


MEUSER
Werke 2012–2023 (GERMAN)
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Bärbel Grässlin, Christian Malycha, Claes Nordenhake, Gisela Capitain, Jochen Meyer, Thomas Riegger |
Author(s) | Alexander Linn, Christopher Williams, Elizabeth Anne Johnson, Gregor Jansen, Hannah Eckstein, Noemi Smolik, Peter Pakesch, Ulrike Groos |
Design | Studio Martin Steiner |
Size | 24 x 30 cm |
Cover | Hardcover |
Pages | 160 |
Illustrations | 85 |
Language(s) | German |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-119-1 |
Ever 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.
More books
-
Katharina Arndt
While waiting for Death38€ Add to cartLife for the most part consists of banalities. What to make of it? Katharina Arndt has decided to dip thick brushes into luminous bold acrylic paints, which she applies expansively without regard for the ostensible gray areas of life. Every stroke is valid, there’s no remorse or trepidation, everything is foreground, all elements of a picture are equipollent. The people in Arndt’s paintings from 2022–23 gathered in this catalog are simply there, for the moment, gaping into their cell phones, stuffing themselves with burgers. Nothing more. That makes her works distorted depictions of our hedonistic society with its craving for sensuality, even as we always have one eye riveted on the virtual. The harder, then, to face up to physical reality; with all photo filters off, its imperfections are unmistakable. And so, although we clearly delight in these gaudy colors, the pictures contain intimations of melancholy and death, too. Knowing that the hour of farewell is near, Arndt’s figures stimulate their senses. They kill time down to the very end with jarring trivia, agitated Sisyphuses wallowing in their glittering inadequacy.
-
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.
-
nolde/kritik/documenta (German)
42€ Add to cartEmil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
-
Cristina Lucas
Immobile Engine29€ Add to cartMechanisms of Power
The Spanish artist Cristina Lucas (b. Jaén, 1973; lives and works in Madrid) works in a wide range of media and genres. Central concerns include the confrontation of subjective and political historiographies and a critical examination of cultural stereotypes. The publication’s point of departure is the multichannel video installation Unending Lightning, begun in 2013, in which Lucas undertakes a painstaking study of the history of aerial warfare. The book also showcases works that limn a contemporary perspective on value chains and the capitalization of time and landscape. Moreover, the artist has developed a corpus of critical cartographic models that offer algorithmic, philosophical, poetic, or, in some instances, humorous visualizations of unexpected nexuses. The first German-language publication on Cristina Lucas’s art, it offers a comprehensive survey of her oeuvre to date.
Cristina Lucas studied fine arts at the University of California and the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She has had residencies in Paris, Amsterdam, and New York. Her work has been exhibited at MUDAM, Luxembourg; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile, and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Kiasma, Helsinki; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
-
Judit Reigl
Kraftfelder / Centers of Dominance28€ Add to cartBeginning in the 1950s, Judit Reigl (b. Kapuvár, Hungary, 1923; d. Marcoussis, France, 2020) builds a singular creative oeuvre between abstraction and figuration, between Surrealism and gestural painting. After studying art in Budapest, Reigl flees Hungary in 1950; arriving in Paris, she is introduced to André Breton, who organizes her first exhibition in 1954. Under the influence of the École de Paris, she branches out into écriture automatique, then shifts toward free expression. Like her contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler in New York, she lays out ever larger unprimed canvases on the floor and works them with a brush, her fingers, or other instruments. After 1966, bodily shapes emerge from her abstractions, and figures reappear in the pictures.
On occasion of Reigl’s centenary and the gift of three major works, the Neue Nationalgalerie mounts the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Germany. The book surveys the oeuvre of one of the most important protagonists of European art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Judit Reigl studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1942 until 1945 and was a fellow at the Hungarian Academy in Rome in 1947–48. From 1950 onwards, she lived and worked in France.
-
Stephan Grunenberg
10€ Add to cartStephan Grunenberg (b. 1954) paints peculiar portraits: not heads or sitting and reclining figures but seemingly independent feet, legs, trousers, socks or soles of shoes. These and other under-appreciated motives are playfully arranged in captivating compositions which take issue with our hierarchical habits while looking at art. “Leaving out the ‘civilized’, educated head and centering on neglected parts such as the legs, including the lower abdomen—which is either eroticized or made taboo—is the artist’s point”, writes Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in an essay that accompanies the images inside this small and attractive new book. The paintings reproduced in this volume were all exhibited in Grunenberg’s latest exhibition in 2024, which was titled tongue-in-cheek „Representatives Regional To Earth.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Jenny Michel
Doors, Windows and Cells38€ Add to cartThe Detritus of Our Society
For around two decades, the artist Jenny Michel (b. Worms, 1975; lives and works in Berlin) has devoted herself to minute particles such as dust, cobwebs, and electromagnetic fields in space. Her fascination with orders of knowledge, symbolism, and utopian visions is reflected by installations, drawings, prints, and sculptures that she exhibits in carefully composed sprawling ensembles. Aggregating fantastic fragments of the world manufactured from paper, adhesive tape, staples, and other industrially made small parts, Michel builds disconcertingly dense structures—human knowledge is transformed into the debris of civilization, its legibility lost beneath palimpsestic layers of meanings and resignifications. The extensive monograph surveys major series in the artist’s oeuvre and presents new works on paper.
Jenny Michel studied at Kunsthochschule Kassel and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been on view at Museum Wiesbaden, the Draiflessen Collection, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and Berlinische Galerie, among other venues. In 2010, Michel was honored with the HAP Grieshaber Prize.
- out of stock
Drucksache Bauhaus
38€ Add to cartThe Early Years of the Weimar Print Workshop
At the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, the print workshop began operation in the spring of 1919 as the first workshop. Printmaking corresponded to the basic idea of the Bauhaus in that it realized the unity of art and craftsmanship in an ideal manner. With the groundbreaking project Bauhaus-Drucke. Neue Europaeische Graphik, four portfolios were created in which forty-five representatives of the European artistic avant-garde participated. In the announcement brochure of 1921, it stated: “The many who do not yet know about the work of the Bauhaus, and who cannot know, are to be made aware of us through this work.” The book presents the portfolios published between 1921 and 1924, together with other works printed at the Bauhaus by Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer. The Stuttgarter Prolog also sheds light on the influence of Adolf Hölzel, whose students and later Bauhaus masters Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten brought many of his ideas to the Bauhaus.
-
John M Armleder
CA. CA.19€ Add to cartCommentaries on our Present Day Realities and the Status of Art
John M Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva; lives and works in Geneva and New York) is one of the most influential contemporary conceptual, performance and object artists. The profound and the banal, control and coincidence, high culture and everyday life coalesce in Armleder’s work to create a unique experience. The works of the Swiss – often humorous or ironically twisted commentaries on contemporary reality – draw on the formal repertoire of Classical Modernism, as well as on video and design. The book focuses on large-scale, site-specific installations and wall pieces, showing in detail the broad spectrum of Armleder’s work.
John M Armleder studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. He represented Switzerland 1986 at the 42nd Biennale di Venezia and participated in documenta 8 one year later. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Belvedere, Vienna, amongst others.
-
Kraftwerk
Innovation durch Transformation34€ Add to cartThe power plant in Rottweil, built in 1915 by the architect Paul Bonatz, looks back on a rich and interesting history: until 1976, it provided power to a gunpowder factory and, later, to a rayon manufacturer and at times also to the city of Rottweil. The façade design, the imposing perron leading up to the main entrance, and the tall chimneys still stand as testament to the modernist industrial structure’s erstwhile significance. Twenty years after the plant was taken out of service, the entrepreneurs Thomas Wenger and Mike Wutta with their event agency trend factory took over the dilapidated building with the surrounding premises and restored it, taking care to preserve its architectonic elements and the most important technical installations. (In the course of fifteen years, around 60,000 square feet of floorspace were reopened, with a special emphasis on the distinctive blend of morbid charm and contemporary design.) The power plant now serves the company as its headquarters and, more importantly, as a cutting-edge venue for concerts, congresses, and corporate events that has attracted clients and visitors from all over Baden-Württemberg and beyond.
-
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.
-
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).
- Out of stock
Flatland
35€ Read moreBetween the Dimensions
The title of this book quotes a literary work by Edwin A. Abbott that was first published in 1884 and gradually gained considerable fame: an allegorical satire whose protagonists are geometric figures, narrated by a square that relates its discovery of a three-dimensional world. Flatland examines the ways in which artists have found inspiration in the formal vocabularies of abstraction since the 1960s. The lavishly designed book gathers works from the past six decades that challenge orthodox interpretations of abstraction.
Contributing artists: Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Francis Baudevin, Philippe Decrauzat, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Hoël Duret, Sylvie Fanchon, Liam Gillick, Mark Hagen, Christian Hidaka, Sonia Kacem, Tarik Kiswanson, Vera Kox, Sarah Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Damián Navarro, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Bruno Peinado, Julien Prévieux, Eva Taulois, John Tremblay, Pierre Vadi, Elsa Werth, Raphaël Zarka
-
Candida Höfer
Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn35€ Add to cartThe Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Yesterday and Today
The imposing presence of architecture captured in the absence of humans: that is the defining characteristic of the photographs with which Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde; lives and works in Cologne) has risen to international renown. In 1992, she captured the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in ten analogue black-and-white pictures that have not been on public display. In 2020, Höfer returned to the institute to take more pictures using a digital camera. The two series now make their public début in the institute’s halls and are gathered in this book. Undertaking a historically and aesthetically captivating comparison, Höfer probes the ways in which university life has changed over almost three decades.
Candida Höfer was a member of Bernd Becher’s inaugural photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works were shown at documenta 11 in 2002, and in 2003, she and Martin Kippenberger represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.
-
Felix Schramm
Things To Come44€ Add to cartFelix Schramm’s (b. Hamburg, 1970; lives and works in Düsseldorf) sculptural oeuvre reflects a probing engagement with space and the body. In works in a variety of media, including installations that intervene into a given setting, sculptures, and collages, the artist creates three-dimensional forms out of classical materials and industrial staples as well as detritus and dust. Deformations, rifts, cracks, or impurities undermine the existing order in his constructed formal ensembles, allowing novel correspondences in space and interconnections across time to emerge. The material and its subjection to form are held in a precarious balance; disintegration, which is an integral element of Schramm’s art, paves the way for artistic assertion and reformulation. The extensive publication gathers works and exhibitions of the past five years. It is Schramm’s first monograph, presenting a cross-section of his entire oeuvre with all bodies of work.
Felix Schramm studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, from 1991 until 1993 and at the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf, where he was in Jannis Kounellis’s master class, from 1994 until 1998. He rounded out his education with residencies in Tokyo in 2000 and at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2008.
-
nolde/kritik/documenta (English)
42€ Add to cartEmil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
-
Penny Hes Yassour
Temp-Est24€ Add to cartA Monograph about the Award-Winning Israeli Artist
Penny Hes Yassour (b. 1950, lives and works at kibbutz En-Harod Ihud) tells stories and keeps history alive, explores the boundary between remembering and forgetting. In her installations she combines sound, image, and a multi-part world of objects into narrative mise-en-scènes of great poetic power. Hes Yassour leads the viewer through the Jordan Valley with its many watchtowers, accompanies the transformation of the landscape in a gigantic, stagelike water basin, and documents the flight of bats in a narrow, labyrinthine spatial installation. The book published on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition in Germany provides comprehensive insights into her subtle artistic work.