MEUSER
Werke 2012–2023 (GERMAN)
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| 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
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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.
- Release January 2026
Valentina Jaffé
Dripping Folds and Melting States23€ Add to cartDripping Folds and Melting States is published in conjunction with the young artist Valentina Jaffé’s most extensive institutional solo exhibition to date. Blending artist’s book and catalogue, the volume gathers works from the past five years by Jaffé, who lives and works in the Rhine–Neckar metropolitan region. Taking an interdisciplinary and inter-media approach, she continually refines the conception of collage that is central to her art. Her creative universe is informed by intersections, imbrications, and the exploration of in-between states—by the concurrence of mutability and constancy.
Created out of long-fibered paper and awash in color, the artist’s visual spaces are transformed with each new environment and have an air of breathing membranes. Her ceramics, meanwhile, play with contrasts of hardness and softness, fragility and stability, coldness and warmth. The book reflects Jaffé’s multifaceted experimentation and is enhanced by scholarly contributions by Carolin Heel and Fedra Benoli, who add depth to her engagement with space, body, and material.
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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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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 Roomi-Mirhosseini, Vanessa Joan Müller, Julia Neumann, Martin Paul, Caroline Planert, Maike Prause, Arne Rautenberg, Kira Sophie Röller, Gina Marie Schwenzfeier
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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.
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Pieter Slagboom
Scent of Hypnosis42€ Add to cartPieter Slagboom’s drawings are about life and death. About how these ostensible antagonists are inseparable; how, in his imagination, they are even fused. In his enormous canvases, we are held by the essence of our existence as though by a steel vise: we come from the void and in the end shall return to it. Thousands upon thousands of sweeping lines, twisting like Moebius strips, make for an almost physical experience of this truth. The dead and the newborn emerge from the primeval soup of Slagboom’s lines, as do genitals; we spot larger-than-life fantasies of disturbing sexual acts. The circle of life as a short circuit. The energy of some of the pictures in Slagboom’s oeuvre is almost too much to bear—we shudder before the pigments materializing our latent knowledge: that death is suspended in life.
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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.
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Spaces Embodied (ENGLISH)
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
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Thomas Lehnerer
Grott18€ Add to cartA 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.
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Maxim Gunga
10€ Add to cartThe painter Maxim Gunga is utterly unafraid of physicality. His canvas is a riot of oil paints huddling up against one another, fusing like the beasts, the humans, and the urban landscape of Berlin that serve him as motifs. Body and soul, animal nature and architecture, the profane and the sacred, subculture and mass culture—everything interpenetrates in Gunga’s paintings in large formats, melded into hybrid bodies. The result is an ecstatic intimacy, a flowing of colors and more or less abstracted dynamic forms toward their primal state, toward the matrix, toward pure energy: eternal transformation. It makes sense, then, that his pictures also amalgamate diverse styles and periods in the history of painting. He borrows from (Neo-)Expressionism, from Art Brut, from Baselitz, Lüpertz, the Neue Wilde, from modernism and Fauvism, from van Gogh and Matisse. His pinpoint brushwork, which reveals his extensive training, interweaves art history with our contemporary lifeworld and our affects. All the specters of the past and the present come to meet us in the pictures gathered in this catalogue, in a frenzy of the senses, in the primordial soup of Berlin, into which we dive with joyful abandon.
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Feuer und Farbe
Gemälde und Grafiken von Walter Jacob35€ Add to cartWalter Jacob (1893-1964) was a painter whose oeuvre and life reflected the discontinuities of the twentieth century in condensed form. Contemplative natural scenes and the self-portraits were constants to which he hewed throughout his career; in stylistic terms, however, his oeuvre could hardly be more contradictory. Working first in the Impressionist, then in the Expressionist style, he eventually forged a form of expression tending toward abstraction, although he rejected modernist painting throughout his life. The Nazis considered his early work “degenerate,” which led him—a committed National Socialist and active member of the SA—to adapt not just his ideological convictions, but also his aesthetics to the new era: starting in the mid-1930s, he produced naturalistic depictions, sometimes suggestive of the New Objectivity, of “popular” motifs like landscapes, animals, soldiers, and more. Tellingly, though, the backs of some of his canvases are taken up by works that suggest the pleasure he took in experimenting with color and form. The same tension is palpable in the abstract landscapes of his late oeuvre. This catalog gathers works to retrace Jacob’s checkered career, complemented by (art) historical essays that embed his output in its context.
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Rooted
Female Brazilian Artists28€ Add to cartThe book Rooted. Female Brazilian Artists, accompanies the eponymous exhibition at Brainlab/Munich, which is open until the end of September 2025. The works of the 16 artists come from the collection of Sergio Linhares and Stefan Vilsmeier. The collectors present this selection hoping to illuminate important and difficult themes such as, among others, discrimination, displacement, and violence but also to remind of our shared rootedness in nature. “Art has no obligation to comfort us; it can challenge, disrupt and remind us that our coexistence is fragile.” The volume shows installation views along with close-ups of the individual works and it includes short texts for each artist along with an essay by curator Tereza de Arruda.
Artists: Marlene Almeida, Azuhli (Luiza Diogo Veras), Tarsila do Amaral, Beatrice Arraes, Carmezia Emiliano, Sonia Gomes, Iêda Jardim, Lucia Laguna, Laura Lima, Rosilene Luduvico, Rosana Paulino, Solange Pessoa, Paula Siebra, Luzia Simons, Nádia Taquary, Alexsandra Ribeiro, Larissa de Souza
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Agostino Iacurci
10€ Add to cartAgostino Iacurci’s (b. Foggia, Italy, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings, sculptures, installations, and murals are based on vegetal forms and botanical subjects. Lucid compositions in radiant colors unfurl fantastical ornaments that transcend the division between figuration and abstraction and the hierarchical distinctions of applied art, design, fine art, and folk art. His central theme is the painted garden, in which he stages plants, humans, architecture, geometry, and decoration in a fashionably theatrical landscape. In Iacurci, the interpenetration of nature and civilization is real, integrating mythological motifs from across the history of art and culture, from antiquity to futurism and postmodernism, into his singular style.
Agostino Iacurci studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Since 2009, he has realized numerous large-format murals and installations for public and private institutions. He has also worked with international brands including Apple, Adidas, Hermès, and Starbucks.
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Angelika J. Trojnarski
Noble Earth38€ Add to cartAngelika J. Trojnarski (born 1979 in Mrągowo/Polen; lives and works in Düsseldorf) examines facets of nature through an ecological, scientific, poetic study of their phenomena. Through a process centered on painting, her art articulates allegorical relationships between some of the most significant contentions of our time: humans and nature, strength and fragility, crisis and hope. She expresses a desire to understand nature by reproducing its workings, pointing to its incredible might while underscoring its increasing fragility. Trojnarski overlays raw canvases with paper fragments, employing brushwork and collage to apply materials like graphite or soot, generating a source of energy and suspense through color and contrast. The monograph offers an overview of the last decade of Trojnarski’s work.
Angelika J. Trojnarski 2006–2013 studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. 2006–2009 Painting with Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and Herbert Brandl, from 2010 Free Art with Andreas Gursky.
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Simone Haack – Untangling the Strands / Démêler les Fils
24€ Add to cartSimone Haack’s (b. Rotenburg/Wümme, 1978; lives in Berlin) most recent body of work delves into the theme of hair as a parameter of identity straddling the division between nature and culture. Her second publication with DCV is released on the occasion of two exhibitions: Untangling the Strands at Berlin’s Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik, a collection of casts of ancient sculpture, which are seen in dialogue with her hair pictures; and Helix of Realism at Galerie Droste, Paris, which is part of the official program of events around the grand Surrealism exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in celebration of the Surrealist Manifesto’s centennial. The new book is the first to shed light on the aspect of the surreal in the artist’s oeuvre and uncovers a major source of her visual inspiration: the dream diaries that Haack has kept since she was seventeen and the interest in the unconscious they reflect. It is above all the logic of the dream as well as feelings and moods that inform her paintings.
Haack: “My goal is to use the means of realism to visualize what cannot be seen. To get into an automatism that lets the unconscious speak in order to infuse the pictures with a life of their own. To shed light on the domain where the myths originate.”
- 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.
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Nam Kim
10€ Add to cartThe large-format paintings of Nam Kim (born 1991 in the US, lives in Vienna) are inhabited by chunky androgynous, naked figures, which gently blend with the vegetation, light and shadows, or ornaments around them. “The figures resonate with fluid grace, caught in the intimate moment between thought and touch.” (R. Grunenberg) Here, the human body is equal to its natural environs and not separate. Kim begins her paintings with zones of gestural abstraction, from which the characters grow like plants into her compositions. Kim grew up in Korea and her painting practice combines elements of Asian traditions (in art and theater) with Western art history and virtuality. This book presents her works of the last three years and includes an insightful essay by Robert Grunenberg.
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Ilit Azoulay
Facts and Tales. Truth be Told120€ Add to cartIn an era in which multiple perspectives and oral histories are increasingly vital, Facts and Tales—Truth Be Told delves into the haunting work of Ilit Azoulay. The artist, who was born in Jaffa in 1972, transforms objects, archives, and museum holdings into vessels, challenging traditional hierarchies of knowledge. In her most recent solo exhibition Mere Things at the Jewish Museum, New York, Azoulay presents works that probe the delicate balance between factual representation and nuanced storytelling.
The publication accompanying the exhibition includes archival pages, the artist’s notes, and depictions of the works as well as an introduction by curator Shira Backer and an essay by the art critic, curator, and writer Sarit Shapira, who passed away in 2018. Titled Houses of Junk and Specters: On Ilit Azoulay’s Early Works, it underscores the importance of honoring both factual accuracy and oral histories and invites readers to explore the complex interplay between concrete evidence and the rich and nuanced stories.
Azoulay has devised a singular method to shed light on the blanks in hegemonic narratives and expose them. As though to produce an extortion letter, she clips her pictures from archival materials and photographs of the walls of abandoned buildings and composes them in collages interweaving a multiplicity of views. The resulting works question the exclusive truth claim of museum expertise and reveal its constructed quality. The catalog of her works, designed as a box replete with texts and images, reflects this approach, aiming to dismantle established narratives and open up diverse perspectives.
Box containing 6 different standalone publications, limited edition of 500 copies
THIS PUBLICATION WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE GALLERY LOHAUS SOMINSKY, MUNICH
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Sam Falls
After Life45€ Add to cartSam Falls (b. San Diego, 1984; lives and works in New York) delegates the authorship of his works to the phenomena of nature. Applying water-reactive dry pigments or plant parts to support media like canvas, aluminum, or tiles and then exposing them to the effects of sun, rain, and wind at selected sites for extended periods, he deliberately integrates the agency of chance into his art. The playful yet conceptually rigorous process is a metaphor for the impermanence of all bodily existence. Falls’s symbiotic work with nature and its elements evinces references to the technique of the photogram as well as land art. Melding diverse media—photography, sculpture, and painting—he bridges the gulf between artist, object, and beholder.
Sam Falls studied at Reed College in Portland, Maine, and at the International Center of Photography Bard in New York. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Mori Museum, Tokyo, and Frankfurter Kunstverein.
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MS 00 22
Michael Sailstorfer – Works 2000–202245€ Add to cartMS 00 22 – Michael Sailstorfer: Works 2000–2022
Michael Sailstorfer (b. Velden/Vils, Germany, 1979; lives and works in Berlin) is one of the most renowned German sculptors and object artists of his generation. His sculptural creations, which often require extensive planning and complex production processes, are the results of reflections on and reinterpretations of everyday objects: intriguing, bizarre, and sometimes humorous experimental arrangements and artifacts that interact with their environments, create spaces, or self-deconstruct. These transformative processes combine conceptual depth with poetic allure and tell stories of the passage of time and disintegration. Many of Sailstorfer’s installations depend on the beholder’s active engagement for their effect. He typically documents his sculptural experiments with the camera and later shares them with the public in the form of videos or photographs.
The extensive monograph MS 00 22 presents the most important works from Sailstorfer’s creative career. Formally diverse writings and conversations with the artist offer profound insight into his practice.
Michael Sailstorfer studied with Olaf Metzel at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 1999 until 2005 and at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2004–05. He has won a number of art awards, including the Kunstpreis junger westen (2011) and the Vattenfall Contemporary (2012). Selected solo exhibitions: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2007); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2010); Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2011); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014).
