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
-
Pensive Images
16 Artists in Dialogue with W. G. Sebald35€ Add to cartOn Memories and Temporalities
Pensive Images examines the complex and invariably singular relationships through which images and memories are inextricably linked. The book relates to the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald (b. 1944, Wertach; d. 2011, Norfolk), especially to four fictional stories he published between 1990 and 2001, in which he inserted non-captioned blackand- white photographs of uncertain provenance and nature into the text like memories punctuating ways reminiscent of his writing. It brings together 16 artists who, in ways reminiscent of Sebald’s approach, explored the realms of memory and past from the perspective of experience and intertwining temporalities.
With works by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Dove Allouche, Lonnie van Brummelen / Siebren de Haan, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Jason Dodge, Félix González-Torres, Ian Kiaer, Jochen Lempert, Zoe Leonard, Helen Mirra, Dominique Petitgand, John Stezaker, Danh Vo and Tris Vonna-Michell.
-
Cudelice Brazelton IV
Mortal Surface35€ Add to cartCudelice Brazelton IV’s works are magnets. He uses them to glean what he finds in the urban landscape, in the street, in factories and studios: fabric, leather, metal, cardboard, and all sorts of implements. He arranges these materials and things atop one another and side by side in collages, assemblages, and sculptures, staging encounters also between the contexts in which they originated and what he calls their “undercurrents,” their subtexts. Such frames of reference, including that of the exhibition space, play a key role in his art, an aspect he will occasionally engage quite explicitly, creating site-specific works for some settings. This makes the space the context and a part of the piece, sometimes physically so, as when Brazelton works directly on the walls. The recent works gathered in this catalogue were displayed in a former railcar repair workshop. It is hard to imagine a more industrial, “metallic” environment. There, as between the covers of this catalogue, Brazelton’s works appear to their fullest advantage, becoming veritable magnets drawing the gaze.
-
“Das Quadrat muss den Raum beherrschen!”
Aurélie Nemours und Zeitgenossen15€ Add to cartDoes everything in the world obey a mathematical logic, can everything be calculated? In our present age of probability, some would say the answer is a straightforward yes, inevitably prompting the question: Even art? Yes, even art, or so the defenders of Concrete Art would respond, a twentieth-century movement that took abstraction as a focus on the “idea of art itself” (W. Kandinsky) to the next level. The act of painting was now to be subject to preconceived organizing principles as though they were laws of nature. One prominent exponent of the genre was Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005), who had a penchant for the square; her credo was that it needed to “rule space.” That is why the equilateral quadrangle is the defining shape in this catalog, which brings Nemours’ oeuvre into focus. Her iconic position is flanked by works by seventeen others that similarly grapple with the square, including pictures and sculptures with square basic forms, grids, or canvases. All these works derive their force from the stern authority of the square: only when art constrains its means can it bring its full potential to bear.
ARTISTS:
JOSEF ALBERS, GÖTZ ARNDT, MAX BILL, AD DEKKERS, HELMUT FEDERLE, GOTTFRIED HONEGGER, KATHRIN KAPS, FRITZ KLINGBEIL, JOHN MEYER, GEROLD MILLER, AURÉLIE NEMOURS, JOHN NIXON, PETER ROEHR, JAN SCHOONHOVEN, ANTON STANKOWSKI, KLAUS STAUDT, HERMAN DE VRIES, GERHARD WITTNER -
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.
-
Michel Majerus 2022
49€ Add to cartMichel Majerus (1967–2002) ranks among the most interesting painters of his generation and left a singular and multifaceted oeuvre that still speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns. His works quote phenomena of everyday culture such as comic strips, advertisements, and videogames as well as sources of inspiration from art history ranging from minimalism to Pop Art. Decontextualizing the different elements of pictures, he integrated them into novel contexts of meaning by, for instance, setting them on a par with art-historical references.
Twenty years after his death, a series of exhibitions throughout Germany showcase different periods and aspects of his creative output. Five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate, and Galerie neugerriemschneider, Berlin, pay tribute to Michel Majerus’s art in unprecedented breadth.
Concurrently, thirteen museums mount presentations of works by Michel Majerus from their collections: Ludwig Forum Aachen; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum Hannover; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Saarlandmuseum—Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
The extensive publication accompanying the exhibition series Michel Majerus 2022 includes three essays and two artists’ contributions as well as visual documentation of the exhibitions and presentations from the collections. It is rounded out by a biographical sketch of Michel Majerus, a history of exhibitions of his work, and archival photographs.
- 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.
-
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.
-
Ugo Rondinone
nuns + monks20€ Add to cartContemplation and Communion with the World
Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is a conceptual and installation artist whose oeuvre spans abstract painting, photography, and sculpture. Nature is where he has long found inspiration, regeneration, and comfort: “In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another.” Rondinone’s works oscillate between the extremes of interiority and engagement with the wider world; stone is often present in his art as a recurrent material and symbol. The sculptures in the series nuns + monks originated as limestone models; the artist made three-dimensional scans and then cast the works in bronze. As a reflection of the inner self in the outside world, the friable mineral contrasts with the solidity of the bronze; the natural genesis of the millennia-old stones with the presence of the polychrome casts in the here and now. nuns + monks attest to a visibility while also giving the impression of flinching from the gazes to which they expose themselves.
Ugo Rondinone studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His work has been presented at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, the Swiss National Museum, Zurich, MoMA/PS1, New York, and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, among others.
-
Mon Trésor
34€ Add to cartEurope’s Treasure Chamber
What do the torque of the princess of Reinheim, the tableware from the Orient Express, and the radio station Europe 1’s studio building have in common? They are among the treasures of the Saar region. The book presents outstanding archaeological objects and achievements of technology and art dating from the age of the Celts to the present. Drawn from the Saarland and neighboring Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, and Rhineland-Palatinate, the unexpected riches illustrate the cultural and social dimensions of this multinational region in the heart of Europe. The title Mon Trésor describes many of them quite literally: the note a seven-year-old dashed off to his father before his family was evacuated in the first days of World War II; the Roman-era ring that is also a relic, witnessing to flight and danger. All treasures are personal first and foremost, though others may later cherish them as cultural assets.
-
Leszek Skurski
Catalogue raisonné Vol. 1: Works from 1990–202459€ Add to cartLeszek Skurski (b. Gdańsk, 1973; lives and works in Fulda and Mallorca) is known for his singular and immediately recognizable white paintings. Small black and gray figures emerge from the white landscapes, always set in relation to one another, in pairs or groups. Exposed on the expansive and boundless-seeming plane, they silently tell a story that remains as open-ended as the pictures. In a few spare brushstrokes or lines drawn with the palette knife, Skurski’s superb neoimpressionism deftly captures the atmosphere that weighs down on his characters and holds his compositions in suspense.
The extensive monograph presents over two thousand works from more than three decades. Essays embed the various bodies of work in their art-historical contexts.
- 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.
-
B.A.R.O.C.K.
24,80€ Add to cartArtistic Interventions in the Caputh Palace. Contemporary Parallels to the Baroque Era
Four international women artists spent more than three years studying Caputh Palace near Potsdam and creating works specifically for this magnificent location. The tapestries by Margret Eicher (b. 1955, Viersen; lives and works in Berlin), the floral scans by Luzia Simons (b. 1953, Quixadá, Brazil; lives and works in Berlin), the wax sculptures by Rebecca Stevenson (b. 1971; lives and works in London), and the ceiling painting projections by Myriam Thyes (b. 1963, Luxembourg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) blend into the surrounding space both naturally and surprisingly. With twelve double-page collages, the large-sized catalog is an artistic commentary on the ambitious project.
-
Digitale Skulptur
Follow the unknown19,80€ Add to cartCrossing the BNorders of the Tangible
For the first time in art history a competition for the Digital Sculpture Award was announced. What is a digital sculpture anyway? Where are the boundaries between real and virtual worlds? With the advent of digitally generated images, the conditions for our perception and the parameters of our viewing habits are changed. Through the interactive involvement of the viewer, software-controlled image phenomena such as virtual environments lead to an exploring vision. The book presents and documents innovative works, which were conceived for the international competition, initiated by the Museum Ulm.
With works by Morehshin Allahyari, Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz, Jörg Brinkmann, George Crîngaşu, Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez, Marcel Karnapke, Leonard Kern, Nicolò Krättli + Jann Erhard, Martina Menegona and Marjan Moghaddam.
-
Ivonne Thein
TECHNO BODIES28€ Add to cartIn her multidisciplinary work, Ivonne Thein (born 1979 in Meiningen, lives and works in Berlin) addresses the current body images of a digital culture that is undergoing fundamental change due to extensive technologization. Today, new technologies are profoundly shaping both the physical body and its virtual representations in the visual culture of our time. Thein works with AI systems for her installations and places the question of the problem of imitating nature, and thus the relationship between art, technology and body, at the center of her artistic work. To do this, she combines digital techniques with sculptures that she creates by hand from silicone. Thein thereby evokes an intrusive closeness in the exhibition space, as the images generated with the AI no longer remain just a pure data set on the screen. The book presents works from 2020–2023.
-
Ion Bitzan
48€ Add to cartThe painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country’s isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceaușescu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and São Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.
-
Julia Steiner
Am Saum des Raumes24€ Add to cartExpansive Worlds
The pencil drawings of Julia Steiner (b. Büren zum Hof, Switzerland, 1982; lives and works in Basel) are monumental in size. And yet they exude an air of delicacy and evanescence, sprawling across the edges of the paper and taking possession of the space around them. Processes frozen in an instant—like wind sweeping through clouds, light piercing the night, or the ground breaking apart—erupt with unexpected vigor. The beholder believes that he has identified a motif, only to lose sight of it a moment later in the abstraction of the painterly drawing. The artist’s oeuvre lays out a cosmos of images that crack and burst into pieces, explode and implode. The present book accompanies Julia Steiner’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
Julia Steiner studied at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) from 2002 until 2007, with a semester abroad at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2005. In 2018–19, she held an interim professorship at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK), leading the drawing class. Steiner’s work has won her several accolades, including the 2009 Swiss Art Award and the 2017 STRABAG Artaward International (Vienna).
-
Francesca Martí
Passage and Presence42€ Add to cartFrancesca Martí’s (b. Sóller, Mallorca; lives in Mallorca and Stockholm) art revolves around themes like transformation, communication, and deformation, the power of self-determination, the instability of memory, and the effects of the chaos caused by migration and the migration prompted by chaos. In a collaborative process, a multitude of performers, dancers, and musicians help make her vision a reality. The book presents performances, sculptures, and visual works from Francesca Martí’s most important exhibitions in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and China. The portraits of the various series the artist has developed over the past ten years, including Cocoon, Planet of Fusions, Migrant Angel, Dreamers & Believers, Copper and Flux, are rounded out by her drawings, photographs, and making-of shots from her studio in Mallorca.
-
Philip Loersch
POW – PORTRAITIST OF WRITING34€ Add to cartPhilip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980; lives and works near Munich) combines painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His works reveal the fragility of truth and authenticity while commenting with subversive irony on the postmodern disintegration of the idea of originality. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions like Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst. This monograph gathers his works created between 2016 and today.
-
Konkrete Progressionen
François Morellet & Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr & Hartmut Böhm15€ Add to cartThanks to a generous donor, the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret welcomed a number of outstanding works to its collection in 2022. Titled Konkrete Progressionen, the first exhibition to showcase a selection from the gift features four internationally renowned artists whose works are derived from mathematical or geometric procedures: the concrete systematists Hartmut Böhm (1938–2021) and François Morellet (1926–2016) and the pioneers of computer-generated art Manfred Mohr (1938–) and Vera Molnar (1924–).
The book documents the serial paintings, drawings, collages, wall objects, and monumental installations and environments of steel beams or concrete blocks. The works play concrete games with the beholder’s ability to recognize patterns in binary contrasts or layered grids. They show sine waves, vector series, hypercubes, and markings derived from the circular constant π or the Fibonacci sequence—and in each instance demonstrate primarily how the basis of calculation takes on a life of its own.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen runs until April 14, 2024.
-
Elias Sime
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ35€ Add to cartEthiopia’s multi-award-winning artist Elias Sime (born 1968 in Addis Ababa) impresses with monumental wall reliefs made of ornamentally interwoven wires and cables or sawn-up circuit boards. For years, together with his team, he has been tirelessly
reworking discarded electronic components into complex and colorful assemblages. In doing so, he draws on traditional Ethiopian techniques of weaving, braiding and carving. Sime is interested in the “biography of the material” and each collage is a search for traces (of the local and global past). The artist obtains the electronic waste, which the countries of the global North are known to like to “dispose of” in the African continent, from the flea markets in Addis Ababa. His friezes are monuments both to the throwaway society and to global networking and interaction.
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ, a richly illustrated book, gives an overview over the artist’s fascinating career and is published on the occasion of the solo show at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. The volume includes insightful essays by Felicity Korn and Andria Hickey as well as an important conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist from 2016. Also discussed is the Zoma Museum complex, which was initiated by Sime (together with the curator Meskerem Assegued)—a total work of art that is exemplary for sustainability and community building.
