





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of pictures, he integrated them into novel contexts of meaning by, for instance, setting them on a par with art-historical references.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
-
Irmel Droese. Felix Droese
Die Fruchtbarkeit der Polarität28€ Add to cartA Tribute to the Artist Couple
Irmel Droese (b. 1943, Landsberg an der Warthe) and Felix Droese (b. 1950, Singen/Hohentwiel) first met in 1970, when both were students in Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In a decades-long partnership in life and art, they have built oeuvres that, both each for itself and in dialogue with each other, scrutinize a rapidly changing reality. Irmel Droese creates expressive stage characters, sculptural oil paper figures, and depictions of humans on paper, while Felix Droese’s diverse ensembles and large-format papercuts grapple with money, economic questions, and the rising predominance of commercial considerations. His art gained international renown with his participation in documenta 7 in 1982 and the 43rd Biennale di Venezia in 1988. Designed in close collaboration with the artists, the publication documents their separate and joint oeuvres, drawing attention to societal questions.
-
Konrad Mühe
Guide38€ Add to cartAn Artist’s Book as an “Optical Illusion”
Konrad Mühe’s (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany, 1982; lives and works in Berlin) works interrogate the construction of our identities by uncovering the technological and media apparatuses that sustain it and confronting it with the autonomous lives of objects. Their basic formal principle is the installation hybridizing sculpture and digital moving image, with a particular focus on the projector and the interaction of pedestal or suspension and projection screen. Where the classical black box in the movie theater or exhibition venue seeks to conceal the technical equipment in favor of an immersive visual experience, Mühe brings it to the fore and sets it out in the gallery space as sculpture and installation. Yet his works also undercut the conventional display regime in the white cube: the process of projection emerges as the true creative medium and subject. This book acts as a descriptive illustrated Guide to Mühe’s projects.
Konrad Mühe was Hito Steyerl’s master student and trained at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. His works have been featured at numerous film festivals including the 61st Berlinale and in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.
-
Sprache/Text/Bild
32€ Add to cartSpoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change—that we share responsibility for them.
Artists: John Baldessari, Maria Bartuszová, Alice Bidault, Alejandro Cesarco, Ayşe Erkmen, Nadine Fecht, Gary Hill, Janice Kerbel, Gabriel Kladek, Gordon Parks, The National AIDS Memorial, Markus Vater, Gillian Wearing
-
Logan T. Sibrel
But I’m Different50€ Add to cartLogan T. Sibrel’s (born 1986 in Jasper, IN, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) paintings and drawings depict moments of great joy and beauty, but also fear, sadness, desire and aggression. Frequently only part of the mostly male figures is depicted. Sibrel’s cropping can feel simultaneously intimate and alienating—fragmentary stories are told that touch you through their authenticity and vulnerability. Sibrel’s artistic maneuvers include overlapping, shifted perspectives, and text fragments that appear like snippets of overheard conversations and thus create a collage effect.
This book is the artist’s first comprehensive publication with works from the last twenty months. While the first part presents the artist’s paintings, the second part presents his drawings with the edges of the backing paper digitally removed so that it looks as if the images were drawn directly into the book.
Logan T. Sibrel completed his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington in 2009 and his master’s degree at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2011. His most recent solo exhibitions include In Another Life and Galerie Thomas Fuchs (Stuttgart, DE) and Brake For Your Sweetheart at Auxier Kline (New York, NY).
- Release September 2025
The Magnificent Seven+
Strong Contemporary Female Artists44€ Add to cartWhen The Magnificent Seven hit the silver screen in 1960, heroism was firmly men’s business. Now it is women artists who are redefining the art world with visionary energy. Sebastian C. Strenger portrays outstanding women making art today, including Ingeborg Lüscher, Elfie Semotan, Xenia Hausner, Valérie Favre, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Cristina Lucas. Their works question power structures, play with identity, or deconstruct prevailing narratives. Their art is figurative or abstract, narrative or conceptual, political or introspective. These women are changing the art market and dominate the new canon at international institutions by calling existing structures in question and opening up spaces for fresh thinking.
-
Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
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.
- Release November 2022
X x X
Semjon Contemporary50€ Add to cartFounded by Semjon H. N. Semjon in 2011, the gallery Semjon Contemporary has built a distinctive and singular profile that has earned it an unrivaled position in the art world. It represents international positions in contemporary art that, their divergences notwithstanding, are united by the extraordinary intelligence of their engagement with the material. The result is an unmistakable visual language that permits of no modification of established choices. Despite the considerable differences of material, technique, and expression, the artists’ works enter into dialogue with one another, as parallel solo presentations and special exhibitions showcasing numerous visiting artists have demonstrated.
The book features Colin Ardley, Edward L. Buchanan, Takayuki Daikoku, Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Ute Essig, Experimental Setup (Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager’s collective moniker), Katja Flint, Andreas Fux, Dave Grossmann, Renate Hampke, Marc von der Hocht, Nataly Hocke, Michael Kutschbach, Henrik U. Müller, Cornelia Nagel, Susanne Knaack, Katja Kollowa, Susanne Pomrehn, Thomas Prochnow, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Gerda Schütte, Gil Shachar, Li Silberberg, Karina Spechter, Klaus Steinmann, Stefan Thiel, Hitomi Uchikura, Royden Watson, and Bettina Weiß in dedicated chapters. It is rounded out by statements from collectors including Thomas Lenhart, Cornelie Kunkat, Gabriele Quandt, Roland Schnell, Nobert Fuhr and Klaus Werner, Roswitha and Jürgen König, and Helmut Ließ. Remarks by art critics and scholars and an interview with Semjon by Jan Maruhn provide additional insight into the gallery’s work.
- Release April 2025
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Monograph (EN)58€ Add to cartThe Great German Artist’s Imposing Oeuvre
Ernst Wilhelm Nay (b. Berlin, 1902; d. Cologne, 1968) was one of the most interesting painters of European modernism. Spanning the decades from the 1930s to his death in Cologne in 1968, his output encompasses paintings as well as an abundance of works on paper. The new monograph surveys all periods in Nay’s oeuvre, from the “Fishermen paintings” to the striking late pictures, which leave no doubt about the artist’s outstanding gift for color. Nay’s evolution is embedded in the history and ideas of his time, on which he reflected in lectures, writings, and notes. The volume unlocks a wide spectrum of fresh insights into Nay’s life and art.
-
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.
-
Secundino Hernández
Miettinen Collection36€ Add to cartSecundino Hernández’s (b. Madrid, 1975; lives and works in Madrid und Berlin) paintings and works on paper blend figuration and abstraction, the linearity of drawing and exuberant color, minimalism and gesture. Slowly and methodically moving across the canvas, Hernández sets down sinuous lines and marks, using a brush or applying the paint straight from the tube before rinsing and scratching off the surfaces. The resulting compositions feel organized yet charged with explosive energy and evince manifold references: a physicality reminiscent of Action Painting, cartoon-style terse figuration, and passages that bring to mind Old Masters and especially the Spaniards El Greco and Velázquez. As Hernández observes, his works “may look like Action Painting or Expressionism, but they represent a profound and painstaking scrutiny of these visual idioms, a way of articulating my own contemporary perspective on certain aesthetic movements.”
Secundino Hernández studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid from 1995 until 2000 and at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2005–2006.
-
Simone Haack
HAIR30€ Add to cartSimone Haack (b. 1978 in Rotenburg/Wümme, lives and works in Berlin) has always made the inwards legible in the outer appearance of her figures in her painting. This is also the case in her block of works in the exhibition of the same name, Hair. Already in the late 17th century, magic and superstition were attributed to hair. In it one suspected the whole power of the soul. The artist, who was formed in the painting class of Katharina Grosse and Karin Kneffel, symbolically reveals the fragility of the DNA of human beings through her hair landscapes, which are sometimes placed macroscopically in the picture in the spirit of a New Magic Realism. At the same time, her accompanying exhibition publication always also tells of the triangle of tension of physical as well as psychological existence, which in her case runs through the painterly psychoanalysis.
-
Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst38€ Add to cartContemporary Visual Communication in a Historic Weaving Technique
Margret Eicher’s (b. Viersen, Germany, 1955; lives and works in Berlin) large-format tapestries combine the baroque form of the woven picture with familiar motifs excerpted from contemporary media images. She digitizes her sources and then assembles them in painstaking editing work on the computer. The resulting ‘media tapestries’ occupy the interface between the traditional work of art as a physical object and the electronic noise of the digital realm: two worlds that at first glance would seem to be incompatible yet find themselves in harmonious union in Eicher’s art. In Göttliche Liebe (Divine Love), for example, Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns meets a kissing gay couple from a pro-tolerance campaign in Berlin, while Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is sampled together with a subway station in Frankfurt. In conceptual art production, the creative idea is central and its realization becomes secondary; in a final twist, Lob der Malkunst (Praise of Painting) elects this practice as its artistic lodestar. Eicher installs the painter Martin Kippenberger in the interior of Berlin’s Paris Bar, where he poses as a dandy and presides over a clash between the different tendencies in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
- Release June 2025
Katharina Baron
Anonymous Narcissists24€ Add to cartKatharina Baron’s debut novel Anonymous Narcissists is set in the fast-paced world between Berlin and Hollywood – and told from the perspective of a clinically depressed (but incredibly successful) international socialite.
Anonymous Narcissists delves deep into the female psyche, taking readers through intense episodes of personal trauma, sexual nihilism and psychological vulnerability. Baron – an LA-based creative director and artist – has produced numerous award-winning commercials, worked on camera as an actress and model, and studied at the Cours Florent in Paris. She was also a finalist at the Actor’s Studio.
Anonymous Narcissists is her first novel and she was mentored by Bruce Wagner, author of Maps to the Stars.
-
Alexandru Chira
42€ Add to cartAlexandru Chira’s (b. Tăușeni, Romania, 1947; d. Bucharest, 2011) oeuvre systematically and comprehensively maps a fictional field of research. His paintings, drawings, and objects, whose individual elements recall switches, screens, keyboards, and levers, were designed to “bring rain and rainbows,” to promote prosperity and prevent floods. Working in his art laboratory, Chira resembled a farmer tilling his field. He sowed symbols across his paintings, sometimes transplanted them to create new semiotic interconnections, then reaped them and stored up his harvest in painted machines of varying shapes and dimensions. In the 1990s—by then Chira held a professorship and was a widely recognized artist—he fulfilled a lifelong dream by building the “Tăușeni Ensemble,” the largest monument single-handedly created by one man in Transylvania. Much of his oeuvre accordingly consists of sketches and elaborations relating to the monument. In the course of his decades-long fascination with an agrarian aesthetic, architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, ufology, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy fused, yielding a kind of practical knowledge as well as spiritual speculations sustaining his endeavor.
The extensive monograph with more than 750 illustrations surveys Alexandru Chira’s output of four decades and synthesizes years of research undertaken at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. It contains numerous transcriptions of textual parentheses, legends, and instructions on how to decode the works and poetic fragments embedded in Chira’s pictures.
-
Birgitta Thaysen
Amor and Psyche24€ Add to cartAspects of Love
The fine art photographer Birgitta Thaysen (b. Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1962; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and in Nan Hoover’s master class. Her photographic oeuvre encompasses urban motifs as well as likenesses of humans. In black-and-white portrait shots, she revisits the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche; embodiments of the yearning for love and the bafflements of the soul, the title characters have long been vehicles for variegated interpretations in visual art. Thaysen chose to shoot her portraits at Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf, where the tale is present in an adaptation as a lavishly made wallpaper from the nineteenth century. She captured the protagonists lying on the floor, bedded on cushions, their heads upside down, for a vertiginous exploration of states of mind between self-abandonment and doubt.
Birgitta Thaysen studied art with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her conceptual photographic series have been seen by wide audiences in numerous exhibitions.
-
Roland Schappert & Wolfgang Ullrich
Aktualitätsjetzt16€ Add to cartPhilistinism, climate change, legitimation discourses—in a tour de force sustained by profound knowledge of the phenomena in question, AKTUALITÄTSJETZT blazes trails through the jungle of contemporary art and its current debates. Over the course of two years, the art scholar and author Wolfgang Ullrich initiated 14 dialogues on Schappert’s word paintings, murals, and interventions. Their distinctive formal features and conceptual and substantial dimensions inspired illuminating conversations that range far beyond the specific works to explore today’s art world and questions of the philosophy of art and the sociology of culture. The best volume of dialogues on art since David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.
-
Ralf Cohen
Synthese25€ Add to cartThe First Comprehensive Overview of the Work of the Photo Artist from 1972 to the Present Day
Ralf Cohen (b. 1949, Solingen; lives and works in Karlsruhe) makes use of the entire material complex of photographic image production for his own creative purposes. He works exclusively with analog processes and explores the limits of the medium with a variety of experiments in the darkroom, altering his photographs through solarization, long-term exposure, light/dark reversal, chromatic filtering, and further manual processing. This comprehensive volume presents Cohen’s works, from the high-contrast black-and-white architectural photographs of the early period and the work groups of people in cities from the late 1980s to the latest photographic series with their enigmatic light effects, seemingly glowing planetary surfaces, hails of stars, and fantastical islands. Ralf Cohen’s fascinating cosmos of imagery breaks viewing habits and, with his imaginary universes, opens up a new perception of the world.
-
Gabriele Basch
fortuna24€ Add to cartPaper and Foil Cut‑Outs in an Innovative Language of Forms: An Overview of the Works of Gabriele Basch from 2008 to 2019
Since the 1990s, Gabriele Basch (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) has been working with cut-outs and translating the age-old tradition of silhouettes into an idiosyncratic and innovative language of forms. The artist interweaves creation and destruction, planning and chance into a complex, multi-layered reality and makes views into the spatial environment an integral part of her work. In her paper and foil cut-outs, foreground and background, materiality and void combine to form a whole that oscillates between painting and drawing, as well as between urban structures and hints of the biomorphic – in delicate color gradients, swirling structures, spontaneous gestures, and stenciled surfaces. The generously illustrated monograph offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work from 2008 to 2019.
-
Kraftwerk
Innovation durch Transformation34€ Add to cartThe power plant in Rottweil, built in 1915 by the architect Paul Bonatz, looks back on a rich and interesting history: until 1976, it provided power to a gunpowder factory and, later, to a rayon manufacturer and at times also to the city of Rottweil. The façade design, the imposing perron leading up to the main entrance, and the tall chimneys still stand as testament to the modernist industrial structure’s erstwhile significance. Twenty years after the plant was taken out of service, the entrepreneurs Thomas Wenger and Mike Wutta with their event agency trend factory took over the dilapidated building with the surrounding premises and restored it, taking care to preserve its architectonic elements and the most important technical installations. (In the course of fifteen years, around 60,000 square feet of floorspace were reopened, with a special emphasis on the distinctive blend of morbid charm and contemporary design.) The power plant now serves the company as its headquarters and, more importantly, as a cutting-edge venue for concerts, congresses, and corporate events that has attracted clients and visitors from all over Baden-Württemberg and beyond.
-
Jakob Ganslmeier
Lovely Planet. Polen / Poland16€ Add to cartAn Unconventional and Humorous Guide to a Country of Contrasts
In 2015, the photographer Jakob Ganslmeier (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) went on an extended tour of Poland in search of shots that captured the country’s social realities and way of life at a time of wrenching changes. The title of his project evokes associations with Lonely Planet, one of the world’s best-selling series of travel guides, and the artist took inspiration from the format of the popular books, where recommendations for readers exploring strange lands are grouped by categories. Crisscrossing Poland—he covered over ten thousand kilometers—Ganslmeier encountered widely different people and draws our attention to places that would never make it into a guidebook. His pictures show a country of extremes, between boomtown optimism and decline, consumerism and poverty, gleaming façades and bleak village streets.
Jakob Ganslmeier studied at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin, and at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. His pictures, which have garnered numerous awards, are frequently featured in leading German media and have been shown in exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus, the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, the Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, and the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris.