iconic Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, the monumental sculptures of Tell Halaf, and other exhibits, engendering new layers of meaning across all historical periods. The first joint project of the Vorderasiatisches Museum and the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart makes for a singular visual and sensory experience. Designed by the artist himself, the publication not only documents the richly colorful production, but also provides insight into the eventful history of the museum, which is approaching its centennial.
Liam Gillick studied at the Hertfordshire College of Art in 1983–1984 and at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1984 until 1987. Gillick is a prolific published writer as well, producing essays, reviews, fiction, and theatrical scenarios.
