





Michel Majerus 2022
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | |
Author(s) | Cory Arcangel, Karen Archey, Diedrich Diederichsen, Brigitte Franzen, Rirkrit Tiravanija |
Design | Book Book, Berlin |
Cover | Hardcover |
Size | 24 × 31 cm |
Pages | 304 |
Illustrations | 218 |
Language(s) | German, English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-091-0 |
Michel 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of pictures, he integrated them into novel contexts of meaning by, for instance, setting them on a par with art-historical references.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.
More books
-
Johannes Schütz
Die Unterbrechung / The Interruption48€ Add to cartJohannes Schütz (b. Frankfurt am Main, 1950; lives in Berlin) is one of the best-known stage designers and directors working today. His style may be characterized as “simple, clean, and radical.” All major theatres and opera houses in the German-speaking countries and beyond have showcased Schütz’s work. He trained with Wilfried Minks and created his first stage setting for Luc Bondy in 1971. His career then took him to Berlin’s Schillertheater and the Kammerspiele in Munich, later he became head of stage design at the Bremer Theater and the Schauspielhaus Bochum. Schütz taught scenography at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from 1992 until 1998 and has been professor of stage design at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts since 2010.
In his book Die Unterbrechung, he meets Annette Storr to discuss his new work for the stage, which is documented by maquettes and photographs and, most often, by stills from the performances. The productions represented include Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist, Landestheater Salzburg, 2018; Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Schauspielhaus Bochum, 2019; Reich des Todes by Rainald Goetz, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, 2020; Richard II by William Shakespeare, Burgtheater, Vienna, 2021; and Der Idiot by Dostoevsky, Thalia Theater, Hamburg, 2021.
-
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.
-
Jan Muche
Agora42€ Add to cartTracing the Wear of the Life of Labor
The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century’s ideologies – Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche’s roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear’s “heroes of labor” into focus.
Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste 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
-
Arantxa Etcheverria
Doors38€ Add to cartThe Mythical Power of Grids
Arantxa Etcheverria’s (b. 1975, France; lives and works in Bucharest) creative practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Since 2006, she has been especially interested in modernist architecture, a ubiquitous sight in her adopted country, Romania. Blending rationalism with speculation, the artist draws on historical references including post-Communist turbo architecture, Op art, and minimalism for works that balance between figuration and abstraction, construction and deconstruction. This book documents Etcheverria’s more recent panel paintings and installations, seen in interaction with actors in monochrome costumes. With essays by the Paris-based Romanian curator and critic Ami Barak and the art historian and curator Alina Şerban.
Arantxa Etcheverria studied fine arts at Villa Arson, Nice, and stage design at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg.
-
Susanne Rottenbacher
Radiationen40€ Add to cartIn expansive compositions in light, Susanne Rottenbacher (b. Göttingen, 1969; lives and works in Berlin) visualizes the fire of life in its timebound and fluid dimension. Plotinus called fire the “spiritual potency of beauty.” Pursuing a similar vision, Rottenbacher’s works orchestrate light as energy in space. To this end, the artist, who studied light and stage design in the United States and the United Kingdom, creates weightless luminous choreographies realized in colorful LED technology in combination with acrylic glass as a translucent vehicle of form. The results are installations in three dimensions that are deeply silent yet unfold in a magical ecstasy of light.
In Christian sacred architecture, light has been deployed and perceived since the Middle Ages as the aesthetic equivalent of the divine mind’s lucidity. The history of light art, by contrast, is much younger, going back to the years after the First World War. Having built her creative practice over the past fifteen years, Rottenbacher not only continues a century-old tradition of light art in Europe and the U.S.; her works also anticipate a future in which humanity will have room for feelings no less than for scientific knowledge.
-
Cornelia Baltes
Dingbats44€ Add to cartCornelia Baltes’s (b. Mönchengladbach, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) paintings and installation straddle the divide between abstraction and figuration. Her pictures are inspired by observations of mundane details—apparel, body parts, or facial expressions—that she pares down to simple lines and shapes. Rendered in vibrant colors and gestural fields, they hint at a narrative in the pictorial space. Baltes works with steadily modulated color gradients, on which she places thick and assertive marks. She often interrogates the painted picture’s function, by painting on the wall beyond the rectangle of the canvas, by hanging a picture in the middle of the room as an object in its own right or laying it out on the floor. Her works blend Pop Art and minimalism with an intensity and dynamic energy—and, sometimes, unmistakable flashes of humor—that cannot fail to captivate the beholder.
This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s oeuvre.
Cornelia Baltes studied at Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2000–2003 and at Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, in 2003–2006, before rounding out her education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2009–2011.
-
Franziska Windisch
Walk with a wire14€ Add to cartThe interweaving of traces, sounds, and movements in an impressive work of sound art
The narrow brown magnetic tape of an audio cassette runs through a half-opened hand, slides through the fingers, is palpated in constant motion, and finally falls to the ground. The hand and its touching, particles of sand and small stones leave their traces and, when the tape is played, generate a multi-layered soundscape with crackling and background noises.
In her performative action in the ruins of the city of Messene in the Peloponnese region of Greece, Franziska Windisch (b. 1983) thematizes aspects of repetition and recording. Her artistic examination of the vestiges of the ancient urban space, the reciprocal transition from traces to writing in her video documentation, and the graphic element of the line visible on the ground lead to a reflection on temporality, dissolution, and decay. -
Michael Williams
New Paintings40€ Add to cartAwkward Uncertainty
Michael Williams (b. 1978, Doylestown, Pa.; lives and works in Los Angeles) makes work that interrogates the history of painting, often by dismantling its components into their constituent parts. His pictures employ form to reflect on the complexity and contradictions of modern life. He works on canvas, availing himself of a range of techniques including oil painting, collage, and inkjet prints. In his new works, Williams examines the relationship between painting and photography, transferring the chilly aloofness that is characteristic of the latter onto the former. The photographic “negative” yields a smooth canvas disencumbered of its painterly qualities and the medium’s historic ballast. The book includes several foldout plates that illustrate Williams’s creative approach, and a brief essay by his Austrian fellow painter Tobias Pils.
Michael Williams studied fine arts at Washington University, St. Louis, and has exhibited widely, including at the Wiener Secession, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-
Ann Wolff
Observations and Reflections44€ Add to cart“Art is coming from my inside. I am working as its servant.—I let it out not thinking too much—using my hands and gesture—choosing a material to put it on place. I do not use the art. It is using me.“
Ann Wolff (b. Lübeck, 1937; lives and works in Visby and Kyllaj, Sweden) has ranked among the most significant and most influential glass artists on the international scene for over five decades. Yet she has also worked in bronze, aluminum, nickel silver, and concrete, creating abstract as well as figurative sculptures, and produced a sizable oeuvre on paper: pastels, drawings, and fine art prints. Ann Wolff enrolled at the legendary Ulm School of Design in the 1950s to study visual communication with Otl Aicher. From 1993 until 1998, she was professor of “materials-related design” at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg. Her works, which have garnered an array of prizes, have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and are held by renowned public and private collections all over the world.
- Release July 2023
Martha Rosler
32€ Add to cartThe American conceptual artist and pioneer of critical feminism Martha Rosler (b. 1943 in Brooklyn, NY, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) has influenced numerous contemporary artists with the radicalism of her artistic position. Rosler’s work is always political and examines questions of power and violence, the ideals of beauty and their demolition, and the purported contrasts between war and consumption. For her sociocritical collages and videos, Rosler uses found pictorial material that has already been published. The artist delights in working with photos from public sources like magazines and newspapers, which she processes and arranges in new contexts in order to visualize inequality and protest. Following on from Rosler’s iconic series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (ca. 1967–1972), at the heart of the publication lies the confrontation with warlike disputes as conveyed in the media, together with the associated dissonance between the private and the political.
Martha Rosler received a Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1965 and a Master of Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 1985. In 1975 she began to write reviews for Artforum and other art magazines. She teaches at School of Arts of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
-
Alexandra Tretter
24€ Add to cartThe art of Alexandra Tretter (*1988) is as deep as it is playful. Owing just as much to the gentle spirituality of Hilma af Klint’s late geometries as it does to Sonia Delaunay’s exuberant disc paintings, almost bursting with sheer chromatic pleasure. Her compassionately designed artist’s book combines monumental paintings with intimate works on paper, all of which are imbued with the contexts of Tretter’s own life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother.
Her kaleidoscopic figurations unfold from a center at rest in itself and multiply in symmetry and asymmetry towards all sides. She contrasts the circular form, the unchanging basic element of her compositions, with the oval, which constantly strives beyond itself, transforming itself in ever-new permutations from one figure into the next, into eyes, mouths, breasts, petals or vulvas.
Her images strive for composure, unfold and blossom, only to let go of all gestalt-like form. Once gained stability is instantly pushed into turmoil. Colors flare up violently or flow delicately about, lighten or shade each other, carry or throw each other off course. Tretter equally realizes materialization and dissolution as basic principles of her painting.
Whereby all, what her images absorb, preserve and release, is experience, growth and slow maturing. Her paintings are “figurations of affection”, in which each individual turns towards something else, doubts or grows, at times turns away or surrenders all the more consciously. They question everything, start anew and yet find their way back to themselves, into their very own.
-
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.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe Pop Artist as Master of Watercolor Painting
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is a master of the watercolor. Themes and motifs that also determine the painterly work gain a special expressiveness here: bizarre landscapes and opulent blossoms, fantastic celestial bodies and colorful abstractions. This opulent volume presents this part of Bengston’s oeuvre for the first time in great breadth with roughly 400 works. They demonstrate the skill of an artist who has brought watercolor to extreme precision and enriched it with numerous new aspects.
Billy Al Bengston attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. His works can be found in outstanding permanent collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-
Wyatt Kahn
Paintings and Sculptures36€ Add to cartWyatt Kahn’s (b. New York, 1983; lives and works in New York) work hovers between two and three dimensions, reviving aspects of American 1960s Minimal Art. In the tradition of minimalist abstraction, his multipart paintings seem devoid of content, but their construction is a sophisticated choreography of geometric shapes. Instead of delineating them on the canvas itself, he transforms them into physical elements composed of canvas stretched over strips of wood that he mounts on the wall as reliefs, making the latter an integral part of the composition. Working on the interface between painting and sculpture, the artist also references Ellsworth Kelly’s single and multiple shaped canvases.
Wyatt Kahn’s works are held by major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
-
Corona, Queens
Photographs by Cara Galowitz32€ Add to cartFor seven years Cara Galowitz (b. 1964, lives and works in New York) walked the streets of Corona, Queens every day during her lunch break from her nearby museum job, where she worked as an art director. These photographs, which she calls “an exercise in seeing”, capture the vivid juxtapositions of one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the world.
Through layers of irony, humor, and visual sophistication, these photographs evoke a place that is a continual work-in-progress, where the past, be it faded lettering or crumbling architecture, collides with the present in the form of spontaneous street decorations, signage, graffiti, and religious iconography. The images evoke the struggle and resilience of the people of Corona, as well as capturing the quirky beauty of the streets.
Cara Galowitz is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art where she focused on graphic design, photography, and fine art. She has pursued a long career as a museum art director and has shown work at the Newark Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Grey Art Gallery.
- Out of stock
Kurt Weidemann
Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt49,95€ Read moreSignierte Sonderauflage
Kurt Weidemanns Ansichten über Schrift und Typografie ist das beeindruckende Ergebnis eines über Jahrzehnte erlebten und reflektierten Berufslebens als Schriftsetzer, Typograf, Autor, Lehrer und Berater. Das Buch schildert die persönlichen, philosophischen und fachlichen Ansichten seines Metiers.
-
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.
-
Nicola Staeglich
Color Light Matter Mind36€ Add to cart“This painting springs from the ambition to paint color into the air.” (Ulrich Loock)
Nicola Staeglich’s (b. Oldenburg, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) work with color achieves a distinctive intermediate state between physical presence and atmospheric radiance. She stages painting now as a performative action with broad propositions in color, now as an installation in three dimensions with multilayered translucent painted panels. Color Light Matter Mind is Staeglich’s first monograph, setting recent works in relation to her earlier output (1998–2021). From the spiral-shaped reliefs to her Liquid Lights, the artist opens up a fresh dimension for color.
Nicola Staeglich studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz, and the Chelsea College of Art, London. She won numerous fellowships and has been professor of painting/graphic art at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste Essen since 2015. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad and is held by private and public collections.
-
Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
with free download link on the inside
You’ve read right, and you’re going to hear it: a bureaucratic document—we’re all familiar with it, for a new one arrives every year—is the subject of this inspired collaboration between the graphic artist Philip Loersch and the virtuoso vocalist Johannes Steck.
The “Renteninformation”—an official letter on cheap paper informing the recipient about their expected future retirement benefits—makes many cultural workers, and others, crack up or break out in tears: arriving unexpectedly, it launches us on an emotional roller coaster between excitement, fascination, resignation, and sheer madness.
The manuscript for this audiobook is Loersch’s actual Renteninformation for 2022. Its intonation is the culmination of a series of works the artist has pursued since 2016. Every year, he has produced a naturalist colored-pencil drawing of his Renteninformation, embedding it in idyllic scenes—in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid autumn foliage, or on a frozen lake, delicately and accurately executed down to the smallest leaf of grass and the tiniest letter.
“Renteninformation 2022” is the ideal gift for all vinyl lovers who need to close a “pension gap” in their collections and a stunning audio experience that redefines what the satire of reality itself and conceptual art can do.
Philip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980) is best known for his unconventional drawings. His works combine 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 art has been exhibited at renowned institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst, and helped initiate the exhibition series “Drawing Wow.”
Johannes Steck (b. Würzburg, 1966) is one of Germany’s best-known audiobook narrators, having sold over four million copies, including of books by Simon Beckett and Ken Follett, in a three-decade career. Television viewers also know his voice from trailers on Kabel 1 and DMAX and documentaries on ZDF, BR, and Sky. His work has garnered awards including the 2012 HörKules.