MEUSER
Works 2012–2023 (ENGLISH)
 | |
|---|---|
| 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) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-123-8 | temporarily not available |
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.
temporarily not available
More books
-
Silke Eva Kästner
Panta Rhei36€ Add to cartSilke Eva Kästner (lives and works in Berlin and Uckermark) developed her creative approach while traveling in India, New York, and Japan. She creates temporary on-site paintings as well as conceptual pieces in which the viewer comes upon prepared materials and becomes part of—or even alters—the picture. Kästner documents these encounters in photographs or filmic traces out of which she compiles films in the editing suite. Probing the potentials of painting as communication, she foregrounds the active intervention and process. In the gallery no less than the urban scene, Kästner places painting in relation to architecture in order to frame it in varying perspectives.
The monograph offers insight into the foci of Kästner’s art; the works are grouped in chapters rather than arranged in chronological sequence. This structure makes the book a space of experience that gives the reader a vivid sense of her ephemeral creations.
After studying with Katharina Grosse at the Weißensee School of Art and Design Berlin, Silke Eva Kästner won the Mart Stam Prize; she honed her craft in India on a NaFöG fellowship and in New York on a yearlong DAAD fellowship. Funding support from the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) enabled her to initiate an ongoing exchange project between Kashmir and Berlin. Her work has been on view at numerous institutions including the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Devi Art Foundation, Delhi; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
-
Roland Schappert
Liebe +–24€ Add to cartRoland Schappert’s Liebe+– is a poetic voyage into the mysterious and paradoxical landscapes of love. Combining an unrelenting eye with lyrical precision, Schappert captures the fragile equilibrium between intimacy and distance, between the longing for union and the need for detachment. The +– in the title is a symbolic shorthand for the ambivalence of love: attraction and repulsion, delight and pain, their constant interplay defining the dynamic of love.
The terse and sometimes aphoristic writings enter into a dialogue with the author’s artful and enigmatic pictures and sculptures—text images sewn out of strings of beads or painted in Champagne chalk that subtly mirror and refract the emotional tension of the poems. Nimbly balancing on the fine line between devotion and disaffection, Schappert’s verses are interspersed with ironic allusions to our digital and urban contemporary world.
By forging a symbiosis of poetry and image, this artist’s book charts a world unto itself in which the boundaries between I and you blur and subject and object are fused in a collective we. It invites us to contemplate love with a fresh eye—as tender touch and fractious idea, as a play of expectation and disappointment that we begin anew every day.
‘Love in the age of social media and dating apps, but not from a Gen Z perspective – but from someone who has known this feeling for much longer. And who brings his experiences – which are certainly representative of many – in ever new combinations of text and images into a form that makes reading and viewing a memorable experience.’ – Wolfgang Ullrich
-
WORLD FRAMED
Zeitgenössische Zeichenkunst der Sammlung Schering Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett38€ Add to cartIn 2008, the Schering Stiftung began acquiring outstanding contemporary works on paper for the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) in Berlin. The collection, which has since grown to 130 nonfigurative drawings and a small number of prints, emphasizes the close conjunction of art and science. The holdings also reflect central tendencies in the art of drawing: in addition to exploring the line and its multifaceted formulation, artists shed light on the bounds of their medium and its expansions and undertake forays into inter-media art within drawing. The lavishly designed publication WORLD FRAME—the title is borrowed from a work by the artist Matt Mullican—presents the works acquired thanks to this partnership. It inquires into how artists translate their perceptions of their world into pictures and which contexts and discourses inform those pictures. Which perspectives, which ideas frame the segment of reality an artist observes?
“World Framed,” exhibition, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, July 7–October 8, 2023
-
Beyond the Box
Dohmen Collection30€ Add to cartBreaking the Mold of Convention
Presenting installations, sculptures, objects, and paintings from Mexico, Cuba, West Africa, Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, rounded out by extraordinary works from the U.S. and Europe, this selection from the Dohmen Collection features artists from countries that did not typically register on “Western” art radars until fifteen years ago. It was the seminal documenta 11 (2002), curated by a team led by Okwui Enwezor, that ushered in a departure from the contemporary art world’s entrenched geopolitical ideas. This book showcases a treasure that has long been ahead of its time yet did not attract public attention: the private collection of Werner Dohmen, a physician in Aachen. It includes works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Wim Delvoye, Jimmie Durham, Diango Hernández, Rodney McMillian, Pavel Pepperstein, Nora Turato, Haegue Yang, and other artists who continue to provoke audiences, ask probing questions, and prompt fresh thinking.
Dr. med. Werner Dohmen has been head of the board of Neuer Aachener Kunstverein since 1988. In addition to building his own collection, he has been a committed supporter of the intercultural project No es arte, which advocates for the return of goldwork of the pre-Colombian Tairona people that was stolen from sacred sites during the colonial conquest of South America.
-
Mirror
Collaborative Pictures by Merrick d’Arcy–Irvine x Julia Bajanova40€ Add to cartWe humans are social creatures. Without others to reflect our behavior back to us, we lose what defines us—language, culture, the capacity for creative expression. That is why photographer Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine and fashion designer Julia Bajanova are invested in intense encounters: not only with the people who appear in their pictures, but also with each other, as artists and as humans, and between their media and the materials out of which they are made. The materiality and sensual experience of these media in the physical world are the focus of the pictures gathered in this volume, which is why d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova eschewed all digital technologies. Sensuality forges an emotional bond between their creative universes, whose boundaries become permeable, as do the dividing lines between genres. Colors and forms are fused in a shared language of visual art and fashion in which d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova write their messages in light on photographic paper. They speak to what makes us human: creative energies untrammelled by the necessities of everyday life. The pictures in Mirror, then, are reflections of our existence and portals of self-knowledge.
-
Sibylle Springer
Ferne Spiegel / Distant Mirrors35€ Add to cartThe paintings of Sibylle Springer (born 1975, lives in Bremen) focus on the role of women in the art world of the digital age. For her portrait series Feed, she has painted 40 female artists to date, based on staged photographs from their Instagram feeds. “Is social media an instrument of emancipation, or does it even lead to new forms of objectification?” (Kohout) In Wait for It, Springer copied pop stars from the internet, but used a silver paint that oxidizes the canvases, thus aging the eternally youthful icons before our eyes—precisely what digital image control seeks to prevent. In her more recent textile objects, Springer interweaves female artists of the past and present. This informative book accompanies her exhibition at the Kunstverein Bremen.
Die Malerei von Sibylle Springer (geb. 1975, lebt in Bremen) widmet sich der Rolle von Frauen in der Kunstwelt des digitalen Zeitalters. Für ihre Portraitserie Feed malte sie bisher 40 Künstlerinnen, basierend auf fotografischen Selbstinszenierungen aus deren Instagram-Feeds. “Sind Soziale Medien Instrumente der Emanzipation oder führen sie gar zu neuen Formen der Objektifizierung?” (Kohout) Für Wait for It kopierte Springer Popstars aus dem Netz, aber benutzte ein die Leinwände oxidierendes Silber, das die ewig-jungen Ikonen vor unseren Augen altern lässt, gerade das, was digitale Imagekontrolle zu verhindern sucht. In neueren, textilen Objekten verknüpft Springer Künstlerinnen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Dieses informative Buch begleitet ihre Ausstellung im Kunstverein Bremen.
FERNE SPIEGEL / DISTANT MIRRORS
KUNSTHALLE BREMEN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -
Tobias Pils
Drawings55€ Add to cartDrawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils’s (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms—the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces—constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils’s visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He—his art—remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils’s drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).
Tobias Pils studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1990 until 1994. His works have been displayed in museums around the world, including at the mumok, Vienna (2021); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); the Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2018); the Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010). In 2020, he executed a large wall painting at the École normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay.
-
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.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur14€ Add to cartThe Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
-
Erich Hörtnagl
to be a man38€ Add to cart“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” The witty remark, attributed to Diane Arbus, succinctly captures the twofold code at work in Erich Hörtnagl’s (b. Innsbruck, 1950) pictures. Aesthetically appealing photographs, mostly in black and white, show men (and women) in a wide variety of cultural, social, and religious contexts: from Swedish bikers and drag queens to monks in Myanmar, from Turkish belly dancers to Tyrolean performers in traditional attire. What looks at first glance like a conventional photobook soon reveals itself to be a brilliantly staged interactive riddle around clichéd notions of masculinity with positive and negative connotations, around gender roles and persistent stereotypes. With the deftly composed visual meta-narrative in to be a man, Hörtnagl, a seasoned theater and film director, lures us into a trap, and the only way out is by taking the challenge head-on: by engaging in self-reflection and questioning our own prejudices and ideas.
-
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.
-
Petra Arnold
Beyond Starlight39,90€ Read moreThe Fischer Family of Circus Artists: A Photographic Long-term Observation
For more than a decade, the photographer Petra Arnold has shadowed the Zirkus Starlight troupe and the Fischers, a family of performers, taking analog photographs, mostly black-and-white, of their life behind the scenes. When she began the project, the Fischers were a large family, with thirty grandchildren. Over time, the company has had to downsize – the business environment is difficult, and few people can make a living as circus artists these days. Arnold’s photographs peek behind the curtain for a study of an existence between circus family and family circus – mostly outside the limelight. The portraits and unstaged scenes are documents of contemporary history and draw attention to the steady decline of circus culture.
-
Jenny Brosinski
Things I’ve Never Said58€ Add to cartJenny Brosinski’s (b. Celle, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) paintings in large formats look like uncoordinated abstract compositions with traces of wear deliberately left in place. This brings their materiality to the fore and reveals the creative process. Expressive oil paint on unprimed canvas, spray-painted lines, typographic elements, shoeprints, or pieces of masking tape on the canvas: on the one hand, these are experiments and statements; on the other hand, they are engagements with painting as such. The artist added sculpture to her repertoire in 2019, making figurative and sometimes colorfully painted imaginary beasts in bronze or stone—more evidence of her subtle sense of humor, which also manifests itself in her pictures and especially in their titles. The extensive monograph offers profound and comprehensive insight into Brosinski’s oeuvre.
Jenny Brosinski studied illustration and animation at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, the École supérieure des arts décoratifs, Strasbourg, and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She completed her education with a master class in Berlin in 2010.
-
Anaïs Horn
Fading14€ Add to cartThe mystery of love and its language, translated into a photographic discourse
The starting point for the series by Anaïs Horn, which the artist, who works in Vienna and Paris, began in 2013 and now comprises eighty photographs, is the book Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Fragments of a Language of Love) by the French philosopher and author Roland Barthes. Terms such as “asceticism,” “magic,” “yearning,” “venerable,” and “unfathomable” serve Horn as models for her staged photographs. The linguistic “figures,” from which Barthes developed his “discourse” in an open structure, find their counterparts in views of people, landscapes, objects, and spaces. The result is a cosmos of images that is as non-binding as it is intimate, as touching as it is light, as vulnerable as it is challenging, and appears to be infinitely expandable. Viewed together, fragments of collective experiences and cultural codes of our notions of love become visible.
-
Peter Zimmermann
abstractness26€ Add to cartTreading the Limits of Originality
Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956, Freiburg; lives and works in Cologne) is one of the most important conceptual media artists. With his work, he consistently experiments with visual reproduction techniques and gained international recognition in the late 1980s with his Book Cover Paintings: motifs from book covers such as that of the Diercke Weltatlas or the Polyglott travel guides, which Zimmermann transfers to the canvas with oil and epoxy resins. The relationship between original and copy is the central theme of his work, with which he addresses the ambivalence of artistic and digital authorship. This monograph brings together early works and a selection of current productions.
Peter Zimmermann studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and was professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne, from 2002 to 2007.
-
Shara Hughes
Time Lapsed35€ Add to cartShara Hughes (b. Atlanta, 1981; lives and works in New York) describes her pictures and drawings as psychological or invented landscapes. Her cliff coasts, river valleys, sunsets, and lush gardens, often framed by abstract patterns, might be the settings of fairy tales or scenes from paradise. As the New Yorker put it, the paintings “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.” Wielding oil paint, brushes, spatulas, and spray cans, the artist celebrates painting itself, not infrequently quoting the masters of past eras.
Shara Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her most recent solo exhibitions are currently on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. In 2021, she had shows at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Garden Museum, London; the Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado; and at Le Consortium, Dijon.
- temporarily not available
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.
-
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.
- Out of stock
Idee – Entwurf – Konzept
48€ Read moreArt in the Preliminary and Provisional Stage
In this sumptuous volume, Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg, the association of visual artists in Baden-Württemberg, puts the focus on visualizations of inchoate impulses, spontaneous flashes of inspiration, and the euphoria of that first spark rather than the painstaking process of hammering out a work. Structured as a complex compendium comprising contributions by more than 240 artists, the book highlights the experimental circumstances in which the individual creative mind experiences the nascency of ideas—without regard for the specialized skills and technical accomplishment that distinguish the finished work. Perfunctory sketches, doodles, drawings, notes and material collages, photographs and other media images provide insight into very intimate stages of the creative process that are not usually revealed to visitors to an exhibition of contemporary art.
- With socks designed by the artist and augmented reality
JOHN BOCK
AURAAROMA-Ω-BEULE42€ Add to cartThe Augmented Reality Book for John Bock
John Bock (b. 1965 in Gribbohm, lives in Berlin) is one of the most important contemporary performance and video artists. In his works characterized by humor and absurdity, the artist places language, human bodies, everyday objects, and spaces in peculiar relationships to each other. He attained international recognition with the installation LiquidityAuraAromaPortfolio at the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. Together with his work Voll die Beule from 2013, it is now included in the collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim. The present augmented reality book not only contextualizes his work, but also immerses the viewer/reader directly in his performances, in which the artist’s head emerges and a filled rubber glove leaks out. A completely new approach to the works of John Bock, packaged in a pair of socks designed by the artist.
John Bock studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and since 2004 has taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe as Professor of Sculpture. He has participated in the 55th Biennale di Venezia, and his works have been featured worldwide in solo exhibitions at, among others, the Berlinische Galerie, the Contemporary Austin, Texas, the Barbican Centre, London, and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
