




Mihai Olos
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Călin Dan, Sandra Demetrescu, Magda Predescu |
Author(s) | Călin Dan, Helga Feßler, Magda Predescu, Anca Verona Mihuleț, Ileana Pintilie, Liviu Rața |
Design | Bogdan Ceaușescu |
Cover | Hardcover |
Size | 23,5 x 28 cm |
Pages | 400 |
Illustrations | 482 |
Language(s) | English, Romanian |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-073-6 |
Mihai 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.
More books
-
Ed Sommer
Planetare Allianz22€ Add to cartA Monograph on the Pioneer of Op Art
The complex and extraordinary work of the Schwäbisch Gmünd-based artist Ed Sommer (1932–2015), who preferred to call himself a Bildsprachenmaler (painter of visual imagery), includes metal objects, formations of acrylic glass, gestural painting, erotic films, projection photography, dialogical portraits, and spoken texts. In 2014, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe added a large number of works by the artist to its collection. This publication now presents the collection holdings, supplemented by further works by Ed Sommer.
Ed Sommer, together with his artist friend Marc Adrian, was one of the most important representatives of op and kinetic art and received considerable attention in the 1970s with his films and photographs.
-
Isabelle Graw
In einer anderen Welt. Notizen 2014–201726€ Add to cartPersonal Observation as an Analytical Lens on Society
Isabelle Graw (b. 1962, Hamburg; lives in Berlin) is publisher of the magazine Texte zur Kunst and has been professor of art theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2002. In this book, she branches out from her work as an art historian and critic to offer reflections on a wide range of observations from her own life. Never before has Graw addressed her readers more frankly than in these 160 notes.
“She is blindingly frank, addressing the questions that envelop her days: waxing salons, the arrival of Syrian refugees in Germany, exhibitions and grief, electoral and family politics. Subtly, Graw reveals how impressions and beliefs arise out of circumstance.”
Chris Kraus, American filmmaker and author of I Love Dick“In crisp and striking vignettes, this book shows how self-scrutiny and minute observation of the world intermesh and form the dense web of her analysis. This is a unique and original book, literary, psychological and sociological, all at once.”
Eva Illouz, French-Israeli sociologist - Release May 2025
Simone Haack
NEW MAGICAL REALISM44€ Add to cartTalking about magical realism today, we typically think of the literary genre. Yet when Franz Roh coined the term, he was referring to a tendency in German visual art in the years before the rise of fascism. What marked a major departure from Expressionism and abstraction has seen a renaissance in the New Magical Realism pioneered by Simone Haack since the turn of the millennium, now framed by a comparable geopolitical situation. The influence of Giorgio de Chirico and his pittura metafisica is unmistakable in Haack, as are those of the New Objectivity, Kafkaesque painting, and the metaphysical dimension of Surrealism. One of the most eminent artists of our time.
-
Elsa Salonen
Stories Told by Stones15€ Add to cart“I find the question of a consciousness of stones genuinely inspiring, captivating, and provocative!”
Elsa Salonen (b. 1984, Turku; lives and works in Berlin and Finland) produces colored crystals from the pigments of flowers, draws stellar constellations with finely ground meteorite dust on glass, or distils liquid from plants. The Finnish artist experiments with a wide range of “poetic” materials, reviving lost animistic rituals and magical practices. Her subtle works in the field of tension between installa-tion, painting, and conceptual art combine mysti-cism with science, ancient knowledge with recent findings — supported by a great respect for nature. This volume documents her artistic search for consciousness as the primary source of all physical matter.
- Release April 2025
Antonia Hirsch
Phenomenal Fracture24€ Add to cartIn a probing engagement with the screen, an omnipresent object in contemporary life, Antonia Hirsch charts the gulf between the digital and the analog, the two spheres of which our perceived reality is composed. In provocative installations and objects, the artist conceives the distinctions between screen, mirror, and blade as less than sharply defined. Her works show rigidly geometric shapes made of hard and shimmering glass and steel; they encounter eerily somatic and perishable-looking cardboard or soft foamed-plastic components that recall the bodies they perhaps once served. Reflective surfaces mirror our gaze, but the less classy materials, too, await recognition by the beholder’s body. The book accompanies Hirsch’s solo exhibition “Phenomenal Fracture” at Kunsthalle Lingen; photographs and writings convey extensive and sustained impressions that run the gamut from the uncanny to the darkly humorous.
-
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.
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
Special Edition60€ Add to cartSPECIAL EDITION in clothbound slipcase
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
-
Katja Aufleger
Schwindelerregende Höhen30€ Add to cartOn a Razor’s Edge: Evanescent Moments
Katja Aufleger’s (b. Oldenburg, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) works bring instants of suspense and uncertainty into focus in a variety of aesthetic forms. Their nuclei are typically everyday phenomena and physical models, which she combines with a range of concepts from cultural history and psychology. The publication presents several series, some of which capture explosive tensions. Among them are photographs of homemade Molotov cocktails for which the artist set perfume flacons on fire, making this most recent series a probing exploration of the potentials of material aesthetics and emotion. With an introductory essay by Julia Katharina Thiemann.
Katja Aufleger studied visual art the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK), where Andreas Slominski, Matt Mullican, and Michael Diers were her teachers.
-
Maria Braune
Keep Away From Fire28€ Add to cartMaria Braune’s (b. Berlin, 1988; lives and works in Munich and Bamberg) work revolves around a material she developed; named Migma, it consists of eight different renewable natural resources. She heats it, then casts and molds it in a process that continues for weeks. The resulting sculptures and installations sprawl throughout the space like sensuous organisms. Associations of growth and symbiosis emerge, but discontinuities and disintegration come into view as well. Braune’s creative process is part of an ecosystem and thoroughly anchored in the now. Her material is a vitally alive substance to which she responds in an immediate engagement, connecting it to mythological and narrative significations and setting it in relation to her own world.
Maria Braune studied woodcarving at the Fachhochschule für Bildhauerei in Berchtesgaden, Germany, in 2009–2011, then fine arts with Hermann Pitz at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where she graduated in 2017.
-
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.
-
Robbie Cornelissen
Terra Nova28€ Add to cartFuturistic / Fantastic
The Dutch artist Robbie Cornelissen’s (b. Utrecht, 1954; lives and works in Utrecht) oeuvre is endowed with unusual narrative power. His architectonic drawings in enormous formats, which often exude a futuristic aura, typically show deserted libraries, waiting halls, factory floors, or other oversized spaces. In alternation with his work on paper, the artist creates animated films out of thousands of drawings. This publication presents 250 drawings from Cornelissen’s new film Terra Nova, which explores an urgent contemporary concern: humanity’s responsibility for the earth and the open question of its long-term survival on the planet.
Robbie Cornelissen studied biology and ecology at Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht and at Vrije Akademie, Den Haag, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. His work has been shown at Centraal Museum Utrecht, Hamburger Kunsthalle, the 11th Biennale de Lyon, and elsewhere.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Das Rheinprojekt48€ Add to cartReinterpreting the Classical Panorama
The mythical character of the Rhine as a ‘German symbol’ has long been of profound interest to poets and visual artists. Today, however, the Rhine has lost the aura of a great romantic river along much of its course: from Basel to Rotterdam, it serves as a high-volume shipping lane, and sprawling industrial installations line its banks.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) went on an almost eight-months-long walking tour, following the Rhine from its source at the foot of Piz Badus in Switzerland to its debouchment into the North Sea near Rotterdam. During this thousand-mile trek along the river’s right bank, he stopped every minute—after between two and three hundred feet—to take a photograph of the opposite shore. In this way, his camera compiled a painstaking record of the Rhine in 21,449 individual shots. Digitally assembled in a single six-inch-tall composite image, the pictures form a two-and-a-half-mile stream.
What Kaluza created in this project would have been inconceivable before the development of digital photography, which made the seamless presentation of the pictures in a single panoramic band possible. What is more, the computers capable of processing the enormous quantities of data did not arrive until a few years ago. It took the artist’s assistants a full two years just to edit the images. Harnessing digital technology, Kaluza creates for photography what had been the exclusive precinct of painting: a sweeping holistic perspective. A large number of the fascinating panorama photographs were published in the imposing tome Der Rhein in 2007. Das Rheinprojekt now presents a freshly composed selection from this treasure trove.
Stephan Kaluza received a comprehensive education in Düsseldorf in the 1990s, studying photography at the city’s University of Applied Sciences, art history at the Academy of Fine Arts, and history and philosophy at Düsseldorf University. Since 1995, his work has been shown at numerous galleries in Seoul, Shanghai, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Berlin and elsewhere. Kaluza’s plays have been performed in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Stuttgart.
-
Wolfgang Gäfgen
Photographic Miracles45€ Add to cartA Mysterious Play of Light and Shadow
While Wolfgang Gäfgen’s (b. Hamburg, 1936; lives and works in Stuttgart and Esslingen) hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less accomplished than the artist’s graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier history of art or allusions to historic myths.
-
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).
-
Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
-
Ossian Fraser
DISSOLVING ACTS38€ Add to cartOssian Fraser (b. Edinburgh, 1983; lives in Munich and Berlin) molds and captures evanescent moments. Working with volatile materials such as water, dust, or light, the artist exposes the latent potentials of unremarkable situations in the urban fabric and natural scenes. A tunnel in a city, a rock face in the mountains become points of departure and elementary components of his site-specific interventions, which he records in photographs. The book is the first to offer comprehensive insight into Fraser’s artistic practice. Series of pictures showcasing his conceptual and poetic pieces alternate with conversations that not only demarcate the framework in which his art operates, but also touch on the great issues of our time.
Ossian Fraser studied fine arts and sculpture at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Bonn, from 2006 until 2009 and at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, from 2009 until 2013, rounding out his education in Albrecht Schäfer’s master class in 2013–2014.
-
André Butzer
Miettinen Collection30€ Add to cartAndré Butzer (b. Stuttgart, 1973; lives in Berlin) rose to renown with pictures he describes as “science fiction expressionism” and iconic characters like the “Peace Siemense,” the “Men of Shame,” or the “Woman” as well as seemingly abstract compositions. Artistic predecessors he admires and emulates include Walt Disney, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Henry Ford. Butzer’s utopian artistic vision is anchored in the fictional place “NASAHEIM”, a kind of pilgrimage destination in outer space. Yet his paintings should not be mistaken for illustrations of narrative structures; they articulate something that could not be said before. Similes of a sort, they embody the forever recurring extremes of history as emblems of human existence.
André Butzer briefly studied at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, before enrolling at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), from which he was expelled after two semesters in 1996. He went on to found the autonomous and anti-institutional Akademie Isotrop (1996–2000), where over twenty artists including Markus Selg, Jonathan Meese, and, in loose association, John Bock trained one another. In 2001, Butzer teamed up with Björn Dahlem to establish the Institute for SDI Dream Research.
-
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.
-
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
READ48€ Add to cartThroughout their careers, the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961, and Ingar Dragset, b. Trondheim, Norway, 1969, live and work in Berlin) have eschewed the traditional “White Cube” exhibition format by creating large-scale installations and staging narrative situations in which autobiographical quotes blend with fictional stories and cultural references.
For the solo exhibition READ, Elmgreen & Dragset have transformed Kunsthalle Praha into a minimalist version of a modern public library to prompt reflections on our relationship with physical books and knowledge in the age of digital media. With new works by Elmgreen & Dragset as well as performances, videos, collages, paintings, and sculptures by other artists, READ also probes the relation between books and the making of art.
This richly illustrated publication documents the dynamic interaction between language, books, and art. With contributions from renowned scholars and a curatorial text by Elmgreen & Dragset.
-
Peter Buggenhout
Eerie28€ Add to cartAn Autonomous Counterpart
The renowned sculptor Peter Buggenhout (b. 1963, Dendermonde, Belgium; lives and works in Ghent) describes his hybrid pieces as “abject things” that defy classification and even the label “work of art.” He aggregates and manipulates found and discarded objects as well as both technical and organic materials including pig blood, cow stomachs, and horsehair until he achieves a certain degree of abstraction. Buggenhout’s sculptures confront the beholder as creatures that are somehow “off,” exuding an eerie atmosphere by allowing something sinister to rise to the surface that, it appears, lurks just behind the façades of the physical world: vestiges of humanity, society’s sedimented refuse. The book presents a comprehensive survey of his growing oeuvre; it is the first publication to cover his most recent creations in marble.
Peter Buggenhout’s art has been featured at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the MoMA PS1, New York; the 2014 Taipei Biennial; and elsewhere.