Michael Bielicky
Perpetuum mobile
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Peter Weibel, Zdenĕk Sklenář |
| Author(s) | Mel Alexenberg, Norman M. Klein, Bettina Korintenberg, Peter Sloterdijk, Jorge Fernández Torres, Peter Weibel, Siegfried Zielinski |
| Cover | Otabind |
| Size | 21,5 x 27,5 cm |
| Pages | 512 |
| Illustrations | 500 |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-028-6 |
Contemporary Media Art
The German-Czech artist Michael Bielicky (b. Prague, 1954; lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been an innovator in the fields of photography, video, and web-based installation art for over four decades. In an ongoing dialogue with emerging technological developments, his works probe the history of his media from the deepest strata to the magical mathematical practices of the medieval Cabalists: idiosyncratic hybrids that straddle the boundary between the analog and digital worlds. Operating on the interfaces between real and virtual spaces, his media art prompts a critical reflection on the nature of technology, its material and immaterial significations, and the ways in which it informs our perceptions and actions. The book Perpetuum mobile is the first to offer a comprehensive survey of Bielicky’s rich and diverse oeuvre. The layout, designed by the artist himself, integrates the experimental images into a graphic “stream of consciousness.”
Michael Bielicky moved to Germany in 1969 and initially studied medicine. After an extended stay in New York, he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1984 until 1990, first with Bernd Becher and then in Nam June Paik’s master class. He was made professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague in 1991, then professor of new media at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 2006. Bielicky participated in numerous major exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (1987); Videonale, Bonn (1988, 1990, 1992); Ars Electronica, Linz (1992, 1994, 1995); and the Havana Biennial (2012).
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Penny Hes Yassour
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MS 00 22
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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.
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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).
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Sprache/Text/Bild
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Horst Keinig
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Jan Zöller
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Jan Zöller studied with Marijke van Warmerdam und Leni Hoffmann at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe from 2012 until 2017 and with Jean-Marc Bustamante at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016. He won the Federal Prize for Art Students of the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, in 2018, followed by Stiftung Kunstfonds’s working fellowship in 2021.
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Sibylle Springer
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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 -
What is Vienna Actionism?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
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Claudia Fährenkemper
Kontextforschung / context research 1980–202268€ Add to cartClaudia Fährenkemper (b. Castrop-Rauxel, 1959; lives in Steinheim/Westfalen) photographs enormous as well as minuscule objects using scanning electron microscopes to produce images that are as fascinating as they are disconcerting. The play with extreme scales yields fantastic visual worlds: American desert and canyon landscapes, the giant industrial machinery of open-pit mines in Germany, insects, plant seeds, crystals, and plankton, plus historic armaments from Europe and Japan. The lavishly designed book is the first to gather works from her entire oeuvre, which now spans four decades. Surveying the most important of Fährenkemper’s conceptual series, it reveals unexpected interconnections between disparate motifs on vastly different scales from nature, technology, science, and cultural history.
Claudia Fährenkemper studied at Fachhochschule Köln, today’s Cologne University of Applied Sciences, where Arno Jansen was her teacher, and with Bernd and Hilla Becher and Nan Hoover at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her photographs are held by numerous museum collections, including at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Margulies Collection, Miami.
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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.”
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Nadira Husain
Manzil Monde30€ Add to cartNadira Husain’s (b. Paris, 1980; lives and works in Berlin, Paris, and Hyderabad) work combines figures, symbols, and ornaments from different cultures in complex imageries that reflect her own multicultural experience. To achieve a harmonious, though by no means placid, coexistence of all elements, the artist harnesses painting, drawing, printing processes, traditional artisan practices, and a range of materials including textile and ceramics, recognizing no hierarchy of media or genre. Hybridization and the translocation of motifs serve her to tease out similarities as well as divergences between myth and pop culture: the Indian deity, the cartoon character, and the fashion label appear as equals in the universe of her art.
The book contains several essays that explore Nadira Husain’s oeuvre as a significant contribution to the discourse around postmigration, transculturality, and feminism in contemporary art.
Nadira Husain studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is currently a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-teaches with the Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina.
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Tobias Rehberger
1993–202244€ Add to cartIn his sculptural work, Tobias Rehberger (b. Esslingen, 1966; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main) connects strategies from different, also non-art disciplines. His interiors meant to be taken into service have established him as one of the most influential artists of his generation. In 2022, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart will honor Rehberger with a grand exhibition that will feature some of the most important bodies of work from the past three decades. The accompanying book makes a signal contribution to the ongoing critical engagement with his art.
Tobias Rehberger studied with Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1987 until 1992 and later returned to his alma mater as a professor. He has had numerous solo shows in Germany and abroad and, in 2009, furnished the central cafeteria at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which won him a Golden Lion.
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FINALE
DIRECTOR’S CUT25€ Add to cartThe Best Part …
In 1994, Britta Erika Buhlmann took the helm at Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, from which she will retire in the spring of 2022. In her twenty-eight-year tenure, she has enlarged the museum’s art collection and put her personal stamp on it. The classical modernism division was strengthened with the addition of major works by Otto Dix, Hermann Scherrer, and Karl Buchheister, while key pieces by François Morellet, Martin Willing, Werner Pokorny, and others have enriched the museum’s holdings in sculpture. A newly established division of the collection is dedicated to the creations of American artists such as Eric Levin, Kiki Smith, Charles Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart. More than a few artists—the list includes Carmen Herrera, Pierrette Bloch, Eva Jospin, and Nobuyuki Tanaka—made their German or even European début at the mpk.
In this book, members of the mpk’s staff offer their takes on selected works in the collection, unfurling a subjective story of their engagement with works that have earned the museum its reputation as a “place of discoveries.”
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Karlheinz Bux
über Linie …15€ Add to cartClarity, Complexity, and Linearity
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Karlheinz Bux studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe and taught as a lecturer at Pforzheim University and as a visiting professor at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences. His works are represented in private and public collections, including the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Hurrle Collection, and the Würth Collection.
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Beate Höing
It’s all about Love28€ Add to cartRecollections—What remains?
The painter and ceramist-sculptor Beate Höing (b. 1966, lives and works in Coesfeld and Münster) creates works of art whose aesthetic is deeply informed by the ornamentation and manual techniques of folk art. Drawing inspiration for her motifs from souvenir culture, but also from fairy tales and myths, she unfurls her burgeoning imagination in works defined by an unmistakable style and a singular allure. Poetic pictures and sculptures deftly toy with the conventions of kitsch and forms of traditional craftsmanship. Tangible objects, associations, and recollections coalesce in an ambivalent play between reality and fiction in which only a fine line separates dream from nightmare, congeniality from alarm.
The lavishly illustrated monograph presents a comprehensive survey of the artist’s output between 2011 and 2021.
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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.
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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.
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Cahier #1
Heinz Gappmayr22€ Add to cartDo we think in images or in language? Can writing visualize time? Heinz Gappmayr (1925-2010) was interested in text as a spatial event and in letters as architecture. Although his works were often presented in the context of Visual Poetry, Gappmayr himself preferred the more neutral term text to lyricism. His understanding of written language as a conceptual medium and typography as an indicator of physicality was closer to Lawrence Weiner’s approach than to that of the Concrete Poets. This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Tiroler Landesmuseum and includes Gappmayer’s most important art-in-architecture projects, as well as a complete notebook from 1961, with commentary by Gaby Gappmayr, the artist’s daughter. A conversation with her provides valuable philosophical insights into her father’s work.
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Rainer Jacob
justICE30€ Add to cartRainer Jacob (b. Jena, 1970; lives and works in Leipzig) has anonymously installed objects made of ice in public settings in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, and Budapest since 2013. He then allows them to dematerialize and records the process in photographs. Radiators, wall outlets, QR codes, and the Duchampian pissoir are among his recurrent motifs. The impermanence of the ice objects builds bridges to street art, Fluxus, and action art. Critical observations on the unequal distribution of resources and political power in contemporary society, his works reflect on our perceptions and question the idea of originality in art while also probing the outer limits of sculpture.
The publication showcases the ice objects of the past ten years, embedding them in a decade that has marked a sea change in the life of humankind: JustICE captures an artist’s distinctive perspective on societal processes.
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Mihai Olos
42€ Add to cartMihai Olos (b. Ariniș, Romania, 1940; d. Endingen am Kaiserstuhl, 2015) ranks among the most fascinating artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His adaptations of the formal vocabulary pioneered by Constantin Brâncuși are unrivaled in their creative originality. His works evince an utterly novel approach to the combination of materials from the culture of rural Romania with the visual strategies of modernism. His formidable oeuvre engages with conceptual and minimal art and comprises paintings, drawings, and sculptures, sometimes in the dimensions of land-art projects, as well as performances and poetry. Despite the constraints imposed by the communist system, his art and travels—during which he also met his kindred spirit Joseph Beuys—were dedicated to the unerring pursuit of his vision of social sculpture and radical utopian architecture.
